It is my great pleasure to be a part of the collective celebration of Manijeh Moradian's This Flame Within: Iranian Revolutionaries in the United States, a truly stunning achievement. In bringing to the fore a submerged history of Iranian leftist student organizing in the United States prior to 1979, Manijeh importantly reperiodizes the Iranian diaspora and demands that we expand our understanding of Third World internationalism and Afro-Asian solidarity movements in particular. Most important, Manijeh's careful archival excavation of this forgotten history, the remarkable interviews she conducts with dozens of members of the Iranian Students Association who survived that period, and her consistent attention to the deployment of discourses of gender and sexuality in nationalist and diasporic contexts give us incredible insight into the current moment. Her book allows us to make sense of the mass mobilization that began in September 2022, with women and girls once again at...
Freedom Dreams and Revolutionary Affects
Gayatri Gopinath is a professor in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis and the director of the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality at New York University. She works at the intersection of transnational feminist and queer studies, postcolonial studies, and diaspora studies, and is the author of two monographs: Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures (Duke University Press, 2005), and Unruly Visions: The Aesthetic Practices of Queer Diaspora (Duke University Press, 2018). She has published numerous essays on gender, sexuality, and queer diasporic visual art and culture in anthologies and journals such as Journal of Middle East Women's Studies, GLQ, and Social Text.
Gayatri Gopinath; Freedom Dreams and Revolutionary Affects. Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 1 May 2024; 44 (1): 174–176. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/1089201X-11141471
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