In Domesticity and Consumer Culture in Iran Pamela Karimi offers a history of Iranian modernity through a detailed and exquisitely rendered study of everyday living spaces and commodities. From cooling units to washing machines, visual artifacts and building facades to chairs and home economics pamphlets, Karimi allows domestic objects and the people who give them meaning to narrate the complex negotiations and intersections of secularism, religion, gender, class, and colonial encounter within the forces of modernization in Iran. Shifting our gaze from the big screen of political events to the intimate life of the home, Karimi affords an innovative look into how ordinary Iranian citizens have determined their own aspirations for and meanings of modernity, even as Western colonial influence and strong secularized or Islamized states sought to have the full say.
Unfolding chronologically from the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first century, each chapter explores a facet of daily...
