By Tahereh Aghdasifar, Arash Davari, Alexander Jabbari, Amira Jarmakani, and Golnar Nikpour
Note: We began work on this syllabus in 2023 and did not have the opportunity to revise it before Israel’s attack on Iran in June 2025. This violence, which escalated into a twelve day war recruiting the US to drop “bunker buster” bombs at Fordo, Natanz, and Esfahan, saw similarly confusing messaging as outlined in the original introduction to the syllabus below. Iranian women, and Israel’s disproven and disingenuous claims about Iranian nuclear weapons, were used as pretexts for bombing Iran. We have heard both pretexts used before for invading Iran’s neighbors: the US’s phony claim that Iraq possessed “weapons of mass destruction,” and the Taliban’s repression of Afghan women, were used to justify US invasion and occupation. In his address to Iranians, Benjamin Netanyahu even exploited the Kurdish call for “woman, life, freedom” which gained popularity during Iran’s feminist uprising, repeating it in English and Persian. This co-opting of grassroots feminist movements in Iran combined with the right-wing segment of the Iranian diaspora unironically committed to “Make Iran Great Again,” makes us more committed than ever to the liberatory politics that attention to radical Iranian theory and praxis can bring.
In September 2022, Jina (Mahsa) Amini, a young Kurdish woman, died after being severely beaten by police for improperly wearing the legally mandated headscarf in Tehran, Iran. Amini’s murder and the resulting feminist uprising received popular but questionable global coverage. In the US specifically, her murder galvanized conversations about gender liberation in Iran; however, mainstream US fascination with her death also serves to reinforce a cyclical and ongoing US preoccupation with women, queers, and trans people and their oppression and/or liberation in Iran. Such fascination shows how gender and sexuality operate as key vectors through which the complexity of Iran’s political landscape is flattened and is mechanically reified as always-already foreign in the US. Despite the fact that the Woman, Life, Freedom movement emerged simultaneously within the US Supreme Court’s assault on abortion rights, inviting a compelling and obvious comparison of the two feminist struggles for bodily autonomy, most mainstream narratives could only read the Iranian protests through the tired lens of Iranian hyper-patriarchal oppression. This distancing move is ironically an exceptionalizing one; it employs the technologies of gender and sexuality as central nodes through which Iran is regarded as an abject other in both the US academy and in mainstream perceptions more generally. The initial scholarly hesitation to address the troubling coverage of the uprising – or even the uprising at all – revealed how Iran’s tense geopolitical status as a “rogue state” vis-à-vis US empire has caused an astonishing dearth of knowledge not only on Iranian politics (a nation with a radical history that includes two revolutions and the 2022 feminist uprising), but on Iran altogether. At the same time, the Islamic Republic’s claim to “anti-imperialism” via critiques of US empire, global financial institutions, and Zionism saw a curious alignment of some US leftists with the Iranian state. Despite Iran’s violent suppression of dissidents (including leftists), some US radicals believed supporting the uprising meant supporting US empire over what they perceived to simply be an anti-imperialist state established through revolution. This facile binary move to assign either the US or the Iranian state as imperialist or repressive ultimately obscures the complexities of power and revolution in the modern era. This microsyllabus offers some nuance in this narrative through sustained attention to how modernity, revolution, carcerality, and sociality have taken shape in Iran.
The scholarship offered here is one step toward rectifying this intellectual void on Iranian politics, demonstrating the necessity of integrating both radical Iranian thought formed in Iran and US Iranian theorizations of the transnational circuits that underlie the geopolitics of imperialism linking both states into US academic discourses. We hope these interdisciplinary sources spanning Iranian revolutions and revolutionary thought, carcerality, sociality, movement building, and the development of critical SWANA studies/Ethnic Studies will facilitate engagement with radical Iranian thought instead of provincializing such work as area studies or even “counter-terrorism” studies.
Modernity and the Constitutional Revolution
Iranian modernity has always been an international and internationalist project, born of exchange with people living beyond the borders of the Iranian nation-state. Persian has historically been an important lingua franca across much of Eurasia, particularly India. An early modern ethos and sense of self perhaps first found articulation in the Persian writings of Indian intellectuals and litterateurs in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the Persian literature shared by Iranians and Indians alike would later become an important resource for nineteenth- and twentieth-century Iranian modernizers.
The Iranian Constitutional Revolution of 1906-11 was a moment of political modernization, with Iranians demanding elements of social democracy. Networks linking Iran to the Caucasus enabled the circulation of socialists and other revolutionaries and allowed Iranian revolutionaries to connect with their counterparts in the Russian and Ottoman empires. This period witnessed great experimentation in modernizing social concepts and political forms. Though the Constitutional Revolution was ultimately put down with force before its demands could be meaningfully fulfilled, it left an enduring legacy in Iran. Part of that legacy is the genesis of the Iranian left, which would play an increasingly active role in Iranian society in the decades to come. The following sources offer a starting point for understanding the emergence of Iranian nationalism, the experience of modernity, and the role of the Constitutional Revolution in developing later Iranian Leftist thought and movements.
Mansour Bonakdarian, “Iranian Nationalism and Global Solidarity Networks, 1906-1918: Internationalism, Transnationalism, Globalization, and Nationalist Cosmopolitanism,” In Iran in the Middle East: Transnational Encounters and Social History eds. Houchang Chehabi, Peyman Jafari, and Maral Jefroudi. London: I.B. Tauris, 2015. 77-119.
Mana Kia, “Indian Friends, Iranian Selves, Persianate Modern” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East (2016) 36 no. 3: 398–417.
Mohammad Tavakoli-Targhi, Refashioning Iran: Orientalism, Occidentalism and Historiography. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001.
Alexander Jabbari, The Making of Persianate Modernity: Language and Literary History between Iran and India. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2023.
Milad Odabaei, “Shrinking Borders and Expanding Vocabularies: Translation and the Iranian Constitutional Revolution of 1906.” In Iran’s Constitutional Revolution of 1906 and Narratives of the Enlightenment, ed. Ali M. Ansari. Gingko, 2016.
Afsaneh Najmabadi, “‘Is our name remembered?’: Writing the history of Iranian constitutionalism as if women and gender mattered,” Iranian Studies 29, no. 1-2 (1996): 85-109.
Prisons and Abolition
Prisons have been an indelible feature of modern life in Iran, both before and after the 1979 revolution that deposed the Pahlavi monarchy and brought to power the Islamic Republic of Iran. During the revolutionary groundswell of 1978-1979, Iranians of diverse political stripes and ethnic and class backgrounds made their opposition to torture and political imprisonment a central tenet of their radical demands for a new and more just world. In the leadup to the fall of the shah, political prisoners were freed by the hundreds and eventually thousands. Upon the victory of the revolution in February 1979, jubilant revolutionaries stormed the shah’s most infamous prisons – including sites like Qasr and Evin prisons in Tehran – to release those whom they erroneously believed were still held there.
The provisional government tried unsuccessfully to convince these roving revolutionaries not to storm Evin at all, in part because of the prison’s new prisoners. Within weeks, Evin would house many times the number of detainees as it had in the last months of the shah’s rule, all arrested by revolutionary forces. Carceral expansion – which had been exponential in the five decades before 1979 and would remain so afterwards – did not stop there. Today, the prisons of the Islamic Republic hold approximately a quarter of a million incarcerated persons. As was the case before 1979, these prisons (and the torture endemic to them) unite a diverse range of Iranians in opposition to a government that uses them to maintain its grip on power.
Despite the significance that incarceration has played for political movements over the last century in Iran, mass imprisonment is a relatively recent phenomenon in the region’s history. Although small jailing facilities existed in Iran before the 20th century, imprisonment was relatively rare and typically for short periods of time. It was not until after the Constitutional Revolution that the Iranian government, with the help of Europeans brought to reform policing in the country, endeavored to build a small modern carceral network in Tehran.
Although the explicit language of prison abolition has not commonly been found in Iranian social movements, critiques of modern incarceration – including structural critiques of prisons as an institution – are widespread. From its inception, the modern Iranian prison system has been the site of extraordinary protest. Indeed, Iranians have written innumerable books and essays and made a great deal of art and music confronting the injustices of the prison system over the past century. The following is not nearly an exhaustive list of this remarkable – and sometimes contradictory – body of work. Rather, it is an effort to highlight some key texts on prisons and carcerality in the Iranian context. Of note is the inclusion of Forough Farrokhzad’s short documentary The House is Black (1963) which has rarely been considered in the context of prisons and imprisonment. Despite this, the elegiac film’s focus on forcibly sequestered Iranians with Hansen’s Disease (leprosy) represents an Iranian feminist abolitionist vision that critiques the modernizing state’s logic of forced enclosure to its core.
Ervand Abrahamian, Tortured Confessions: Prisons and Public Recantations in Modern Iran. Oakland: University of California Press, 1999.
Behrouz Bouchani, No Friend but the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison. Sydney: Pan Macmillan Australia, 2018.
Arash Davari, Omid Tofighian, Golnar Nikpour, and Naveed Mansoori, “Is Abolition Global? Parts I and II,” Jadaliyya (September 2, 2020).
Forough Farrokhzad, The House is Black. 1963.
Nasser Mohajer, Voices of a Massacre: Untold Stories of Life and Death in Iran, 1988. London: Oneworld Publications, 2020.
Narges Mohammadi, White Torture: Interviews with Iranian Women Prisoners. London: Oneworld Publications, 2022.
Golnar Nikpour, The Incarcerated Modern: Prisons and Public Life in Iran. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2024.
Shahla Talebi, Ghosts of Revolution: Rekindled Memories of Imprisonment in Iran. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011.
Revolution
Twentieth century Iranian history fell between two revolutions. By standard accounts, these events characterize the scope of modern revolution in world history. Iran’s 1905-1911 Constitutional Revolution characterizes political revolution, as exemplified by the “Springtime of Nations” across Europe in 1848. Meanwhile, Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution captures the “Jacobin-Bolshevik” model of social revolution first found in Russia in 1917 and later advanced by Third Worldist movements for decolonization. The 2022 uprising, deemed revolutionary in many corners, seems to suggest a third approach: what experts call “small ‘r’ revolutions,” crystalized by the 1989 movements that precipitated the fall of the Soviet Union. These were horizontal, leaderless, and non-ideological movements. Popular and nonviolent, the “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement certainly transcended taken-for-granted distinctions between the political and the social found in prior accounts focused on revolutionary outcomes. Its feminist ethos and attention to daily life depicted revolution as an attempt and a process.
For all their important insights, however, these schematic distinctions fail to account for overlaps—in the Iranian case between 1905, 1979, and 2022. What is more, they incorrectly cast historical events in Iran as derivative of European circumstances, experiences, and models, all of which are predicated in one way or another on the 1789 French Revolution. Often criticized in readings of postcolonial politics, this interpretive gesture strikes an especially discordant note here given the projected meaning of a modern revolution: an event that invents and so ruptures from prior formulae. Take discourse about the 2022 uprising where inconsistencies abound. Declarations of opposition to the Islamic Republic conflated opposition to authoritarianism and patriarchy with opposition to anti-imperialism and decolonization. Slogans that purported to break from Iran’s 1979 revolution and everything it stood for appeared side-by-side with comparisons to the progression of events in 1978 and 1979.
What if we consider historical continuities between 1905, 1979, and 2022 rather than ruptures? Can we viably call later events revolutions? And further, can we understand the revolutionary movements of 1905, 1979, and 2022 as not only specific to Iran but also global by virtue of their capacity to author conceptual categories?
To imagine a global history of revolution from Iran is to consider how people in the global South engage in practices of worldmaking. We must do more than de-exceptionalize, deprovincialize, or situate events in relation to processes that take place elsewhere in the world. The question remains whether we can in the Iranian case, given the widespread demonization of Islamic ways of life. The following readings point in this direction.
Elleni Zeleke and Arash Davari, “Third World Historical: Rethinking Revolution from Ethiopia to Iran,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East 42, no. 2 (2022): 422-429.
Naghmeh Sohrabi, “Writing Revolution as if Women Mattered,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East 42, no. 2 (2022): 546-550.
Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi, Foucault in Iran: Islamic Revolution after the Enlightenment. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016.
Naghmeh Sohrabi, “The Problem-Space of the Iranian Revolution,” History Compass (9 November 2018): https://doi.org/10.1111/hic3.12500
Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi, “Iran and the Permanence of the Theologico-Political?,” Political Theology (4 July 2022): https://doi.org/10.1080/1462317X.2022.2095851.
Arash Davari “On Inexactitude in Decolonization,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East 40, no. 3 (2020): 627-635.
Arang Keshavarzian and Ali Mirsepassi, eds. Global 1979: Geographies and Histories of the Iranian Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. (Chapters 2, 11, and 12)
Sociality, Self-Making, and Solidarity
Jina Amini’s death globalized decades long Kurdish resistance politics and labor, though it was rarely contextualized in this way, particularly during the first few weeks of resistance. The call for Woman, Life, Freedom (Jin, Jyan, Azadi in Kurdish) originates in the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and specifically Jineology, a Kurdish feminist liberation politic and fundamental component of the PKK’s vision and practice of democratic confederalism. While the Persian “Zan, Zendegi, Azadi” translation of the original Kurdish slogan spread across the world, the gender dynamics of state violence and resistance in Iran was often missing. The sustained history of homosocial culture, care, and politicization in Iran was instead flattened to a tired but recognizable racist binary of a patriarchal Islamic state oppressing liberal “westernized” women. The resources here are starting points for both areas and their overlap. Some sources demonstrate necessarily transnational nature of feminist theorizing on the Iranian left, particularly Kurdish feminist theory and praxis, despite the violence of exactly the borders which police ethnic minorities within and outside of Iran, while others offer the liberatory potential of homosociality in Iran, despite how it is not always a choice one can opt into or out of.
Dilar Dirik, The Kurdish Women’s Movement: History, Theory, Practice. London: Pluto Press, 2022.
Bahareh Hedayat, “Revolution is Inevitable”: A Letter from Evin Prison, Tehran, Iran, trans. Feminists4Jina, Jadaliyya (December 2022).
L., “Figuring a Women’s Revolution: Bodies Interacting with their Images,” trans. Alireza Doostdar, Jadaliyya (October 5, 2022).
Nima Naghibi, Rethinking Global Sisterhood: Western Feminism and Iran. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2007.
Afsaneh Najmabadi, Professing Selves: Transsexuality and Same-Sex Desire in Contemporary Iran. Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2013.
Nazanin Shahrokni, Women in Place: The Politics of Gender Segregation. Oakland: University of California Press, 2020.
Stanley Thangaraj, “Jina in Iran, Erased Kurdish Histories, and the Worlds We Need,” Tropics of Meta (December 5, 2022).
Amed Yones, “Our History is Not Insta-Activism: On Jina, Mahsa, and the Trendification of Kurdish Feminism,” gal-dem (December 16, 2022).
Iranian studies and/as Ethnic Studies
Though critical SWANA studies is now recognized within critical ethnic studies, such recognition did not come easily. The illegibility of US Iranian studies within ethnic studies historically could potentially be attributed to mainstream perceptions of Iranians in relation to whiteness, which is, perhaps, why scholarship on this topic has held such prominence. In fact, racialization through surveillance and racialized exclusion enacted through War-on-Terror policies have uniformly orientalized everyone from the larger SWANA region—Arabs, Iranians, Turks, Assyrians, Kurds, Chaldeans, Imazighen, and Armenians, among others – for the purposes of global white supremacy. The historic inability to see SWANA people as integral ethnic studies projects actually points to the ways that these areas of study have always already been transnational. Their critiques of neoliberal imperialism as well as both proxy and direct military intervention, including the centrality of the struggle for Palestinian liberation in BIPOC anti-war organizing, likewise situate them within the anti-imperialist core of the ethnic studies project.
Along with the efforts to include ethnic studies in the broader curricula have come struggles to demonstrate that critical SWANA studies have been part and parcel of the ethnic studies project since its inception, as exemplified by Manijeh Moradian’s This Flame Within. The book begins with a story of protest – it is a story about a student-organized action at the Statue of Liberty to oppose US aid to the repressive shah regime in Iran – and its purpose is to situate US Iranians squarely in relation to liberation-based movements: “Before Iranians in the US were labeled ‘terrorists,’ they were revolutionaries” (4). The before/after frame here is telling; it demonstrates the devastating violence that such a label can have on an entire group of people. Before, during, and after they were labeled “terrorists,” US Iranians were revolutionaries, among many other things. Yet there has historically been little space in US academia to flesh out the full range of subjectivities and, indeed, the full range of relationships to revolution within the US-based Iranian diaspora, particularly given the way that “revolution” and “terrorist” have collapsed in on one another in the US imaginary of Iran.
In fact, the appellation “terrorist” tells us little about US Iranians and US Iranian studies and a lot about how US Iranian studies has been repeatedly funneled into Cold War-era “area studies” formations and sidelined in (US-based) ethnic studies conversations. Through the putative relationship to “national security,” the figure of the terrorist evacuates political and historical complexity from the people who come to be associated with it, relegating them to the hazy realm of a perpetual foreign threat. This is not to deny the impact of such deleterious labels on US Iranians, nor the importance of the existing scholarship on this topic. But an overreliance on this one category, as important to racialization processes as it is, can serve to obscure the fact that stereotypes about terrorism often operate by recourse to the exception: the threat of terrorism allows for a state of exception exploited to perpetuate US imperialism, and that project of imperialism is intimately related to resource extractivism, even if it has operated mostly through neoliberal proxy in relation to Iran. In short, US Iranian studies and critical SWANA studies more broadly are integral to the critical ethnic studies project of unpacking the complexities of US imperialism.
In terms of understanding these complexities, we must begin with a recognition of how US exceptionalism is central to its own nationalist-imperialist-neoliberal project. This is a project, moreover, that has propelled itself through liberal – and often liberal multicultural – frameworks. Narratives of exceptionalism find their forté in rights discourses, particularly those that reinforce US perceptions of Iran as violating gender and sexuality rights, which reflects the liberal move toward the ultimately limiting frameworks of inclusion and tolerance. The following sources eviscerate such limiting frameworks, pointing toward critically engaged understandings of US Iranian studies within ethnic studies.
Tahereh Aghdasifar, “Refusing Empathy: Queer Racialized Life and Death in Diasporic Performance” GLQ 29, no. 4 (2023): 427-451.
Louise Cainkar, Pauline Homsi Vinson, and Amira Jarmakani, Sajjilu Arab American A Reader in SWANA Studies. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2022.
Manijeh Moradian, This Flame Within: Iranian Revolutionaries in the United States. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2022.
Sunaina Maira and Roozbeh Shirazi, “Thinking SWANA in Asian American Studies,” Journal of Asian American Studies 26 no. 2 (2023): 123-131.
Mitra Rastegar, Tolerance and Risk: How U.S. Liberalism Racializes Muslims. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2021.
Sima Shakhsari, Politics of Rightful Killing: Civil Society, Gender, and Sexuality in Weblogistan. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020.
AUTHOR BIOS
Tahereh Aghdasifar is an assistant professor of Gender and Feminist Studies at Pitzer College.
Arash Davari is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities.
Alexander Jabbari is an associate professor of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Minnesota. He is the author of The Making of Persianate Modernity: Language and Literary History between Iran and India (Cambridge University Press, 2023), as well as scholarly articles published in Iranian Studies; Journal of Persianate Studies; PMLA; Philological Encounters; Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East; and elsewhere.
Amira Jarmakani, she/they, is Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at San Diego State University. She is the author of An Imperialist Love Story: Desert Romances and the War on Terror (NYU Press, 2015), Imagining Arab Womanhood: The Cultural Mythology of Veils, Harems, and Belly Dancers in the U.S. (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), and co-editor, with Pauline Homsi Vinson and Louise Cainkar, of Sajjilu Arab American: A Reader in SWANA Studies (Syracuse University Press, 2022). She is an organizer with the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition, a member of the Palestinian Feminist Collective, and a Founding Collective member of the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism.
Golnar Nikpour is an associate professor of History at Dartmouth College and author of The Incarcerated Modern: Prisons and Public Life in Iran (Stanford University Press, 2024).