“Displaced Allegories is a compelling and provocative book. With a remarkable talent for closely reading and analyzing films, Negar Mottahedeh examines some of the most important films produced in post-Revolutionary Iran. She offers a multilayered analysis of the tension between continuity and change, transgression and submission, and compliance and resistance inherent in the films.”—Farzaneh Milani, author of Veils and Words: The Emerging Voices of Iranian Women Writers “Displaced Allegories is an extremely timely book. Negar Mottahedeh treats the issues of nation-building and the veiling of women together, demonstrating the various ways they are co-implicated in Iranian films. Questions of feminine sexuality and desire are shown to have a national-political purchase in Mottahedeh’s analysis. This not only produces more complex interpretations of the films than a focus on just one issue or the other would have allowed; it also ‘updates’ the still important but by now slightly tired feminist concerns that have motivated a significant strand of film theory since the mid-1970s.”—Joan Copjec, author of Imagine There’s No Woman: Ethics and Sublimation “Finally, a book about post-Revolutionary Iranian cinema that is not another general or political history of that cinema but an innovative, sustained, and rigorous analysis of it using film theory. Displaced Allegories is a highly original work.”—Hamid Naficy, author of An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking