Literature as a tribunal: the modern Iranian prose of incarceration

This essay examines the development of prison memoirs in modern Iranian prose. It constructs from the prison memoirs of the dissident writers ʿAli Dashti, Bozorg ʿAlavi, and Reza Baraheni a genealogy of the emergence of prison consciousness in Iranian modernity, across both the Pahlavi and post-revolutionary periods. The modern Iranian prose of incarceration is situated 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 we can better understand the relation between prose and literary representation in modern Middle Eastern literatures.