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Manijeh Moradian. This Flame Within: Iranian Revolutionaries in the United States

Max Bledstein
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Manijeh Moradian. This Flame Within: Iranian Revolutionaries in the United States. Durham: Duke University Press, 2022, 352 p., ISBN 978-1478018810.

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1This book provides a compelling look at the political activity of Iranian students studying at American universities in the years between the 1953 coup against Mohammad Mossadeq and the 1979 revolution, with a particular focus on the Iranian Student Association (ISA). Moradian argues that the journey of a number of members of the ISA from bourgeois backgrounds to revolutionary politics demonstrates the complexities of diasporic identity and its potential to facilitate engagement with political struggle. To support this argument, Moradian coins several terms, including ‘revolutionary affects,’ which describes how political orientations spread through feelings and sensations, and ‘affects of solidarity,’ which speaks to how the sensations that circulated amongst ISA members led to affinity with international liberation movements. Moradian brings these sensations to life through oral history, in which she interviews the former members about their experiences, as well as what she calls a ‘methodology of possibility,’ which enables her to read the productive capacities of the revolutionary actions of the students while still acknowledging the repressiveness of the Islamic Republic. The discussion of these actions is thematically organised into six chapters, which each provide a different perspective on the ISA: repression under the Shah and how it began many of the members’ political journeys, the American government’s attempts to use Iranian students to solidify a Cold War alliance with Iran, the students’ turn against this alliance, their solidarity with global freedom movements, the sexism experienced by female ISA members, and the relationship between this experience and the female students’ support for Iranian women’s resistance to the Islamic Republic.

2These chapters offer a vivid portrait of how ISA members went from being privileged foreign students to committed revolutionaries, as well as the enduring significance of this shift. Moradian’s book is a welcome addition to recent work on expanding thinking about the Iranian Revolution. A few particular texts of note to which This Flame Within makes an excellent companion are Arang Keshavarzian and Ali Mirsepassi’s edited volume Global 1979: Geographies and Histories of the Revolution (2021), which foregrounds international contexts and ramifications of the Iranian Revolution (and in which Moradian has a chapter on the ISA, previewing the work she elaborates on in the greater depth afforded by a monograph here), and Negar Mottahedeh’s Whisper Tapes: Kate Millett in Iran (2019) (cited by Moradian), which uses Millett’s famous trip to Iran in 1979 to reflect on the relationship between the events of that year and global feminist politics. The space Moradian gives to former ISA members to discuss their memories of the period and evolving thinking about what transpired makes a valuable contribution to understanding of the complexities and contradictions of the Iranian Revolution, as well as the nature of diasporic identity more broadly. I recommend this innovative and interdisciplinary book to students and scholars working in a number of areas, including history, gender studies, sociology, and political science.

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Max Bledstein, « Manijeh Moradian. This Flame Within: Iranian Revolutionaries in the United States »Abstracta Iranica [En ligne], Volume 45 | 2023, document 2, mis en ligne le 30 novembre 2023, consulté le 13 juin 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/abstractairanica/56539 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/abstractairanica.56539

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Max Bledstein

University of New South Wales

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Le texte seul est utilisable sous licence CC BY-SA 4.0. Les autres éléments (illustrations, fichiers annexes importés) sont « Tous droits réservés », sauf mention contraire.

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