The first chapter examines contemporary exhibitions inside and outside Iran as historiographical sites of knowledge production about modernist Iranian art. This chapter focuses on two case studies, the exhibition Iran Modern (2013–2014) and the canceled exhibition project Tehran Modern, which was supposed to present artworks from Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art’s collection at the National Gallery in Berlin. In light of these exhibitions outside of Iran, this chapter also investigates the history, legacy, and exhibition activities of the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art as the official institution for modern art in Iran. A comparative perspective shows how these exhibitions repeated and strengthened the historiographical paradigm that modernist Iranian art production symbolizes the country’s successful modernization and secularization during the Pahlavi rule. A close analysis demonstrates that the depoliticized reading of Iranian modernist art in the respective exhibition contexts serves different contemporary political interests.

This chapter examines the gender and sexual politics of the Iranian Students Association (ISA), the US affiliate of the Confederation of Iranian Students (National Union) (CISNU), which was the largest anti-shah opposition formation during the 1960s and 1970s. While the participation of CISNU in the creation of pan-Third Worldist solidarities has been established, Iranian foreign student activists have been left out of narratives of the emergence of Third World feminism as an outgrowth of women’s commitments to the anti-imperialist movements of the era. The author argues that the efforts of some ISA members to challenge gender hierarchies, and to place the struggle for women’s equality on the immediate organizing agenda – rather than postpone this goal until after the arrival of socialism – represent gestures toward an anti-imperialist feminism that was severely constrained by historical and ideological circumstances. Nonetheless, these gestures are important for subsequent generations of Iranian diasporic feminists to parse, as they contain ideas crucial for reimagining transnational feminist solidarities today. Through close readings of interviews with former ISA members and movement literature, the author traces a genealogy of Iranian revolutionary gender consciousness rooted in an analysis of the intersections between patriarchy, empire, and dictatorship.