After the decline of the Constitutional movement, the discourse of archaic nationalism made its way into the political system, literature, and the "intellectual" movement. In this discourse, the racial and linguistic "other" was considered responsible for Iran "backwardness."

This research focuses on the genealogy of racism and domineering masculinity in the literary discourse in the 1920s and 1930s, centered on Sadegh Hedayat. Discourse theory and discourse analysis are applied on data from first-hand and second-hand texts including novels, short stories, interviews, reports, documentaries and analytical articles.

Among these early Iranian fiction writers, Jamalzadeh defined his patriotic duty in terms of policing and preserving the Persian language against Western, Arab, and Turkish enemies, framing Iran’s problems in racial terms. The writings of Hedayat, Alavi, Minovi, Partow, and Farzad were replete with racial and gender stereotypes, while Choubak repeatedly associated the Arabic language with “annoying” and “unpleasant” noises. Women were reduced to sexual or romantic experiences and portrayed as victims of circumstance, regardless of their choices. This perspective, aligned with the political ideology of the first Pahlavi era and influenced by Orientalism, gave rise to a discourse that was intensely essentialist, deterministic, and regressive and came to represent the Iranian “intelligentsia” itself.