Iranian Publishers Abroad and Online: The Circulation of Iranian Texts Around the World

The roman noir started in America in the 1930s and in France in the 1940s as a version of the crime novel with a twist, since the protagonist is not a detective or a police officer but a victim or a perpetrator of the crime. In addition, the ending more often than not does not re-establish social order. As it developed as a genre, the roman noir came to be characterized by a pessimistic view of the world and an emphasis on politics. The roman noir is indeed interested in the reasons for crime and in questioning society about its responsibility in their production.

The genre is thought to be a Western one, with well-known writers and numerous audiences in North America and Europe. However Iranian literature also innovates with romans noirs, which are essential to understand the genre in a world literature context. Sometimes written by Iranian migrant writers in Western languages, sometimes written in Persian, these romans noirs renew the genre and its politics. As they circulate in a globalized world, they come to not only question their country’s society but the world order in the making of crimes.

This paper will focus on the politics of the Iranian roman noir. It will compare three novels by Iranian writers (Aida Moradi Ahani, Salar Abdoh and Naïri Nahapétian), one written in Persian, one in English and the other in French. Grounded in a historical understanding of the genre, it will situate the Iranian roman noir in a larger movement of peripheral literatures redefining the genre thanks to their questioning of world politics.