Manijeh Moradian

Barnard College, Columbia University

2023 Nikki Keddie Book Award Honorable Mention

This Flame Within: Iranian Revolutionaries in the United States

Duke University Press

Manijeh Moradian’s This Flame Within is a skillfully written and analytically sophisticated reconstruction of the history of the 1979 revolution, as shaped and lived by the Iranian diaspora in the United States. Combining archival research with in-depth interviews with members of the Iranian Students Association, a leftist and politically radical organization opposing both domestic authoritarianism and US imperialism, Moradian brings to the fore of her analysis what she aptly calls "revolutionary affects." This Flame Within throws into sharp relief visceral expressions of affect, shaped through the Iranian students’ encounters with oppression and their practices of resistance, spanning from their experiences in Iran under dictatorship to their joining fellow student activists in antiracist and anticolonial movements in the United States. Moradian’s analysis becomes a springboard for a transnational feminist reframing of revolutionary pasts and provides insights as to the possibility of the infusion of Iranian diasporic politics today with a praxis of transnational solidarity. Her feminist examination of experiences and affects spanning multiple, interwoven sites and histories, challenges bounded and parochial notions of revolutions and opens new, and exciting paths for the study of revolutions as transnational phenomena.

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