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At a time of growing state control, censorship and wholesale
crackdown on opposition in post-1953 Iran, intellectuals and
artists began to produce works that defied the Shah's dictatorship
and the regime's "Great Civilisation" propaganda. With the
emergence of urban guerrilla warfare in 1971, dissident artists -
spearheaded by Marxist People's Fadai Guerrillas (PFG) - created
symbolic works that popularised the militants' ideas through
artistic depictions and tropes, while portraying the militants as
immortal freedom-fighters. The arts of defiance thus swayed young
educated Iranians, as well as certain layers of the public, to
perceive the state through the eyes of its most radical critiques:
militant dissidents. By closely examining and interpreting the
poetry, fiction, songs and films of the 1960s and 1970s, this book
uncovers how militant action was translated into artistic
expressions and vice versa. It also explores how the PFG militants
- who were few in number - were able to acquire a 'heroic'
dimension in the eyes of the public, portraying a symbolic image of
defiance far beyond their actual militant existence.
Mostafa Sho'aiyan (1936 1975) was a leading Marxist intellectual in
twentieth-century Iran and a prolific author of theory, history,
fiction and poetry. In an era of repressive politics following the 1953
coup that toppled the democratically elected government of Mossadeq and
restored the rule of the Shah, he became a key figure on the militant
left. From a life underground Sho'aiyan contributed significantly to
the study of Iranian history and politics, and developed a unique
theory of revolution one specific to Iran and yet also international in
reach.
With A Rebel s Journey, Peyman Vahabzadeh provides the first
intellectual biography of this singular theoretician, offering
fascinating insights into his life and work. Vahabzadeh not only sets
Sho'aiyan s thought in the context of their time and place, but offers
an ambitious reconstruction of his revolutionary theory for the
twenty-first century, setting out how it might contribute to today s
expanding movements for social justice and liberation.
Emerging in the early 1970s, the Organization of Iranian People's
Fadai Guerrillas (OIPFG) become one of the most important secular
leftist political organizations in Iran. Despite their lasting
influence and the way in which their efforts helped shape the
history of Iran for decades to come, little is known about the
group. ""A Guerrilla Odyssey"" presents the first comprehensive
examination of the rise and fall of the Fadai urban guerrilla
movement in Iran. Drawing on exhaustive analyses of the published
and unpublished works of the Fadai Guerrillas, as well as of
archival material and interviews with activists, the author
demonstrates historically and sociologically the conditions that
surrounded the debut and demise of the urban guerrilla warfare that
defined Iranian political life in the 1970s Vahabzdeh offers a
critique of various aspects of the Fadai's theories of national
liberation in an attempt to reconsider the painful relationship
among modernization, secularism, and democracy in contemporary
Iran. In addition, the author makes a compelling case explaining
why older revolutionary social movements of the 1960s and 1970s
have transformed into the new democratic social movements that
emerged from the 1980s onward in the form of today's women's,
student, and youth movements in Iran. ""A Guerilla Odyssey"" is a
meticulously researched and engrossing narrative that promises to
be a major contribution to the field of Iranian history.
More than a decade after the birth of contemporary social movements
in the Middle East and North Africa scholars are asking what these
movements have achieved and how we should evaluate their lasting
legacies. The quiet encroachments of MENA counterrevolutionary
forces in the post-Arab Spring era have contributed to the revival
of an outdated Orientalist discourse of Middle East exceptionalism,
implying that the region's culture is exceptionally immune to
democratic movements, values, and institutions. This volume,
inspired by critical post-colonial/decolonial studies, and
interdisciplinary perspectives of social movement theories, gender
studies, Islamic studies, and critical race theory, challenges and
demystifies the myth of "MENA Exceptionalism". Composted of three
sections, the book first places MENA in the larger global context
and sheds light on the impact of geopolitics on the current crises,
showing how a postcolonial critique better explains the crisis of
democratic social movements and the resilience of authoritarianism.
The second section focuses on the unfinished projects of
contemporary MENA social movements and their quest for freedom,
social justice, and human dignity. Contributors examine specific
cases of post-Islamist movements, the Arab youth, student, and
other popular non-violent movements. In the final section, the book
problematizes the exceptionalist idea of gender passivity and
women's exclusion, which reduces the reality of gender injustice to
some eternal and essentialized Muslim/MENA mindset. Contributors
address this theory by placing gender as an independent category of
thought and action, demonstrating the quest for gender justice
movements in MENA, and providing contexts to the cases of gender
injustice to challenge simplistic, ahistorical and culturalist
assumptions.
More than a decade after the birth of contemporary social movements
in the Middle East and North Africa scholars are asking what these
movements have achieved and how we should evaluate their lasting
legacies. The quiet encroachments of MENA counterrevolutionary
forces in the post-Arab Spring era have contributed to the revival
of an outdated Orientalist discourse of Middle East exceptionalism,
implying that the region's culture is exceptionally immune to
democratic movements, values, and institutions. This volume,
inspired by critical post-colonial/decolonial studies, and
interdisciplinary perspectives of social movement theories, gender
studies, Islamic studies, and critical race theory, challenges and
demystifies the myth of "MENA Exceptionalism". Composted of three
sections, the book first places MENA in the larger global context
and sheds light on the impact of geopolitics on the current crises,
showing how a postcolonial critique better explains the crisis of
democratic social movements and the resilience of authoritarianism.
The second section focuses on the unfinished projects of
contemporary MENA social movements and their quest for freedom,
social justice, and human dignity. Contributors examine specific
cases of post-Islamist movements, the Arab youth, student, and
other popular non-violent movements. In the final section, the book
problematizes the exceptionalist idea of gender passivity and
women's exclusion, which reduces the reality of gender injustice to
some eternal and essentialized Muslim/MENA mindset. Contributors
address this theory by placing gender as an independent category of
thought and action, demonstrating the quest for gender justice
movements in MENA, and providing contexts to the cases of gender
injustice to challenge simplistic, ahistorical and culturalist
assumptions.
This interdisciplinary volume offers a range of studies spanning
the various historical, political, legal, and cultural features of
social justice in Iran, and proposes that the present-day realities
of life in Iran could not be farther from the promises of the
Iranian Revolution. The ideals of social justice and participatory
democracy that galvanized a resilient nation in 1979 have been
abandoned as an avaricious ruling elite has privatized the economy,
abandoned social programs and subsidy payments for the poor, and
suppressed the struggles of women, workers, students, and
minorities for equality. At its core, Iran's Struggles for Social
Justice seeks to educate and to develop a new discourse on social
justice in Iran.
The six reflections and conceptualizations of "Exilic Mediations"
explore the relationship between exile and emigration, the
(im-)possibility of return, accent and foreignness,
multiculturalism and sovereignty, trauma and memory, and a life
lived poetically in an unhomely world. Situated subtly between
reflections on personal experiences and post-Heideggerian
philosophy, these exilic meditations show how a life lived as an
exile enables a journey into the very concepts that we hold so dear
to our hearts: home, belonging, justice, and the future. Vahabzadeh
wishes to find a place where the singular experiences of the exiles
and emigrants can be heard. This requires, he argues, a poetic
life-one of creative responses to the very conditions of injustice,
a life of making and crafting a new world. "Exilic Meditations"
calls for attending to the common wounds of the banished and
marginalized, displaced and abandoned, exiles and refugees, in
these inhospitable times of ours.
By reexamining the very foundations of everyday acting and thinking
and stepping into the open expanse of a possible-transition to a
postmodern era, this book presents a radical phenomena-logical
approach to the study of contemporary social movements. It offers a
theory of acting that refuses to surrender to norms and
legislations and thus always intimates a mode of thinking that
challenges various manifestations of ultimacy. Vahabzadeh invites
us to radically rethink many basic principles that inform our
lives, such as the democratic discourse, the concept of rights,
liberal democratic regimes, time and epochs, oppression, acting,
and the practice of sociology, in an effort to instate a reworked
concept of experience in theories about social movements.
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