Amongst many academic enquiries that followed the Iranian revolution of 1979, was a rising entreaty for revisiting the country’s past, both immediate and the distant past. It was in fact the complexities of the Iranian revolution and its outcomes that begged for a theoretical exploration of the nation’s past. The past needed to be revisited, in order to find answers to all queries devised from the failures of the teleological paradigms, posed for decades by the modernists, both Marxists and non-Marxists. In writing history, turning to the metanarratives in macro-history postured to “discover” the “congenital” social structure that in the long-term crafted the major trends in Iranian history. However, the main criterion that anchored these metanarratives is their exclusive approach to re-examining the past from an elitist perspective. Through assigning agency in history to the elite that in its multiplicity could be clerics, secular intelligentsia, colonialists and social or political institutions, these metanarratives not only deny the agency of the non-elite and their autonomous consciousness, but also necessitate an essentialist approach that ends up dehistoricising the process of social and cultural changes.
By reviewing some new and major metanarratives of macrohistories of Iran, the purpose of this paper is to reveal how the labouring poor are missing in these accounts. Thus, an essential criterion of my contribution is its counter-essentialist approach to the process of social and cultural changes, which circumscribes the question of agency and subjectivity in writing the past.
