At first glance, the publication of This Flame Within: Iranian Revolutionaries in the United States just two weeks prior to the spark of what would become the “Woman-Life-Freedom” protest movement may seem to have been unpredictably timely. As Iranians in Iran and around the world took to the streets and social media in autumn 2022, and as they have since navigated deep fragmentations (old and new) in diaspora, Manijeh Moradian's words written prior to these events felt especially prescient:
At this bleak moment, it is all the more important to recuperate a history of thousands of young Iranians who imagined, and even glimpsed, a future for Iran that was neither a monarchical client state nor a theocratic dictatorship. A methodology of possibility allows us to generate new meanings from the [Iranian Student Association]'s fraught and flawed legacy, to claim the mistakes as much as the successes as part of a...
