Toy Gun instead of Doll: Politicization of Children's Literature in the Declining Public Sphere of Iran (1963- 1979)

Abstract

Abstract The present research is an attempt to shed light on the process of politicization of children’s literature in the shaky public realm of Iran during a historical period between 1963 and 1979. The main purpose has been to show how under the pressure of the absolutist regime of Pahlavi many suppressed conflicts have not had any spaces and realms to be manifested and discussed in public or through the free channels of communication clearly, openly and transparently. Consequently, children’s literature has been utilized as a political instrument to give expression to the latent conflicts in the Iranian public realm. Disagreements, contradictions, oppositions in terms of the governmental policy of peremptory socioeconomic development and political underdevelopment, did not have any opportunity to be vocalized in a rational, critical dialogue or in a clear direct debate. Therefore, many of these strangled voices in the Iranian public sphere, or at least parts of demands of dissident intellectuals, have been reflected in the realms like children’s literature, which are normally irrelevant to politics. It means that children’s literature has been politicized and used instrumentally to criticize the status quo. It is interesting that institutions like ‘the center for the intellectual development of children and adolescents’ that were inaugurated in 1965 were, in fact, governmental organizations with no political purpose at all. They opened to function in the same direction with socioeconomic modernization and cultural development specifically according to the capitalist model. However, critics and dissident groups, particularly the leftist and nativist intellectuals, utilized such realms exactly for their political purposes. Thus, it seems that for them children’s literature acts as a façade behind it antagonistic features of the political issues like: the growing gap between different economic classes, or between traditional and modern parts of the Iranian society could be expressed in an indirect and unclear way through artistic productions for children. So in this research it has been described how in the lack of the realms of public debate about disagreements and contradictory interests and ideas, the antagonistic features of the political has penetrated into one of the most innocent realm of communication according to the public institutions of a democratic society, namely, children’s literature. By reading two short stories for children by Samad Behrangi, and by using semiotics as a qualitative method of text analysis, an attempt has been made to reveal some of the suppressed struggles and conflicts within the declining public sphere of Iran. It seems that suppressed public demands and latent conflicts in terms of freedom, justice, independence and so on can be uncovered by the semiotic interpretation of these texts and looking beneath the surface of these juvenile literary works in the brittle Iranian public realm (1963- 1979). Keywords: Politicization, public sphere