Alienation, Translation, and Their Postcolonial Critics

I examine the twentieth century Iranian political thoughts and literature based on several prominent intellectuals' formulations and answers to the conundrum of cultural alienation. The most prominent thinkers, from the 1920s to the end of the 1970s, highlighted different sociocultural practices taking place in Iran as cultural alienation resulting from encountering colonial modernity. I argue that Western modernization was understood, in the 1950s, as a project that needed to be translated in order to be conquered, while in the 1960s and 70s, the translation project was understood to result in the loss of the articulation of postcolonial experiences and the mere reiteration of European local stories; devouring the colonial influence, instead of imitating, was believed to result in the formation of an inclusive universalism.