Friendship of Nations: Polish Shi’ite Showbiz

Beginning as an investigation into the apparently disparate events that bookend the twentieth and twenty-first century – the collapse of Communism in 1989 and the Iranian Revolution of 1979 – Friendship of Nations: Polish Shi’ite Showbiz traces unlikely points of convergence in Iran and Poland’s economic, social political religious and cultural histories. Drawing on Slavs and Tatars’ multi-disciplinary practice encompassing research, installations, lecture-performances, and print media this publication embraces new contributions in the form of essays interviews and archival presentation on subjects that range from seventeenth-century Sarmatism to the twenty-first-century Green Movement taking in along the way tales of the Polish Exodus, Wojtek the bear, craft, hospitality, Passion plays and taziyeh, and the political lessons of a Polish slow burn revolution for contemporary Iran. The volume includes essays by Agata Araszkiewicz, Mara Goldwyn, Shiva Balaghi and Michael D. Kennedy, Slavs and Tatars and an interview between Ramin Jahanbegloo and Adam Michnik.