This Flame Within
Manijeh Moradian will be joined by Nadine Naber and Mae Ngai to discuss her new book, This Flame Within: Iranian Revolutionaries in the United States (Duke University Press, 2022).
About the Book
In This Flame Within, Manijeh Moradian recounts the experiences of Iranian foreign students who joined a global movement against US imperialism during the 1960s and 1970s. Drawing on archival evidence and in-depth interviews with members of the Iranian Students Association, Moradian traces what she calls “revolutionary affects” from encounters with empire and dictatorship in Iran to joint organizing with other student activists in the United States. Moradian theorizes “affects of solidarity” that facilitated Iranian student participation in a wide range of antiracist and anticolonial movements and analyzes gendered manifestations of revolutionary affects within the emergence of Third World feminism. Arguing for a transnational feminist interpretation of the Iranian Student Association’s legacy, Moradian demonstrates how the recognition of multiple sources of oppression in the West and in Iran can reorient Iranian diasporic politics today.
About the Speakers
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, was published by Duke University Press in 2022. Her essays and articles have appeared in Hyperallgeric, American Quarterly, Routledge Handbook of the Global Sixties, Scholar & Feminist online, Women’s Studies Quarterly, Comparative Studies of South Asian, Africa, and the Middle East, Social Text online, jadaliyya.com, and Callaloo. She is a founding member of the Raha Iranian Feminist Collective and a member of the editorial board of the Jadaliyya.com Iran Page.
Nadine Naber is a scholar-activist and Professor in the Gender and Women’s Studies Program and the Global Asian Studies Program at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). Dr. Naber is the author/co-author of five books: Arab America: Gender, Cultural Politics, and Activism (2012); Race and Arab Americans (2008); Arab and Arab American Feminisms (2010); The Color of Violence (2006); and Towards the Sun. She is co-founder of the organization Mamas Activating Movements for Abolition and Solidarity and founder of Liberate Your Research. She is the recipient of the American Studies Association’s 2022 Carl Bode-Norman Holmes Pearson Lifetime Achievement Award.
Mae M. Ngai is Lung Family Professor of Asian American Studies and Professor of History, and Co-Director of the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race. She is a U.S. legal and political historian interested in the histories of immigration, citizenship, nationalism, and the Chinese diaspora. She is author of the award-winning Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (2004); The Lucky Ones: One Family and the Extraordinary Invention of Chinese America (2010); and The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and Global Politics (2021). Ngai has written on immigration history and policy for the Washington Post, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, the Atlantic, the Nation, and Dissent. Before becoming a historian she was a labor-union organizer and educator in New York City, working for District 65-UAW and the Consortium for Worker Education. She is now writing Nation of Immigrants: A Short History of an Idea (under contract with Princeton University Press).
Accessibility
This event is free and open to all.
Please email access needs to skreitzb@barnard.edu.