Historians of the US Third World Left often overlook the contributions of Iranian students in the United States to US-based social movements against imperialism. One possible reason for the absence of Iranian students in scholarship on the US Third World Left is the predominance of US racial formations in shaping the discipline of ethnic studies. In privileging US-based racial formations over more internationalist and “Third Worldist” constructions of racial capitalism and colonialism, ethnic studies sometimes narrows its focus to the United States, thereby deemphasizing analyses of diasporic, refugee, and exilic communities not at the center of US multiculturalism. Another possible reason for Iranian students’ elision from accounts of the US Third World Left is that Iranian Americans and Iranian students in the United States are often understood through the prism of the geopolitical relationship between Iran and the United States, and this relationship overdetermines analysis of the ways that Iranian...

You do not currently have access to this content.