The well-established field of Iranian studies houses many disciplines under a canopy of mutually acknowledged common interests. At times, however, one might be forgiven for wondering if “Iranian studies” would be better identified as “Tehran studies.” Certain bodies of linguistic, ecological, and ethnographic research aside, a great deal of the academic work that deals with contemporary Iran is conducted in or with a fairly narrow focus on Tehran. This serves to compound another problem: that works about post-Islamic Revolution Persian literature, cinema, and music have often given disproportionate attention to the contributions and perspectives of Iranians living in exile.

The immediate strengths and weaknesses of Annabelle Sreberny's and Massoumeh Torfeh's edited volume Cultural Revolution in Iran lie in these same areas. It is an expansive interdisciplinary survey of popular culture idioms, technologies, structures, and vernaculars, with its full attention devoted to Iranians in Iran. But of its sixteen chapters, only one is explicitly concerned with a subject outside of Tehran, that is, Iranians in the UAE.

Iranian filmmakers often fixate on the internal exotic of rural and frontier populations while government-sponsored festivals and publications both celebrate and seek to delimit the music, poetry, and other spheres of cultural performance of Iran's diverse ethnolinguistic groups. Given the thematic scope of this volume however, it is not so much the culture and iconography of Kurdistan, Khorasan, Lorestan, or Balochistan that is missing as a treatment of how the political center intersects with these peripheries, and above all an acknowledgement of life in secondary cities, small towns, and rural environments. Regardless of how acutely crucial cultural and ideological struggles play out in Tehran, Iran as a dynamic and multivalent social landscape cannot be reduced to its capital.

Despite having opened on a critical note, there is much to recommend this collection. The angles and approaches of the diverse chapters productively fit alongside one another, raising complex questions about how indeed one might seek to represent Iran as a whole. Mehri Honarbin-Holliday's chapter on “emerging forms of masculinity” in Iran, for instance, explicitly takes into account Tehran's role as a point of convergence for Iran's distinctive local cultures. While Mahmoud Arghavan's chapter, “Tehrani Cultural Bricolage,” makes no pretense of looking farther afield than Tehran, one wonders about the extent to which his findings could or could not be applied in Esfahan, Yazd, Sanandaj, or Quchan.

In the sections on music, two domains are considered in depth without an endeavor to represent the full scope of musical performance and listening practices in Iran. These are rock music that is performed without the approval of the bodies governing cultural performance and expression and the politically charged repertoires of iconic performers that have permeated the public sphere in its broadest sense. But the importance not only of “foreign” musical vernaculars (like rock) but also of “classical” (sunnatī) and regional folk music as participatory contexts should not be underestimated.

Chapters on theater, dance, video games, satire, jokes circulated by text message, and the evolving content and iconography of public murals contribute to a keen sense of the subtle shifts in popular and institutional consciousness that have taken place in recent decades, long after the Islamic Revolution: which symbolic realms are being accessed across established ideological thresholds, and how are public space and popular culture in Iran being redefined amid evolving technoscapes and increasingly global flows of information, style, and social ideation?

The treatment of gendered forums for social and intellectual expression at the fore of the chapters on subcultural style, dance, women publishers and filmmakers, and performances of masculinity steers clear of reductive frameworks of patriarchy and gender apartheid. Rather, the authors look in some cases towards historical genealogies of gender performance in Iran and in others at the kinds of concerns that emerge in the work of women making films or producing print writing, without insisting that these concerns will automatically be oriented towards women's rights as a focal topic or be exclusively coded as women's voices as such. The extent to which women are prolific participants in these core domains of culture production speaks to their access to education and professional mobility.

It is important to note that the hardcover edition of this book was published in 2013 and thus each chapter primarily reports on the climate in Iran during Ahmedinejad's presidency, often with some reflection on earlier periods. The editors’ preface to the paperback edition, however, endeavors to address some of the shifts that have taken place at the national and international level since the hardcover was published.

This volume belongs to a body of deepening exchange between Iranian and non-Iranian cultural theorists and of ever more nuanced considerations of cultural processes in which the Islamic Revolution, the Iran-Iraq war, the reform era, and the Green Movement all retain a prominent stature without dominating the narrative. It is a welcome addition to work such as Ameneh Youssefzadeh's indispensible articles on the state mechanisms and regional circuits for promoting, mounting, and controlling music after the Revolution;Footnote ¹ Zuzanna Olszewska's recent, refreshingly non-Tehran centric work on Hazara poetry circles in Mashhad and elsewhere;Footnote ² Hamid Naficy's rich encyclopedic treatment of the history, aesthetics, and thematic terrain of Iranian cinema;Footnote ³ Hamid Dabashi's tireless endeavors to approach Iranian politics, culture, and thought from every imaginable angle;Footnote ⁴ and William O. Beeman's anthropological analyses of diverse performance domains in Iran and their social dynamics.Footnote ⁵ Being comprised of discrete, thematically complementary chapters of manageable scopes and lengths, it will resonate with graduate students but will be of equal use and accessibility to undergraduates as well as a lay readership.