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

Session Submission Type: Paper Session

Abstract

This panel brings together scholars who explore anti-imperial legacies of the Iranian Left that intersect with their own family histories to ask after the epistemological and methodological nuances, challenges, and significance of studying counterhegemonic inheritances for our current stage of imperial transformation. What role can inherited legacies of past, and even failed, revolutionary movements play in our efforts to confront the ravages of twenty-first century imperialism and racial capitalism? How does the vantage point of diaspora open up new interpretations of leftist anti-colonial politics and how might these paradigms need both remembering and revising to meet the current scale of overlapping existential crises? We discuss our respective approaches to researching complex counterhegemonic histories of Iranian leftists in the 1960s and 1970s who put forth rigorous critiques of US empire and in particular, the role of US empire in the SWANA region and globally. While these histories provide a critical resource for resisting fascist forces in the present, they also come with deeply personal and often traumatic inheritances. The four presenters, although from different institutional and disciplinary backgrounds, all take up oral history as a tool for investigating the intimate and political afterlives of Iranian revolutionary social movements and the recurring themes of intergenerationality, storytelling, and organizing towards a new world order in solidarity with others. In “Tracing the Long Arc of Learning and Social Change,” Vossoughi and Ganjavi share findings from their collaborative research project on how leftist Iranian elders—and their children—narrate the relationship between their first-hand political experiences and their parenting. In “Unfinished Revolutions,” Moradian likewise considers how feminist analyses of political family histories can offer new ways of thinking about transnational Iranian leftist movements before 1979 and their implications for imagining possible futures beyond the nation state. In “Rewriting Oppositional Family Histories,” Khanmalek extends questions of the imagination to examine the aesthetic forms of past anti-imperial struggles and how we write about them by reflecting on her research process for the play WHERE/AS.

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Individual Presentations

• Tracing the Long Arc of Learning and Social Change: Parenting, Worldbuilding and the Iranian Left - Shirin Vossoughi, Northwestern University; Mahdi Ganjavi, University of Toronto

• Unfinished Revolutions: Diasporic Feminist Interpretations of Familial/National Narratives - Manijeh Moradian, Barnard College, Columbia University

• Rewriting Oppositional Family Histories in the Play Where/As - Tala Khanmalek

Chair

• Keith Feldman, University of California-Berkeley

Biographical Information

Bio: Shirin Vossoughi is an educator, mother, writer and associate professor of Learning Sciences at Northwestern University, where she draws on ethnographic and interactional methods to study the cultural, socio-political, and ethical dimensions of human learning. Vossoughi’s research centers on learning environments that support young people to develop, question and expand disciplinary and artistic knowledge in ways that nourish educational self-determination. She is particularly concerned with understanding the forms of pedagogical mediation, ethical relations, and developmental trajectories that take shape within these settings. She takes a collaborative approach to research and design, partnering with teachers, families, and students to study the conditions that foster educational dignity and possibility.

Bio: Mahdi Ganjavi, PhD (University of Toronto), is a lecturer, scholar, and publisher and a distinguished historian of education, print, and literature in the Middle East. A former postdoctoral fellow at the School of Education and Social Policy at Northwestern University, he currently teaches at the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto. His research focuses on intellectual freedom, student movements, the transnational history of literature, books, education, print, and translation, as well as the politics of archives and counter-archiving practices in the contemporary Middle East. Ganjavi’s book, Education and the Cultural Cold War in the Middle East: The Franklin Book Programs in Iran (2023), received the Middle East Librarians Association (MELA) 2023 Book Award. His second monograph (co-authored), titled Revolutionary Engineers: Learning, Politics, and Activism at Aryamehr University of Technology, is forthcoming from MIT Press in 2025.

Bio: Manijeh Moradian is assistant professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Barnard College, Columbia University. Her book, This Flame Within: Iranian Revolutionaries in the United States (Duke University Press, 2022) won the 2024 Hamid Naficy Book Award for the best book in Iranian Diaspora Studies from the Association of Iranian Studies and the Center for Iranian Diaspora Studies. The book also received an Honorable Mention for the 2023 Middle East Studies Association Nikki Keddie Book Award. She has published widely including in American Quarterly, Journal of Asian American Studies, Radical History Review, Scholar & Feminist online, and Women’s Studies Quarterly. She is a founding member of the Raha Iranian Feminist Collective and a member of Feminists for Jina, a global network which formed in fall 2022 to support the women, life, freedom uprising in Iran.

Bio: Tala Khanmalek (all pronouns) is a writer, independent scholar, and Creative Capital Award fellow. She was formerly an associate professor of gender and sexuality studies at California State University Fullerton. His work engages state archives with queer, disabled, and feminist of color epistemologies, literatures, and oral histories. Their scholarly writing has appeared in Frontiers, Feminist Studies, Latino Studies, among other academic journals. Tala served as Chair of the ASA’s Critical Ethnic Studies Committee until this year and was the 2023 recipient of the Q/T Caucus’ Michael Lynch Service Award.