The Question of Identity: Music in the Condition of Post-Orientalism

The Question of Identity: Music in the Post-Orientalist Condition
MohammadReza Darbandi
Graduate Student in Ethnomusicology
Abstract
This article examines musical identity in relation to the post-Orientalist condition in contemporary Iran. “Musical identity” is understood here not as an individual’s musical self but as a collective, cultural, and discursive formation: the meanings through which composers, performers, critics, institutions, and audiences define what a musical practice is and to whom it belongs. Adopting a constructionist and discursive approach, the article asks how this formation can be reconceptualized through postcolonial theory. It first reviews approaches to identity (essentialist, constructionist, anti-essentialist, and poststructuralist) and the ethnomusicological traditions of Alan Merriam, John Blacking, and Bruno Nettl. It then builds a theoretical framework on three axes—Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, and Stuart Hall—with Hamid Dabashi’s post-Orientalism as its point of departure. The framework is examined through an interpretive case study of the writings of the composer and theorist Ehsan Saboohi, especially his manifestos and “trans-temporal” letters to Said, which articulate a distinctive post-Orientalist stance in art. Unlike Dabashi, Saboohi foregrounds emancipation, liberation from hegemonic structures, critique of the colonial language, and the necessity of unprejudiced questioning, framing artistic practice as at once aesthetic and political. The main argument is that post-Orientalism in Iranian music should be understood not as the end of Orientalism but as a multilayered process of identity reconfiguration, cultural resistance, and the making of new aesthetics. The article concludes by proposing a locally grounded critical framework and an agenda for empirical research on musical identity in Iran.
Keywords: Musical identity; Post-Orientalist condition; Orientalism; Identity; Postcolonial theory; Ehsan Saboohi; Iranian music.
1. Introduction
Questions of identity run through the composition, teaching, performance, and criticism of Iranian music. Since the early twentieth century, efforts to codify the dastgāh repertoire, to notate, teach, and record it, and to institutionalize it have repeatedly raised the question of what makes Iranian music “Iranian,” and for whom it speaks.
This question has acquired new urgency in recent decades. Identity in Iranian music is at once a theoretical construct and a lived condition. Conceptually, it is debated in terms of nation, ethnicity, class, gender, and diaspora; in everyday life, it is shaped by policy-making, censorship, markets, and the technologies through which sound is distributed and consumed. For this reason, the identity of Iranian music cannot be read off the sounds themselves. It has to be examined as something produced and contested within particular institutions and discourses.
A first task is therefore to specify what is meant by “musical identity.” In the literature, the phrase covers at least two different things: the identities that individuals and groups construct for themselves through music, and the identity attributed to a musical practice or repertoire as such (for an overview of how the notion is used across the field, see MacDonald, Hargreaves, and Miell 2017). This article is concerned with a collective, cultural, and discursive form of identity attached to musical practice—repertoires, instruments, modal systems, aesthetic languages—and not with the individual musical self. Section 3.2 defines the term more fully and justifies applying the concept of identity to a practice rather than to a person.
The article approaches this form of identity under the rubric of the “post-Orientalist.” Following Edward Said’s critique of Orientalism, it asks how knowledge, archives, and categories have produced an “Eastern” Other in the study of music; following Hamid Dabashi, it asks what knowledge and art can be after Orientalism. Within this horizon, the composer and theorist Ehsan Saboohi offers a salient case. His “post-Orientalism,” articulated both as compositional language and aesthetics and as a critical discourse (Saboohi 2023), seeks to avoid two traps: reproducing an exoticizing, East-as-spectacle cliché for global markets, and an internal ossification around mythicized narratives of “authenticity.” His cycle of twenty imagined, trans-temporal letters addressed to Said both converses with Said’s legacy and translates postcolonial concepts into the language of compositional aesthetics.
The research problem is that this perspective has not been connected to the study of identity in Iranian music in any systematic way. As Section 2 shows, earlier studies are largely descriptive or concentrate on popular, diasporic, or sound-political domains, and a coherent academic literature on “musical post-Orientalism” in Iran remains scattered. Nor is there yet an evidence-based account of what identity means from a post-Orientalist perspective. The article does not claim to supply a complete empirical model of such an account. Its more limited aim is to develop a theoretically grounded framework and to test its usefulness against a concrete body of texts, thereby formulating hypotheses that later empirical work (fieldwork, interviews, and reception studies) can examine.
Three research questions guide the study:
1. How does the post-Orientalist condition reconfigure the concept of musical identity in Iran?
2. How do Saboohi’s writings articulate musical identity in relation to Orientalism, hegemonic language, and emancipation?
3. In what respects does this articulation diverge from Dabashi’s reading of the “post-” in post-Orientalism?
The article’s contribution is threefold: (1) it forges a direct link between identity and postcolonial theory, on the one hand, and a concrete compositional dossier in contemporary Iran, on the other; (2) it advances a critical reading framework for “musical identity” that moves beyond the authenticity/kitsch binary; and (3) following Hall and Bhabha, it emphasizes process and positionality over essence and substance, extending these to aesthetic analysis and the musical field.
In sum, the article argues that the “post-Orientalist condition” in Iranian music is not a simple stylistic label but a discursive–aesthetic orientation. Identity emerges not as the “representation of the East as Other,” but as a situated practice of detachment, questioning, translation, and re-arrangement of sonic, textual, and institutional resources.
The article proceeds as follows. Section 2 reviews previous studies of music and identity in Iran and specifies the research gap. Section 3 develops the theoretical framework: approaches to identity, the concept of musical identity, the ethnomusicological foundations, and the three post-Orientalist axes. Section 4 describes the method and data. Section 5 presents and discusses the analysis of Saboohi’s writings, and Section 6 concludes.
2. Previous Studies on Music and Identity in Iran
Research on identity in Iranian music, particularly through the lenses of ethnomusicology and cultural studies, has developed gradually but in a fragmented way. For the purposes of this review, the existing literature can be grouped into five categories.
Ethnic and regional identity. Early scholarly efforts to address identity in Iranian music appeared in graduate theses at institutions such as the University of Tehran and the University of Art. These projects, often unpublished but accessible in university archives, explored ethnic identity in regional musical traditions. They reflect an early attempt to link ethnomusicological inquiry with sociocultural analysis.
National identity and Persian classical music. A second group of studies examines how national identity is represented in the dastgāh tradition and in its institutional history. This work typically concentrates on repertoires, institutions, and historical developments.
Popular, diasporic, and sound-political studies. A third body of work concentrates on popular music, diasporic communities, and the politics of sound. Studies of rock and underground music and youth discourses in Iran (Nooshin 2005), of music and political change since the Revolution (Siamdoust 2017), and of music and the play of power in the wider region (Nooshin 2009) are representative. This literature shows that identity in Iranian music is inseparable from state policy, media, and markets, but it does not develop a systematic post-Orientalist framework.
Tradition, innovation, and the *dastgāh* discourse. A fourth strand addresses the entrenched “tradition/innovation” binary in the discourse of the Persian dastgāh tradition (see, for example, Nooshin 2015 on the discourses of creativity in Iranian classical music). Within this strand, new theses about identity and tradition have appeared over recent decades.
One notable example is the doctoral dissertation of Sepehr Seraji. Its contribution lies in. What it does not undertake is a systematic examination of identity and “musical post-Orientalism” across composition, performance, and critique, which is the task of the present article.
Online and non-academic discourse. Finally, Persian-language online writing has joined the conversation. The website Iran Musicology, for instance, explores links between music and collective and performative identity and offers critiques of myth-making narratives in the history of Iranian music. Such sources are valuable as evidence of how identity is being debated outside the academy, but they require caution as non-academic material (see Section 4.4).
2.1 The Research Gap
Taken together, these categories reveal three limits. First, much existing work isolates either stylistic description or anecdotal history, without bridging them to theory or to the changing institutional conditions of production and reception; such research has largely remained descriptive, with limited engagement in critical frameworks such as Orientalism or post-Orientalism. Second, although numerous studies on music and identity exist in Iran, the post-Orientalist framework has not been systematically integrated into them. Third, the literature reviewed here offers no account that traces identity and “musical post-Orientalism” across composition, performance, and critique within a single, theoretically grounded framework. The present article addresses this gap by drawing on Saboohi’s works alongside global theories of identity and music, and by proposing a framework for investigating Iranian musical identity that can guide future empirical research.
3. Theoretical Framework
3.1 Approaches to Identity
Identity is among the most complex concepts in the humanities, and different disciplines have conceptualized it in competing ways (Brubaker and Cooper 2000; Hall and du Gay 1996). Three broad families of approaches are relevant here.
Essentialist approaches treat identity as a stable core: a shared essence, origin, or continuity that defines a person or group across time. In music, essentialism appears in appeals to “purity” and “authenticity,” which treat a repertoire or style as the expression of a timeless national or ethnic essence.
Constructionist approaches, by contrast, hold that identity is produced through social interaction, institutions, and narratives, and is therefore historically contingent. On this view, an identity such as “Iranian,” “Kurdish,” or “classical” is the outcome of processes of categorization and recognition rather than a given fact.
Anti-essentialist, postmodern, and poststructuralist approaches radicalize this claim. They see identity as discursively produced, plural, and never complete. Foucault (1984), for example, approached identity as a process that is always embedded in social practices, and Hall (1990) described it as a matter of “becoming” and positioning rather than of being.
Research on identity across disciplines has examined how these processes unfold in different contexts, including national, ethnic, religious, work, gender, and health identities (see Hall and du Gay 1996). This article adopts a constructionist and discursive position informed by poststructuralist insights: identity is treated as a historically situated, multilayered process rather than a fixed essence.
3.2 From Identity to Musical Identity
In music research, the concept of identity has been applied in two main ways. The first concerns the identities people construct through music: how listening, performing, and composing help individuals and groups to define who they are and where they belong (Frith 1996; Stokes 1994; MacDonald, Hargreaves, and Miell 2017). The second concerns the identity of a musical practice itself: what makes a repertoire, instrument, or style “Persian,” “Kurdish,” “classical,” or “modern.”
The second usage is less common, because identity ordinarily refers to the human self rather than to the nature of a thing. Its use here is justified on discursive grounds. A musical practice has no identity of its own, independent of those who make, name, and evaluate it; what is called its identity is the set of meanings attributed to it, and contested, by communities, institutions, and audiences. In this sense, the identity of a practice is derivative of the identities of its practitioners and publics, and it is always in the process of being negotiated. This is consistent with work that treats music as a means of constructing collective belonging (Frith 1996; Stokes 1994).
Accordingly, “musical identity” in this article refers to a collective, cultural, and discursive identity of musical practice. It is not an individualistic musical self. Although it has social, cultural, and political dimensions, these are examined here through the discourses in which they are articulated rather than through ethnographic or political-science methods.
Identities of this kind are developed through cultural practices, education, ceremonies, historical accounts, the arts, and everyday interactions, and they circulate through various modes (written, spoken, multimodal) and media, including digital media and social networks. In music, they are formed and re-formed through education systems, archives, canons, criticism, and audiences. Cultural policy, media ecologies, markets, and technologies of audio distribution and consumption are equally constitutive. Streaming platforms, social-media algorithms, and transnational circulation shape who hears what, how works are categorized, and how value is assigned. These infrastructures do not merely deliver music; they help constitute the very fields in which identities are claimed, contested, and recognized. Composers, performers, critics, and audiences therefore co-produce identity through their practices, and shifts in infrastructure can yield fresh redefinitions.
In contemporary Iran, these processes have particular urgency. Following the social and political transformations of recent decades, the question “What constitutes Iranian identity?” has re-entered public debate with renewed force. For music, this is not a merely aesthetic matter: it intersects with education, institutions, policy, media, and markets, and it extends across a transnational Persianate space that includes the diaspora. Mythicized appeals to “authenticity” and “purity” are insufficient in this setting. A critical approach must acknowledge plurality, historical contingency, and the constructive role of difference and representation. Such a view is not alien to Iran’s intellectual traditions; it resonates, in different registers, with long-standing currents in literature, mysticism, and contemplative thought.
Diaspora, understood as dispersal and as the experience of living cultural life outside the homeland, plays a decisive role in this field. It generates hybrid practices, relocations of memory, and new forms of belonging that complicate simple national narratives. In music, diasporic conditions stimulate cross-cultural collaboration, genre blending, and audiences whose listening habits, platforms, and expectations are themselves hybrid. In Bhabha’s terms, these “in-between” conditions open spaces of enunciation where identity is continually produced and renegotiated (Bhabha 1994).
Digital media have also become sites where identity is discussed and contested. Persian-language online writing, such as the Iran Musicology website discussed in Section 2, is one example of how debates about collective and performative identity, and about myth-making narratives in the history of Iranian music, now unfold beyond the academy.
3.3 Ethnomusicological Foundations
Within ethnomusicology, the concept of identity has from the outset been tied to the relationship between music and culture: identity is not a property that resides inside sonic material alone, but takes shape through social practice, discourse, institutions, and audiences. Three classic positions provide the foundation for this study.
Alan P. Merriam’s functionalist approach treats music as a means of fulfilling social and cultural needs. Because music is embedded in systems of behavior and belief, changes in a community’s musical system often reflect broader transformations in social and cultural identity (Merriam 1964, 39, 221).
John Blacking conceptualizes musical identity not only at the level of structure but also as embodied experience, through movement, dance, and the social uses of music. Enculturation and learning are therefore central to identity formation: for Blacking, identity is made in practice as much as it is theorized on paper (Blacking 1973).
Bruno Nettl, emphasizing systematic analysis of music alongside its environments of production, argues that ethnomusicology must remain comparative and multilayered. Musical identity should thus be examined across levels ranging from social functions and institutional settings to aesthetic patterns and genre formation. As Nettl explains, “We endeavor to study total musical systems and, to comprehend them, follow a comparative approach … But we study each music in its own terms, and we try to learn to see it as its own society understands it” (Nettl 2005, 12).
Taken together, these perspectives indicate that musical identity is neither a fixed essence nor a mere stylistic label. It is a multilayered, historically situated process that must be analyzed across practice, discourse, institutions, and listening. Yet precisely because these frames powerfully shape research questions, they must themselves be revisited through post-Orientalist critique, as Section 3.5 argues.
3.4 Identity in Classical Music: Western and Iranian Contexts
The concept of identity in music, whether in the Western classical tradition or in Iranian contexts, emerges historically at the intersection of aesthetics, institutions, and discourse. Musical identity does not reside inside musical material alone; it is continually formed and re-formed through education systems, archives, canons, criticism, media, and audiences. In this sense, classical music (broadly conceived) functions as one of the principal arenas in which identity is articulated, negotiated, and contested.
In Western classical music, identity has often been entangled with nationalism, individual authorship, stylistic genealogies, and institutions such as conservatories, orchestras, festivals, and criticism. The identities attached to repertoires (“French,” “German,” “Italian,” “modernist,” “neo-classical”) are outcomes of historical and political processes rather than fixed essences. The canon thus encodes power relations and value hierarchies whose continuities and disruptions can be traced across periods.
In Iran, “classical music,” in the sense of the dastgāh tradition and its modern rearticulations, has likewise served as a key site of identity formation. From the early twentieth century onward, efforts at codification, notation, pedagogy, recording, and institutionalization sought to represent Iranian musical identity in scholarly terms. In subsequent decades, Iranian composers trained in Western institutions and engaged with global discourses generated new aesthetic languages, and today the debate over musical identity unfolds under post-Orientalist conditions in which categories, audiences, and evaluative criteria are renegotiated.
Across these histories, identity in classical music, in the West and in Iran alike, is not a timeless essence but a historical–discursive process. This insight sets the stage for a post-Orientalist analysis that scrutinizes how identity is made, labeled, circulated, and valued.
3.5 The Post-Orientalist Critique of Music Scholarship
The ethnomusicological frameworks reviewed in Section 3.3 remain fundamental to studying music within culture. Yet precisely because they powerfully shape research questions, they must themselves be revisited through post-Orientalist critique, so as not to reproduce the knowledge–power formations that Edward Said analyzed. Said’s Orientalism shows how archives, categories, and scholarly vocabularies participate in the production of the “Oriental” Other (Said 1978/2016). Following Said, later critiques show how descriptive categories, archives, and evaluative vocabularies can stabilize an Othered image of “Eastern music,” thereby naturalizing asymmetries in authority and voice.
Ella Shohat and Robert Stam (1994) expose how Eurocentric media and academic infrastructures sustain representational hierarchies, and Hamid Dabashi, who first popularized the term post-Orientalism, argues that knowledge production after Orientalism must interrogate its own institutional conditions (Dabashi 2009). Under such conditions, the Iranian case offers a revealing laboratory, since identity is shaped within networks of representation: archives, curricula, media, and policy. Three consequences follow:
1. Manipulation of criteria: what counts as “value” or “authenticity” can be realigned to the demands of markets and Western scholarship.
2. Narrative narrowing: “official” histories of music may privilege single genealogies while marginalizing alternative memories and practices.
3. Opportunity for redefinition: critical engagement with Orientalism and post-Orientalism opens space to re-narrate identity through plural archives, oral histories, community practices, and cross-disciplinary methods.
Methodologically, a conscious passage beyond single-track narratives entails three commitments:
• Reframing questions: asking why we ask the questions we ask, for whom, and to what ends.
• Multiperspectival evidence: combining textual archives with fieldwork, oral history, and reception studies to counter archival and West-centric biases.
• Critical sensitivity to text and context: aligning close reading of musical and discursive texts with attention to institutions, media ecologies, and audiences, and pairing classic ethnomusicological field methods with postcolonial theory.
3.6 Post-Orientalism and the Three Theoretical Axes
The review so far places this study within a constructionist and poststructuralist understanding of identity. The question that remains is why the discussion is based on three specific perspectives, those of Said, Bhabha, and Hall, rather than on others. The choice rests on a shared premise and on complementary roles. All three hold that identity is produced within discourse rather than given in advance; Said’s Orientalism itself draws on a Foucauldian notion of discourse, which links it to the poststructuralist strand discussed in Section 3.1. Within this shared premise, each contributes something different (Table 1).
Table 1. The three theoretical axes and their roles in the framework.
Axis Core contribution Role in this study Source
Said Orientalism as a technology of power/knowledge that produces the Eastern “Other” Explains how identity is constructed from outside, through representation, archives, and scholarly categories Said 1978/2016
Bhabha In-betweenness, hybridity, and the “third space,” where new cultural subjects emerge in borderline zones Locates the sites of translation and negotiation where binary oppositions are displaced Bhabha 1994
Hall Identity as a fluid, multi-positional process of “becoming,” inseparable from discourse, representation, difference, and diaspora Explains how identity is continually produced and repositioned Hall 1990

Taken together, the three axes move from a critique of representation (Said), through a theory of the sites where identity is negotiated (Bhabha), to a theory of its processual character (Hall). Combined with the ethnomusicological traditions, they help us move beyond dualisms such as “authentic/inauthentic” and “self/other” and examine how musical distinctions are produced across contemporary Iranian fields, both in “Greater Iran” and in the diaspora.
How, then, does identity viewed from a post-Orientalist perspective differ from the approaches reviewed above? Constructionist and poststructuralist approaches ask how identities are produced. The post-Orientalist perspective adds a question about positionality and voice: who produces the categories through which an identity is described, in what language, and from within which institutions, and whether those who have been the objects of Orientalist representation can re-appropriate that language. Dabashi’s Post-Orientalism is the point of departure for this question, since it asks that knowledge production after Orientalism turn a critical eye on its own institutional conditions (Dabashi 2009).
What is still missing is an evidence-based account of how this perspective applies to musical identity. Dabashi’s work is concerned primarily with knowledge production in the scholarly field, and its translation to musical practice, where identity is made through composition and performance as well as through writing, has received little systematic attention. A model of musical identity built from a post-Orientalist perspective must eventually rest on robust theory and on empirical data whose analysis yields the components of the model. This article takes a first step toward that aim: it assembles the theoretical framework and examines it against a concrete corpus (Section 4), leaving fieldwork-based testing to future research.
4. Method and Data
4.1 Research Design
The study is a qualitative, interpretive single-case study. It combines the theoretical synthesis of Section 3 with a close, discourse-oriented reading of the writings of Ehsan Saboohi. The case was selected purposively: Saboohi is a composer-theorist who articulates a post-Orientalist stance both in compositional aesthetics and in critical writing, which makes his work a salient site for examining how post-Orientalist concepts are translated into musical thought. The aim is analytic rather than statistical generalization. The case is used to examine the concepts of the framework and to generate hypotheses for further research.
4.2 Data
The primary corpus consists of Saboohi’s published writings: Omega Discursive Block: Reflections on the Post-Orientalist Condition, The Post-Orientalist Manifesto, and the cycle of twenty Trans-Temporal Letters to Edward Said (Saboohi 2021–۲۰۲۳). Secondary materials include online responses to the Omega Discursive Block and the Letters, and the Iran Musicology website. Theoretical works by Said, Bhabha, Hall, Dabashi, and others form the interpretive framework. Accordingly, the source base privileges classic theoretical works, Saboohi’s published online writings, the Iran Musicology website, and reputable theses and book chapters available online.
4.3 Analytical Procedure
The texts were read closely and repeatedly and analyzed along five questions drawn from the framework: (1) how musical identity is conceptualized, including its levels and dimensions; (2) how the “post-” of post-Orientalism is understood temporally; (3) how hegemony and language are theorized; (4) how emancipation is conceived and where it is located; and (5) how the texts position themselves in relation to Said, Bhabha, Hall, Spivak, and Dabashi. The findings were then compared with the theoretical framework to assess where Saboohi’s discourse confirms, extends, or diverges from it.
4.4 Limitations
Several limits should be acknowledged. Access to Persian and English primary sources is uneven, online data are fragmented, and non-academic materials require caution regarding their reliability and context. The study rests on a single case, so its findings cannot be generalized to Iranian music as a whole. It analyzes texts and the discourse about them, not audiences’ listening practices, and it does not draw on interviews or fieldwork. Finally, working with the self-descriptions of a single living author risks reproducing his own framing; the comparison with Dabashi, Said, Bhabha, and Hall serves partly as a check against that risk.
5. Results and Discussion: Music under the Post-Orientalist Condition in Saboohi’s Writings
5.1 Saboohi’s Post-Orientalist Stance
In the Omega Discursive Block: Reflections on the Post-Orientalist Condition, The Post-Orientalist Manifesto, and the cycle Trans-Temporal Letters to Edward Said, Saboohi articulates a distinctive post-Orientalist stance that operates simultaneously at aesthetic, discursive, and practical levels. He deliberately avoids two common traps in the representation of the “East”: first, the reproduction of exotic clichés tailored to Western markets; and second, internal ossification around mythologized narratives of “authenticity.” Instead, he emphasizes the everyday practices of making and performing music, and the ways in which institutions, media, and audiences continuously reproduce meaning and value (Saboohi, Letters, 2023/24).
5.2 Four Levels of Musical Identity
In Saboohi’s notes, the “East” is neither a mere geography nor a fixed cultural essence; it is a moving field of signification shaped by power, knowledge, and representation. Against any essentialist appeal to purity or origin, Saboohi understands musical identity across four levels:
• Lived/Practical: the quotidian experiences of producing and performing music;
• Historical/Traditional: linkages to Iranian musical heritage and the dastgāh system;
• Discursive: sustained encounters with Western representations and Orientalist frames;
• Critical/Innovative: the re-creation and translation of traditions within modern musical practice, informed by postcolonial awareness.
This multilevel perspective prepares the ground for the analysis, in the following subsections, of how Saboohi treats the temporality of the “post-,” detachment, hegemony, and language, themes that together illuminate the contours of a specifically Iranian post-Orientalist condition.
5.3 The “Post-” as a Transitional Horizon: Saboohi and Dabashi
As classic postcolonial sources have shown, the prefix “post” does not necessarily designate an endpoint. It often indexes a transitional horizon in which elements of the past persist while new arrangements emerge. Saboohi’s writings explicitly treat the present as a site of agency and resistance, a space for active re-articulation rather than a mere aftermath (Saboohi 2023/24). By contrast, Hamid Dabashi’s Post-Orientalism: Knowledge and Power in a Time of Terror tends to construe “post-” more strongly as “after,” drawing a sharper historical break; in Saboohi’s reading, their emphases can partially diverge (Dabashi 2009; 2017, p. 193 [e-version]).
Saboohi’s focus falls on collective agency and artistic practice as the locus of transformation: emancipation is internal to the work of art and the field of practice. Post-Orientalism thus becomes a process within resistance, rather than a condition defined after it (Saboohi 2023/24). Ontologically, Saboohi treats identity as plural and emergent, rejecting both essentialism and historicist closure. Identity is to be redefined as processual, multilayered, and relational, not as a unitary core.
In this respect, Said’s Orientalism provides a theoretical foundation, underscoring how archives, categories, and scholarly vocabularies participate in the production of the “Oriental” Other. In Saboohi’s hands, this critical insight becomes an analytic resource for composition and reception in Iran today, opening a path to rethink musical and cultural identities in the contemporary scene.
5.4 Detachment (varāstagī)
A key notion in Saboohi’s discourse is “detachment” (varāstagī): a capacity to distance oneself from hegemonic language and from inherited templates that imprison practice. Detachment is not a gesture of withdrawal; it is an active re-articulation through which artists continually redefine themselves and their worlds. Unlike postcolonial narratives that equate “post-” with historical finality, Saboohi frames detachment as a present-tense faculty of agency.
5.5 Hegemony and Emancipation
In Saboohi’s theory, hegemony is primarily a linguistic–cultural force that organizes taste, value, and legitimacy. Emancipation, therefore, is not reducible to political revolution or street protest; it is accomplished as much at the aesthetic–artistic level as anywhere else. Under the post-Orientalist condition, identity is forged through practices that do not submit to hegemonic grammars of evaluation or representation.
This orientation resonates with Bhabha’s theory of hybridity and the “third space,” where identity is formed not through static oppositions but through translation and negotiation. For Saboohi, emancipation is realized across three interlocking planes:
1. Ontological: exiting representational structures that reduce identity to stereotype;
2. Epistemological: inventing musical languages that do not capitulate to dominant criteria;
3. Axiological: generating new artistic values not tethered to “authenticity” or to market logics.
Together, these planes enable a redefinition of identity in post-Orientalist terms: neither confined to negating Orientalism nor trapped within traditionalist frames, but oriented toward new cultural and artistic possibilities.
5.6 Language as Instrument of Domination
One of the most prominent lines in Saboohi’s Letters is a critique of language as an instrument and infrastructure of domination: “Language is the tool of thought, not thought itself,” he writes (Letter no. 7). The idea has roots in Said and other postcolonial thinkers: domination can operate by scripting the very categories through which subjects speak and are heard. In music, a “closed musical language,” whether traditionalist or market-driven, forecloses creativity and freedom; in both cases, the possibility of a free, generative language is lost.
This position dovetails with Gayatri Spivak’s (1988) critique in “Can the Subaltern Speak?” even when the subaltern speaks, pre-inscribed discourses can render that speech inaudible or misrecognized. Saboohi’s letters (e.g., no. 16) repeatedly return to the chasm between intention and reception as it is structured by hegemonic codes.
Finally, Saboohi links the critique of colonial and hegemonic language to the fluidity of identity. In line with Hall, for whom identity is not essence but positioning, Saboohi insists on breaking hardened linguistic templates so that identity can remain open to multiplicity and change. One of his preferred tools is unprejudiced questioning: posing fundamental questions that refuse pre-packaged answers and thereby invalidate the hegemon’s putative omniscience.
5.7 Discussion
The analysis allows the three research questions to be addressed. In answer to the first, the post-Orientalist condition reconfigures musical identity by shifting the critical question from what identity is to who holds the language to define it. Identity in Iranian music is neither a possession to be recovered from the past, as essentialism would have it, nor merely a product of Western representation to be deconstructed. In Saboohi’s account, it is a plural, emergent practice that artists continually remake by detaching from inherited and hegemonic templates.
In answer to the second question, Saboohi’s writings articulate this position through a multilevel conception of musical identity (Section 5.2), the notion of detachment (Section 5.4), a linguistic–cultural theory of hegemony with three planes of emancipation (Section 5.5), and a critique of closed musical languages (Section 5.6). These elements correspond closely to the framework of Section 3: Said’s critique of representation appears as the critique of Orientalist and market-driven language; Bhabha’s third space as translation and negotiation; and Hall’s processual identity as the insistence on openness to multiplicity and change.
In answer to the third question, the divergence from Dabashi lies in the temporality and the locus of the critique. Where Dabashi tends to read “post-” as “after,” Saboohi treats it as a present-tense condition of agency within ongoing resistance; and where Dabashi’s concern is knowledge production, Saboohi locates emancipation in artistic practice and aesthetic language itself.
These findings have limits that follow from the design of the study (Section 4.4). Online responses to the Omega Discursive Block and the Letters suggest that this discourse has begun to circulate beyond its author, but this article does not analyze reception systematically, and the extent of its wider public reach remains to be established. Likewise, because the analysis concerns Saboohi’s texts, claims about his compositions as sonic practice remain to be tested through analysis of the musical works themselves. The findings are therefore best read as hypotheses and as a conceptual framework for further empirical work.
6. Conclusion
This article has argued that musical identity in Iran cannot be reduced to a fixed essence, a stylistic label, or a myth of “purity.” Identity is an ongoing discursive–practical process produced within networks of policy, pedagogy, archives, media ecologies, markets, and audiences. In this field, post-Orientalist critique does not signal an “end” to Orientalism so much as it opens a transitional horizon in which inherited templates are reworked and new aesthetic–critical arrangements emerge.
Within this horizon, the writings of Ehsan Saboohi, especially the Omega Discursive Block, the Post-Orientalist Manifesto, and the Trans-Temporal Letters to Edward Said, offer a salient, locally grounded framework for rethinking identity as plural, processual, and resistant to hegemonic grammars of value and representation. Read alongside Said, Bhabha, Hall, and related critiques, Saboohi’s discourse foregrounds practice as a site of agency and insists on detachment (varāstagī) as an active faculty for re-articulation rather than withdrawal.
Three main consequences follow from this study:
1. Identity as polyphony: post-Orientalist identity distances itself both from exoticizing clichés and from essentialist claims to authenticity.
2. Language critique as method: domination often operates through linguistic and discursive infrastructures; emancipation, therefore, requires reopening closed grammars of evaluation and reception.
3. Agency in practice: emancipation is achieved as much at the aesthetic–artistic level as anywhere else; art and politics interlace on ontological, epistemic, and axiological planes.
The study also has limits. It rests on one case and on textual evidence, and it does not examine audiences or the musical works as sound. Future research could therefore (a) conduct interviews and fieldwork with composers, performers, and teachers; (b) study reception through audience research and the analysis of digital discourse; (c) compare Saboohi’s discourse with that of other Iranian and non-Iranian composer-theorists; and (d) test the hypotheses advanced here against the compositions themselves. In short, the post-Orientalist condition invites multiperspectival methods, unprejudiced questioning, and plural archives. These are not merely academic orientations; they can help shape a concrete research agenda for future ethnomusicology in and about Iran.
References
Azadefar, Mohammad. 2022. Ethnomusicology: Research Approaches. Tehran: Nashr-e Ney. [In Persian]
Bhabha, Homi K. 1994. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge.
Blacking, John. 1973. How Musical Is Man? Seattle: University of Washington Press.
Blacking, John. 2018. How Musical Is Man? Translated into Persian by Maryam Gharasou. Tehran: Mahoor Institute. [In Persian]
Brubaker, Rogers, and Frederick Cooper. 2000. “Beyond ‘Identity.’” Theory and Society 29 (1): 1–۴۷.
Dabashi, Hamid. 2009. Post-Orientalism: Knowledge and Power in a Time of Terror. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers.
Foucault, Michel. 1984. The Foucault Reader. Edited by Paul Rabinow. New York: Pantheon Books.
Frith, Simon. 1996. “Music and Identity.” In Questions of Cultural Identity, edited by Stuart Hall and Paul du Gay, 108–۱۲۷. London: Sage.
Hall, Stuart. 1990. “Cultural Identity and Diaspora.” In Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, edited by Jonathan Rutherford, 222–۲۳۷. London: Lawrence & Wishart.
Hall, Stuart, and Paul du Gay, eds. 1996. Questions of Cultural Identity. London: Sage.
MacDonald, Raymond, David J. Hargreaves, and Dorothy Miell, eds. 2017. Handbook of Musical Identities. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Merriam, Alan P. 1964. The Anthropology of Music. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
Merriam, Alan P. 2017. The Anthropology of Music. Translated into Persian by Maryam Gharasou. Tehran: Mahoor Institute. [In Persian]
Nettl, Bruno. 2005. The Study of Ethnomusicology: Thirty-One Issues and Concepts. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Nettl, Bruno. 2005. The Study of Ethnomusicology: Thirty-Three Issues and Concepts. Translated into Persian by Maryam Gharasou. Tehran: Mahoor Institute. [In Persian]
Nooshin, Laudan. 2005. “Underground, Overground: Rock Music and Youth Discourses in Iran.” Iranian Studies 38 (3): 463–۴۹۴.
Nooshin, Laudan, ed. 2009. Music and the Play of Power in the Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia. Farnham: Ashgate.
Nooshin, Laudan. 2015. Iranian Classical Music: The Discourses and Practice of Creativity. Farnham: Ashgate.
Saboohi, Ehsan. 2021–۲۰۲۳. Collected Letters to Edward Said. Tehran: Post-Orientalism Society. [In Persian]
Said, Edward W. 1978. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books.
Said, Edward W. 2016. Orientalism. Translated into Persian by Abdolrahim Govahi. Tehran: Institute for Humanities and Cultural Studies. [In Persian]
Shohat, Ella, and Robert Stam. 1994. Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media. London: Routledge.
Siamdoust, Nahid. 2017. Soundtrack of the Revolution: The Politics of Music in Iran. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1988. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, 271–۳۱۳. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Stokes, Martin, ed. 1994. Ethnicity, Identity and Music: The Musical Construction of Place. Oxford: Berg.
Dabashi 2017 (e-version) details; Saboohi, Omega Discursive Block and The Post-Orientalist Manifesto; Seraji dissertation; theses and Iran Musicology sources cited in Section 2.

نظرات

نظر (به‌وسیله فیس‌بوک)