Radical History Review current issue

Editors' Introduction

Ghamari-Tabrizi, B., Bonakdarian, M., Rahimieh, N., Sadri, A., Abrahamian, E. — 2009-09-23

The Crowd in the Iranian Revolution

Abrahamian, E. — 2009-09-23

This article analyzes the behavior of street demonstrators in the Iranian Revolution of 1977-79. It tries to show that they acted less like irrational mobs and more like the rational crowds found in George Rude's classic works. It also tries to show that the bloodshed in these street protests was far less than conventionally thought both inside and outside Iran.

Khomeini and the Iranian Revolution in the Egyptian Press: From Fascination to Condemnation

Hammad, H. — 2009-09-23

This essay analyzes how the Egyptian press covered the Iranian Revolution and the Khomeini regime in 1978-81. It discusses which issues related to the revolution and the revolutionary regime were covered, as well as the attitudes of different groups of Egyptian politicians and intellectuals toward the revolution as these found expression in the press. It shows that secular and religious opposition groups differed with each other as much as they differed from the government in their perception of events in Iran.

Iranian Anti-Zionism and the Holocaust: A Long Discourse Dismissed

Ahouie, M. — 2009-09-23

Iran's president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has, for the first time since the 1979 revolution, elaborated the Holocaust revisionism as a strategy in Iran's rhetorical war against Israel. Yet his comments on the Holocaust consist of two distinct parts: denying or questioning the extent of the Holocaust, on the one hand, and linking the creation of the Jewish state to the occurrence of the Holocaust in Europe, on the other. Principally this essay argues that the second part of Ahmadinejad's standpoint on the Holocaust—considering Israel as the West's compensation for that tragedy—has precedents in Iranian prerevolutionary political discourse. By reading through the utterances of several Iranian political thinkers and activists from different ideological backgrounds, this essay maintains that all these intellectuals have shown continuity in the line of their reasoning toward Israel over the past six decades.

Revolution, Trauma, and Nostalgia in Diasporic Iranian Women's Autobiographies

Naghibi, N. — 2009-09-23

This essay argues that the 1979 Iranian Revolution constituted a traumatic break in the national imagination, a break that has paradoxically engendered productive possibilities for women's subjectivities, which manifest themselves through the explosion of diasporic Iranian women's autobiographies since 1999. These autobiographies tend to portray the revolution as an individual and collective trauma colored by a powerful nostalgia for the prerevolutionary era. In this article, I propose that the twinning of private, familial memory with public memory through revolutionary rupture and trauma frames these writers' nostalgic recollections of Iran.

The Theory of Survival: An Interview with Taraneh Hemami

Ghamari-Tabrizi, B. — 2009-09-23

Taraneh Hemami was the guest curator of an exhibition she called Theory of Survival at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. The exhibition attracted considerable attention from the local media and the Iranian American communities in the Bay Area. The exhibit included the work of three other Iranian artists: London-based Reza Aramesh, Toronto-based Gita Hashemi, and Berlin-based Leila Pazooki. Each contributor presented a variety of multimedia and installation pieces through which they addressed the experiences of different generations of Iranians who participated in the revolutionary movement of the 1970s and 1980s and its aftermath. Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi interviews Taraneh Hemami with the accompanying images.

Memory, Mourning, Memorializing: On the Victims of Iran-Iraq War, 1980--Present

Ghamari-Tabrizi, B. — 2009-09-23

The eight-year Iran-Iraq war (1980-88) profoundly shaped postrevolutionary Iranian society. In the early years, the war united different dominant political factions and contributed to the solidification of the Islamic Republic. Its subsequent legacy, the "blood of martyrs" and hundreds of thousands of war veterans, however, has long been a point of contention between competing political elites. The photographs in this section—the hidden faces of the "martyrs" and of those who mourn them—and the reflection of life and light at the gravesites depict the continuing significance of the war in present day Iran. Melissa Hibbard and Hamid Rahmanian took the accompanying photos in Behesht-e Zahra (Zahra's Paradise), Tehran's gargantuan cemetery.

The Revolution Will Not Be Fabricated

Moallem, M. — 2009-09-23

This essay, whose title makes reference to Gil Scott-Heron's famous song, "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised," addresses several components of the Iranian Revolution of 1979, meaning the revolution as an event in its singularity, the revolution as experienced by the subjects who participated in it or to whom the revolution happened, and the effects that the event of revolution have produced in subjects who participated in it. I argue that the emergence of a militant Islamist movement did not have much to do with the return of Islam as an incarnation of a fixed traditions opposed to modernity, but was rather a by-product of modernity and postmodernity. I also argue that in the context of the Iranian Revolution, technologies of vision as well as gender performance (including veiling, militancy, and appearance) proved central to the formation of a modern gendered citizen-subject and its mobilization in pre- and postrevolutionary Iran. In reflecting on the effects of the revolution, I make a case for the triadic mapping of death, revolt, and sexuality, arguing that the relationships between the body, power, and knowledge, in the politics of both life and death, intersect with sexuality in the ways in which subjects are made and enabled to constitute and transform themselves as subjects of desire. This has perhaps been the most enduring effect of the Iranian Revolution for gender and women's issues both in Iran and in the Iranian diaspora.

Has Iran's Islamic Revolution Ended?

Arjomand, S. A. — 2009-09-23

The rise of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and of revolutionary hard-liners makes it difficult to maintain that the Islamic Revolution ended either with the victory of pragmatism and Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani's program of economic reconstruction in 1989, or with the rise of the reform movement under Mohammad Khatami's leadership in 1997. The sociology of revolution has typically focused on the short-term revolutionary process that ends with the victory of one of the contending groups and the elimination of the others. This process in fact merges into a more drawn-out struggle among the children of the revolution for the definition of the new political order or the constitutional politics of postrevolutionary reconstruction. The regime set up by Ruhollah Khomeini had a mixed constitution consisting of three elements: theocratic or clericalist, republican or democratic, and populist and egalitarian centered on social justice. The first was developed during the decade after his death, while Khatami's attempt to realize the republican component of the heritage failed, leaving the unclaimed populism and social-justice component to be championed by Ahmadinejad and the hard-liners in a throwback to the original revolutionism.

The Revolution and the Rural Poor

Salehi-Isfahani, D. — 2009-09-23

Critics of the Iranian Revolution of 1979 often paint the picture of a failed revolution when they focus on the structure of employment or on income inequality, neither of which indicates improvement or deep social change. I argue here that the critics miss an important dimension of social change where the revolution has had its greatest impact on Iranian society, namely, the improvement and transformation of the lives of the poor, especially the rural poor, who were socially excluded before the revolution. Poverty is now substantially lower (poverty rates are very low by developing country standards), and rural families have much greater access to basic public services such as electricity, roads, schools, health facilities, and safe water. Some of the gains are the direct result of the revolutionary government's priorities, which shifted infrastructure investment toward villages. In particular, investment in rural health facilities is responsible for a spectacular decline in fertility, as well as child and maternal mortality. Other improvements may be unintended consequences of government action. The significant rise in the education of rural girls in the postrevolutionary era was definitely helped by greater access to schools and family planning services, but it was also in part the result of the strict enforcement of the Islamic dress code and of public behavior that enabled women to leave the confines of their homes to seek more education and look for work.

Postrevolutionary Persian Literature: Creativity and Resistance

Talattof, K. — 2009-09-23

This essay offers a summary of literary activities since the 1979 Iranian Revolution, pointing out the most important poets, fiction writers, literary critics, literary journals, and literary as well as social events that have affected the production of literary shifts. In so doing, the article asserts that in the past three decades, despite fluctuations in the prominence of one or another genre, literary activities have continued to contribute to the formation of history, have influenced events, and have been influenced by societal changes.

Reflections on Literature after the 1979 Revolution in Iran and in the Diaspora

Karim, P. M. — 2009-09-23

This essay highlights the changes in literature in Iran and in the diaspora since the 1979 Iranian Revolution, and it especially emphasizes the role of literature and writers in responding to the societal changes in Iran, as well as to the experience of immigration to the West. The role of women writers, in particular, is suggestive of the ways in which the revolution has enabled new voices to emerge even despite the restrictive and repressive policies of the Islamic Republic. Women have been at the forefront of the literature of the diaspora and have taken opportunities to narrate and represent their experiences, becoming the progenitors of a literary movement in the West. This literature of diaspora has reflected the tensions of Iran's relationships with the West, but it has also begun to point to a shift that reflects a more transnational perspective.

Postrevolutionary Trends in Persian Fiction and Film

Ghanoonparvar, M. R. — 2009-09-23

With a brief survey of Iranian fiction and film since the early twentieth century, this article reflects on the changes and developments in these two art forms in recent decades. It argues that although serious writers and filmmakers in the past century displayed a commitment to social and political issues in their country, and while the nature of the endeavors of the postrevolutionary literary authors and serious filmmakers have generally remained the same, the 1978-79 Iranian Revolution and the Iran-Iraq war ,as well as the new restrictions imposed by the Islamic regime, have had considerable impact on and brought changes to the art of storytelling in Iran.

Islamic Revolution and the Circulation of Visual Culture

Lotfalian, M. — 2009-09-23

The Islamic Revolution of 1979 influenced the production of visual culture in Iran. This article reflects on the postrevolutionary emerging languages of visual culture through its multiple channels of circulation. It argues that the circulation of these productions and an interconnection of media types help us understand the emerging sensus communis, a new possibility for a shared understanding of sense perception, that is coming out of various places, different technologies, and emerging forms.

Intellectual Life after the 1979 Revolution: Radical Hope and Nihilistic Dreams

Mirsepassi, A. — 2009-09-23

This essay presents a discussion of intellectual developments in the thirty years since the 1979 Iranian Revolution, along both religious and secular lines, as they have unfolded in the wake of the prerevolutionary heritage of both the constitutional revolution-Popular Front secular universal tradition and the intellectual turning of the 1960s and 1970s that ushered in a political model of religious authenticity as the organizing axis of popular resistance. The essay points out that in the wake of the Iranian Revolution a variety of evolving intellectual tendencies have adhered to a central notion of the West as the point of reference in all political discussion, whether as an image of adulation and condemnation. This tendency is linked to a more general pattern of privileging abstract philosophical modes of discourse over sociologically specific and contextually grounded research and analysis, a orientation that has had the counterproductive effect of widening a gulf between intellectuals and their work and the real desires, perceptions, and aspirations of the general Iranian public.

Contested Narratives of the Present: Postrevolutionary Culture and Media in Iran

Akhavan, N. — 2009-09-23

This book review compares Mehdi Semati's Media, Culture, and Society in Iran: Living with Globalization and the Islamic State and Nasrin Alavi's We Are Iran: The Persian Blogs. Both works recognize the significance of media in shaping and understanding contemporary Iranian society. Semati's volume aims to critically challenge the models that have become commonplace in describing and assessing Iran, while Alavi's work provides a compact collection of the kind of narratives that Semati indicates are in dire need of interrogation.

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

2009-09-23