Literature as a Tribunal: The Modern Iranian Prose of Incarceration

This essay examines the development of prison memoirs in modern Iranian prose, with a focus on how literary texts function as a tribunal, delivering forms of justice missing from the existing legal system. It constructs from the prison memoirs of a range of dissident writers (Dashti, ʿAlavi, and Baraheni) a genealogy of prison consciousness in Iranian modernity. The modern Iranian prose of incarceration is contextualized within an account of the prison as a site where the modern technologies of the state are refined. As I trace resonances between the long history of prison writing across the Islamic world and the prison literature of modern Iran, I consider how literary texts illuminate the relation between aesthetics and power in modern Middle Eastern literatures