Abstract
Recognizing the creative political communication strategies initiated by the Iranian Green Movement in June 2009 following disputed Presidential election results is imperative in broadening current narrow conceptualizations of “Arab spring” protests. We explore how the Green Movement articulated alternative discursive strategies in their resistance to perceived voter fraud. In response to popular protests, the Iranian government sent the military and police force to control these crowds, sadly causing many deaths and numerous arrests. The Green Movement emerged with an imaginative civil disobedience campaign, worth exploring in terms of its political discourse.
Our analyses map the character of this discourse as creative, in its strategies, and as transnational, in terms of language, distribution, and gendered expectations. Despite emphases in western media on the prominence of digital media in mobilizing activism, the Green Movement worked with a variety of communications approaches, as versatile as traditional sweet dishes concocted in commemoration of the Tragedy of Karbala inscribed with political statements in cinnamon powder, to graffitti on busses, street curbs and walls posting marg bar khamnei (death to Khamnei), and resistance slogans written on money. With this latter illustration of national currency stamped with anti-regime messages such as green victory signs, we consider how the material bill serves as a site for resistance against state-controlled artefacts, reappropriated as symbolic currency in political protests.
We consider the transnational character of this national movement, through the mobilization of artists and movements outside of the country. Not only did Neda’s death become reconfigured as iconic in virtual global space, but even more compelling are the stamps and posters, in English, composed in green, distributed through postal and digital channels. It is worth noting the gendered differences in transnational appropriation of Neda’s image and narrative rather than those of many other victims.
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