By exploring topics such as the Internet, print press, advertising, satellite television, video, rock music, literature, cinema, gender, religious intellectuals, and secularism, this unique and wide-ranging volume explains Iran as a complex society that has successfully managed to negotiate and embody the tensions of tradition and modernity, democracy and theocracy, isolation and globalization, and other such cultural-political dynamics that escape the explanatory and analytical powers of all-too-familiar binary relations.

Featuring contributions from among the best-known and emerging scholars on Iranian media, culture, society, and politics, this volume uncovers how the existing perspectives on post-revolutionary Iranian society have failed to appreciate the complexity, the paradoxes and the contradictions that characterize life in contemporary Iran, resulting in a general failure to explain and to anticipate its contemporary social and political transformations.