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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 January 2025
Manijeh Moradian published a memoir essay in 2009 under the penname Nasrabadi in which she described her relationship with her father. The essay appeared in Callaloo—a journal dedicated to “matters pertinent to African American and African Diaspora Studies worldwide.”1 It was a fitting venue given the elder Moradian's years of service as a professor of architecture at Howard University, an HBCU (historically Black colleges and universities) where during the 1970s he sympathized with and supported student activists in the Iranian Students Association (ISA).2 The venue is all the more fitting given the younger Moradian's recent monograph which, among many groundbreaking contributions, demonstrates “affects of solidarity” between Iranian and Black American student activists in the 1970s.
1 See “About Callaloo,” Callaloo, n.d., https://www.callalooliteraryjournal.com/about-callaloo.
2 See “In Conversation: Manijeh Moradian with Golnar Adili,” Brooklyn Rail, February 2023, https://brooklynrail.org/2023/02/books/Manijeh-Moradian-in-conversation-with-Golnar-Adili.
3 I am grateful to Alexander Jabbari for bringing the resonances between these books to my attention.
4 Society for Iranian Studies, S.I.S. Newsletter 6, no. 1 (1974): 15.
5 Nasrabadi, Manijeh, “A Far Corner of the Revolution,” Callaloo 32, no. 4 (2009): 1207CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
6 “Jin Jiyan Azadî as in Free Palestine,” Jadaliyya, November 23, 2023, https://www.jadaliyya.com/Details/45544/Jin-Jiyan-Azadî-as-in-Free-Palestine.
7 Elleni Centime Zeleke published a comparable volume about the Ethiopian revolution in 2019. Zeleke's work is distinct insofar as she develops a theoretical and methodological approach through conversation with vernacular traditions from Ethiopia. She calls this approach “theory as memoir.” See Zeleke, Elleni Centime, Ethiopia in Theory: Revolution and Knowledge Production, 1964–2016 (Leiden: Brill, 2020)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
8 Malek, Amy, “Reperiodizing, Reclassifying, and Reframing the Iranian American Diaspora in This Flame Within,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East 44, no. 1 (2024): 181CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
9 See, for example, Matin-Asgari, Afshin, Iranian Student Opposition to the Shah (Washington, DC: Mazda, 2001)Google Scholar; and Shannon, Matthew, Losing Hearts and Minds: American–Iranian Relations and International Education during the Cold War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
10 See, for example, L., “Figuring a Women's Revolution: Bodies Interacting with Their Images,” trans. Alireza Doostdar, Jadaliyya, October 5, 2022, https://www.jadaliyya.com/Details/44479.
11 Golnar Nikpour, “On Revolutionary Possibility in the Archive of 1979,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 44, no. 1 (2024): 176–77.
12 Similar topics arose in philosophical writings by activists from the Ethiopian student movement, many of whom were in conversation with the Iranian Students Association. For reference, see Arash Davari, “Solidarity to Fraternity” (review of Ethiopia in Theory: Revolution and Knowledge Production, 1964–2016 by Elleni Centime Zeleke), Radical Philosophy 2, no. 10 (2021): 87–91.
13 Afshin Matin-Asgari, “Review of This Flame Within: Iranian Revolutionaries in the United States by Manijeh Moradian,” Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies 23, no. 1 (2023): 147–50.
14 Ali Nadimi's memoir—first published in 2017 and recently translated into English—offers clues for future research. Nadimi describes relations of solidarity between student movement activists abroad and guerrillas in Iran, paying close attention to their affective dimensions. He recounts how statements of solidarity from activists in Iran “stirred emotions and brought many participants to tears” at the fifteenth CISNU congress in Germany in January 1974. Further, Nadimi compares reception of these internal solidarity statements with reception of solidarity statements from non-Iranian organizations, “CISNU's traditional allies,” and “international organizations and liberation movements from across the globe.” He situates these affects of solidarity in relation to “the useless disputes and rash, unmeasured reactions” that fueled conflict among Iranian student activists. See ‘Ali Nadimi, “The Confederation of Iranian Students (National Union) and the Fada'i Guerrillas,” trans. Arash Davari, in Fada'i Guerrilla Praxis in Iran (1970–1979): Narratives and Reflections on Everyday Life, ed. Touraj Atabaki, Nasser Mohajer, and Siavush Randjbar-Daemi (London: I. B. Tauris, 2023), 203–15.
15 Takriti, Abdel Razzaq, “Embodying Solidarity in the Heart of Empire,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 44, no. 1 (2024): 185CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
16 See, for example, Mahnaz Matin and Nasser Mohajer, Khizesh-e Zanān-e Iran dar Esfand-e 1357 (Koln, Germany: Nashr-e Noghteh, 1392/2013–14), 145, 152.
17 For context and a partial reprint of the original statement in Persian, see Matin and Mohajer, Khizesh-e Zanān, 71–73. For an English language translation of the statement, see Janet Afary and Kevin B. Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 245–46. The translation does not mention who read the statement on March 10, 1979. The Persian-language reprint omits article 7, regarding the preservation of women's “present employment.”
18 For a personal account that demonstrates the point, see Matin and Mohajer, Khizesh-e Zanān, 144.
19 Arash Davari, “Like 1979 All Over Again: Resisting Left Liberalism among Iranian Émigrés,” in With Stones in Our Hands: Writings on Muslims, Racism, and Empire, eds. Sohail Daulatzai and Junaid Rana, 122–35 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018).
20 Like Zeleke, Moradian's argument adds a diasporic inflection to existing scholarship about vernacular Marxism. For the latter, see Bardawil, Fadi A., Revolution and Disenchantment: Arab Marxism and the Binds of Emancipation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020)Google Scholar.
21 I am grateful to Roozbeh Shirazi for bringing this point to my attention.
22 I am grateful to Amy Malek, whose feedback helped me clarify this point.