This Flame Within: Iranian Revolutionaries in the United States

Location: Encina Commons, Rm 123, 615 Crothers Way

Revising the standard narrative of Iranian migration to the US as a post-1979 phenomenon characterized by the flight of wealthy Iranians from the Islamic Republic, This Flame Within (Duke University Press, forthcoming November 2022) looks at the leftist student activists who came to the US in the 1960s and 1970s and joined a global uprising against US imperialism. The book investigates the transnational process that transformed privileged foreign students into revolutionaries determined to end US support for the Shah of Iran. Drawing on in-depth interviews with veterans of the Iranian Students Association, the US affiliate of the Confederation of Iranian Students, as well as extensive archival research, the book traces “revolutionary affects” from encounters with imperialism and dictatorship in Iran to joint organizing with other radicalized student activists in the US. In the context of antiracist and anticolonial movements, the revolutionary affects of differently targeted populations converged into an “affects of solidarity,” an embodied force that animated Third World internationalism. Locating Iranian foreign students as participants in the Afro-Asian connections that marked a highpoint of the era, the book considers the gendered aspects of revolutionary affects as the conditions of possibility for the emergence of Third World feminism.

Manijeh Moradian is assistant professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Barnard College, Columbia University. Prior to joining the Barnard faculty, she was a University of California President's Postdoctoral Fellow in Asian American Studies at UC Davis and an Andrew Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Comparative Revolutions at Brandeis University. She received her PhD in American Studies from NYU and her MFA in creative nonfiction from Hunter College, City University of New York. She is the former co-director of the Association of Iranian American Writers. Her book, This Flame Within: Iranian Revolutionaries in the United States, is forthcoming from Duke University Press in November 2022. Her essays and articles have appeared in the Routledge Handbook of the Global Sixties, Scholar & Feminist online, Women’s Studies Quarterly, Comparative Studies of South Asian, Africa, and the Middle East, Social Text online, jadaliyya.com, and Callaloo. She is a founding member of the Raha Iranian Feminist Collective and a member of the editorial board of the Jadaliyya.com Iran Page.