On Revolutionary Possibility in the Archive of 1979

1979 was a watershed year in Iran. On January 16, Iran's embattled monarch, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, and his wife fled the country amid a mass revolutionary groundswell. On February 11, after months of escalating protests, the final vestiges of the Pahlavi monarchy crumbled, bringing to power a new political order that would soon dub itself the Islamic Republic of Iran. The success of the revolutionary movement would not be the only jolt to Iran's system that year, nor would it be the shock that most altered the links between Iran and the United States. On November 4, a group of student revolutionaries calling themselves the Muslim Student Followers of the Imam's Line stormed the US embassy compound in Tehran, taking most of its diplomatic staff hostage.1The embassy occupation shattered what remained of the long-standing "special relationship" between the shah's Iran and the United States, irrevocably shifting the course of US-Iran relations going forward. Before 1979, the Iranian government had been a staunch Cold War ally of the United States, a major recipient of American funding, and a pillar of US power and influence in the Middle East. With the fall of the shah and the hostage crisis, this well-established and lucrative Cold War allyship was replaced by the bitter geopolitical enmity that has marked relations between the two countries ever since. The events of 1979 also had the effect of changing mainstream perceptions of Iran in the United States, unleashing the rabid Iranophobia and Islamophobia that would become all too common in American popular culture in subsequent decades. There would also be another crucial change in the link between Iran and the United States resulting from the seismic shocks of 1979 and its aftermath. Namely, large numbers of Iranian émigrés and exiles would leave Iran and establish new communities across the United States, many of which have continued to grow until today.Manijeh Moradian's monograph This Flame Within: Iranian Revolutionaries in the United States asks us to consider the genealogy of these epochal events in new ways, bringing subjects that have largely been marginalized into clearer view by using methodologies that have not often been used in analyzing the archive of 1979. Given the significance of the events of that signal year, it is no surprise that 1979 is crucial for the fields of Iranian studies and Iranian diaspora studies. Moradian's work makes crucial interventions in these fields, bringing them into conversation in important new ways. In telling the story of 1979, the field of Iranian studies has often privileged Shia social movements and Iranian domestic affairs, showing particular interest in those who won power—that is, the Islamist (and particularly clerical) revolutionaries whose movement cohered around Khomeini. (Of course, Khomeini himself spent years in exile in Iraq and France before returning triumphantly to Iran upon the success of the revolution, but the fact of his living outside of Iran has rarely if ever been approached in a diaspora studies framework.) While there has been key work on those revolutionaries who did not win power—largely leftists of various stripes—that scholarship has often focused on those groups' political failures. In Iranian diaspora studies, meanwhile, 1979 is typically imagined as year zero—that is, the year when the Iranian diaspora was made. As such, relatively little work done has been done on Iranian diasporas before 1979 generally, on Iranians in the United States before the hostage affair specifically, or on Iranians who at key points left but then went back to Iran. In isolation, these tendencies are perfectly reasonable; the Iranian Revolution was led and ultimately won by clerical revolutions in Iran, the Iranian diaspora vastly increased in number after the fall of the shah, and the hostage crisis has shaped the lives of Iranians in the United States. Still, these scholarly inclinations have worked to produce certain gaps in our genealogies of 1979.This Flame Within addresses some of these elisions, studying a group of thousands of Iranians who came to the United States before 1979 and who were among those revolutionaries who did not win power: namely, leftist university students in the United States in the 1960s–1970s. Unlike the Islamist students who won Khomeini's support upon storming the US embassy, the US-based students of the Iranian Students Association (ISA) never found themselves particularly close to the corridors of post-1979 power. Further, unlike those in the post-1979 Iranian diaspora, many of whom were unsympathetic to any version of the revolutionary cause, the students of the ISA were themselves committed anti-shah militants. Moradian's most straightforward contribution is in tying a diasporic story and a domestic Iranian story into a broader global narrative about revolutionary Third Worldism in the 1960s and 1970s. She does so by analyzing social and political networks of people who left Iran for the United States and then, upon the initial success of the revolution, returned to Iran in hopes—quickly dashed—of an emancipated future. In the years since 1979, Iranian studies and Iranian diaspora studies have to some extent grown apart, addressing different sets of questions, taking interest in separate histories, and using divergent methodologies to better understand their subjects of inquiry. In looking at networks of revolutionaries across locales, and in addressing questions of significance to both Iranian studies and diaspora studies, Moradian's book has the welcome effect of bringing these fields back into a shared and mutually imbricated scholarly conversation.At the heart of Moradian's work are dozens of oral-history interviews with these former student revolutionaries, both men and women, as well as some interviews with non-Iranian student activists who worked alongside their Iranian counterparts. The content of these interviews is revealing; the former student activists tell stories that are at various points incisive, funny, thrilling, revealing, sad, surprising, and poignant. Moradian makes a compelling case that despite their lack of postrevolutionary power, members of the ISA nonetheless played an essential role in creating revolutionary conditions of possibility in Iran, working to shift the shah's global image from that of an enlightened ruler to that of a dictator whom the students dubbed "the king of torture." In this, she joins Afshin Matin-Asgari—whose monograph on the Iranian student movement abroad has to date been the definitive historical work on the movement—in making the case that the movement was among the key factors in building anti-shah sentiment around the world.2As Moradian notes, this was decidedly not what the students were meant to do when they were sent to the United States for their studies. Drawing on methodological and theoretical frameworks from ethnic studies and transnational feminisms, Moradian dubs the students of the ISA an "imperial model minority"—that is, people from largely privileged backgrounds who were meant to come to the United States, enjoy an American education, and return home as a technocratic elite serving the US Cold War project and the Pahlavi state. As Moradian writes, "From the mid-1950s until the mid-1970s, Iran was a hopeful site of American largesse towards developing nations, and Iranian students in the U.S. were welcomed as harbingers of Iran's ascent to the rank of a modern, capitalist nation."3 This view of Iran and Iranians, now largely forgotten in the United States, stands in stark contrast to the mainstream common sense of our current moment, in which Iranians have been demonized for the better part of five decades. As Moradian notes, her book covers an era before Iranians were seen as terrorists. Why these students rejected their status as imperial model minorities for the much less certain future promised by revolutionary Third Worldism is the powerful question at the heart of Moradian's work.Moradian endeavors to answer this question by analyzing something otherwise absent from empiricist accounts of the 1979 revolution: revolutionary affect. Rather than looking solely at what Iranian revolutionaries did or said, Moradian is much more interested in analyzing what these students felt, whom they felt it with, and how they put those feelings into action. Importantly, she also asks what role affect can have shaping social and political subjectivities. In some of the most compelling sections of This Flame Within, Moradian excavates and analyses seemingly lost traces of revolutionary solidarity with non-Iranian student movements, from the Black freedom movement to anti-Vietnam War groups to the Palestinian liberation struggle. These social and political networks reveal the extent to which this would-be "imperial model minority," rather than becoming the technocratic elite they were meant to be, instead closely and deeply aligned themselves with disparate marginalized groups, often risking arrest, injury, or deportation in the process. Of course, Iranian affinities born of the politics of Third Worldism were by no means limited to these US-based students. It was a similar affective attachment that led the Islamist students who occupied the US embassy to release African American diplomatic staff. Similar displays of Third Worldist solidarity have been deployed performatively and increasingly cynically by the Islamic Republic in subsequent years, but Moradian's work asks us to dwell in the effervescent era before and during 1979, during which members of the ISA—and the movements to which they belonged—were profoundly altered by these radical encounters.In studying a group of diasporic Iranians who have otherwise been seen as peripheral to the big-picture narrative of a world-historical revolution, and in bracketing what would come next in the Islamic Republic, Moradian undertakes what she calls a "methodology of possibility"—that is, "a non-teleological approach to reading an archive, one that is attentive to memories, affects, and emotions marginalized or erased by dominant accounts of the failures of revolutionary leftist movements" (25). In doing so, she asks us to dwell on those affects, and to consider not only the possibilities that they opened up for the students in their own day, but also the possibilities these affects might continue to open for scholars today. This methodology of possibility is a shot across the bow for the field of Iranian studies, which has tended to analyze the genealogy of 1979 in the dark shadow cast by the post-1979 era's profound failure to usher in the justice promised by the revolutionary movement. Moradian challenges such a telos by arguing that what these students did and felt in their own day mattered, insofar as they shaped themselves and attempted to shape revolutionary Iran in ways that were oriented toward justice. She writes, "I emphasize that there was a struggle over the meaning of the revolution immediately after it occurred and that this struggle mattered—and matters still. In the course of political struggle, the potential exists for human beings to be transformed, for old ideas and attachments to give way to new ways of imagining social and political relations, and for many possible futures to present themselves" (221). Importantly, Moradian not only writes against a telos that reads the violence of the post-1979 era backward into the movements that fought against injustice in the shah's time; she also warns against a telos that would romanticize these very movements—particularly with regard to the politics of gender. In doing so, Moradian also examines roads not taken during the revolutionary upheaval, particularly in one key chapter in which she analyzes female ISA members' involvement with the March 8, 1979, Women's March in Iran, which represents a possibility foreclosed in the story of the revolution as it happened.Moradian's work leaves scholars with several key questions to ponder, including how we might use a methodology of possibility to read the archive of 1979 in new ways, as well as how we might think critically about the role of affect in shaping social and political subjectivities in our own day. In our current moment, when students, women, and other marginalized groups are again at the forefront of an uprising against an authoritarian government in Iran, Moradian's important work also opens similar questions regarding how we might read and analyze unfolding events. Further, if politics born from affective connections can change people as they strive toward justice, how might we be attentive to the ways in which affective connections can lead people down darker paths? How do we contend with our own deep affective connections to both new and foreclosed possibilities, to new forms of political or social connection, to certain languages of political struggle, to the trauma of loss, and to the anger and grief of political violence? How may we use a methodology of possibility to better understand the vexed relationship between diasporas and homelands, as well as to better understand social movements in Iran today?