Unfinished Revolutions: Diasporic Feminist Interpretations of Familial/National Narratives

• In Event: Counterhegemonic Inheritances: Following Anti-Imperial Family Histories From the Diasporic Iranian Left

Abstract

In this paper, I offer a genealogy of “intersectional anti-imperialism” as a diasporic feminist response to the racial, gender and sexual politics of the US-Iran geopolitical crisis that has shaped the Iranian diaspora for almost fifty years. This crisis has also served as a lightning rod for US foreign policy throughout the SWANA region and is, therefore, crucial for American Studies scholars to better understand in order to assist in our collective efforts to challenge American imperial hegemony and violence. I illustrate a queer feminist epistemological approach to analyzing the unfinished Iranian revolutionary freedom struggle, showing how personal family history can open out into new ways of thinking about social movements and historical epochs. Beginning with my lived experience as the daughter of an Iranian immigrant father who was part of anti-imperialist movements in both Iran and the U.S, I show how my efforts to come to terms with the mixture of oppressive and liberatory ideas my father handed down to me constituted an intellectual and emotional crucible that would lead me to conduct research on transnational Iranian leftist movements before 1979. This talk is thus both backstory and coda to my first book, This Flame Within: Iranian Revolutionaries in the United States (Duke University Press, 2022), in which I drew on interviews and archival materials to tell the story of the Iranian communist student movement in the United States during the heyday of anti-imperialist and anti-racist campus activism.

I chart the intergenerational encounters that occurred during my research for the book that helped me to develop the concept of “intersectional anti-imperialism” as a way of describing the overlapping structures of empire and dictatorship that have proved such enduring obstacles to self-determination for ordinary Iranians. I show how this framework can be understood as an unintended legacy of Iranian leftist activists in the US who launched a critique of US imperialism and the Shah’s authoritarianism in the 1960s and 1970s. Picking up where This Flame Within ended, with the fleeting emergence of a revolutionary feminist alternative to both US domination and Islamist consolidation in 1979, I ask how diasporic legacies of communism and anti-imperialism can engage with and learn from the 2022-2023 women, life, freedom feminist uprising in Iran. Finally, I draw out the implications of this discussion for transnational feminist solidarity and for thinking beyond the nation state as the horizon of liberation.

Author

• Manijeh Moradian, Barnard College, Columbia University