Dabashi's newest book is a meditation on suicidal violence in the immediate context of its most recent political surge and a critical examination of the radical transformation of the human body, supported by close readings of cinematic and artistic evidence.

Horror Fiction in the Global South: Cultures, Narratives, and Representations believes that the experiences of horror are not just individual but also/simultaneously cultural. Within this understanding, literary productions become rather potent sites for the relation of such experiences both on the individual and the cultural front. It's not coincidental, then, that either William Blatty's The Exorcist or Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude become archetypes of the re-presentations of the way horror affects individuals placed inside different cultures. Such an affectation, though, is but a beginning of the ways in which the supernatural interacts with the human and gives rise to horror. Considering that almost all aspects of what we now designate as the Global North, and its concomitant, the Global South – political, historical, social, economic, cultural, and so on – function as different paradigms, the experiences of horror and their telling in stories become functionally different as well. Added to this are the variations that one nation or culture of the east has from another. The present anthology of essays, in such a scheme of things, seeks to examine and demonstrate these cultural differences embedded in the impact that figures of horror and specters of the night have on the narrative imagination of storytellers from the Global South. If horror has an everyday presence in the phenomenal reality that Southern cultures subscribe to, it demands alternative phenomenology. The anthology allows scholars and connoisseurs of Horror to explore theoretical possibilities that may help address precisely such a need.

A transformative account of the adventures of Persian travelers in the nineteenth century, moving beyond Eurocentric approaches to travel narratives.

Can an individual act of suicide be socially significant, or does it present too many imponderable features? This book examines suicide like no other. Unconcerned with the individual dispositions that lead a person to commit such an act, Usurping Suicide focuses on the reception suicides have produced – their political, social and cultural implications. How does a particular act of suicide enable a collective significance to be attached to it? And what contextual circumstances predispose a politicised public response? From Mohamed Bouazizi's self-immolation during regime change in Tunisia to Dimitris Christoulas's public shooting at a time of increased political upheaval in Greece, and beyond – this remarkable work examines how the individuality of the act of suicide poses a disturbing symbolic conundrum for the dominant liberal order.

In this unprecedented book, Hamid Dabashi provides a provocative account of Iran in its current resurrection as a mighty regional power. Through a careful study of contemporary Iranian history in its political, literary, and artistic dimensions, Dabashi decouples the idea of Iran from its colonial linkage to the cliché notion of “the nation-state,” and then demonstrates how an “aesthetic intuition of transcendence” has enabled it to be re-conceived as a powerful nation. This rebirth has allowed for repressed political and cultural forces to surface, redefining the nation’s future beyond its fictive postcolonial borders and autonomous from the state apparatus that wishes but fails to rule it. Iran’s sovereignty, Dabashi argues, is inaugurated through an active and open-ended self-awareness of the nation’s history and recent political and aesthetic instantiations, as it has been sustained by successive waves of revolutionary prose, poetry, and visual and performing arts performed categorically against the censorial will of the state.

Confronting nationalistic and nativist interpreting practices in Persianate literary scholarship, Persian Literature as World Literature makes a case for reading these literatures as world literature-as transnational, worldly texts that expand beyond local and national penchants. Working through an idea of world literature that is both cosmopolitan and critical of any monologic view on globalization, the contributors to this volume revisit the early and contemporary circulation of Persianate literatures across neighboring and distant cultures, and seek innovative ways of developing a transnational Persian literary studies, engaging in constructive dialogues with the global forces surrounding, and shaping, Persianate societies and cultures.

What makes a photograph of a dead body obscene? Auchter's genealogy of obscenity argues that this process is highly political.