Recent scholarly literature has attempted to demonstrate the influence of Western thought on the development of political Islam in Iran. While moving the discussion about the ideas that inspired the 1979 revolution beyond a purely theological domain, this work overlooks the extent to which some of the most significant Iranian ideologues of the 1960s and 1970s developed their thoughts in conversation with other non-Western theorists and activists. My paper counters this trend by providing an alternate history of Ali Shariati’s notion of “a return to self” (bazgasht). Where existing scholarship situates Shariati’s idea in relation to Martin Heidegger’s reflections on authenticity, I argue that this concept is more appropriately the product of an engagement with Frantz Fanon’s efforts to adopt and adapt G.W.F. Hegel’s theory of recognition in 1952’s "Black Skin, White Masks" and, most prominently, 1963’s "The Wretched of the Earth." This line of inquiry brings to attention the important theoretical contributions that Fanon and Shariati make to our understanding of political recognition. My paper begins with Hegel’s "Phenomenology of Spirit," where the explicitly non-violent activity of labor is the means by which life becomes “a living thing” in the emergence of an autonomous self-consciousness. Fanon by contrast introduces the constitutive role that violence plays on the formation of subjectivity in racially determined conditions of colonial and imperial power. In particular, "Wretched" involves a revaluation of violence as labor in the colonized subject’s effort to achieve independence. For Fanon, thought can only proceed in the colonial world as consequent to the racially charged significations attached to physical bodies, thereby opening the possibility of affirming one’s own identity through the physical death of another. I argue that Shariati’s notion of “a return to self” envisions a similar form of recognition on collective terms. The shahid (martyr) who dies for a political cause persists as a living entity; he realizes authentic selfhood as an absent presence that shapes the formation of subjectivity for those that physically remain. My paper pursues this concept in light of the mass-based uprising that drew inspiration from Shariati’s ideas two years after his death. How does a consideration of recognition through violence introduce a technique of the self heretofore unexamined in considerations of subject formation? In turn, how do both Shariati and Fanon bring to light a tragic sensibility regarding the possibility for collective liberation despite efforts to characterize their work as strictly, and problematically, utopian?

This paper explores the emergence of new iterations of Islamic universalism in the mid 20th century. To that end, I look at the affinities between two important 1960s texts that are rarely if ever discussed in the same context: The Autobiography of Malcolm X as told to Alex Haley, and a travelogue entitled Khasi Dar Miqhat (generally translated as Lost in the Crowd) by preeminent Iranian intellectual Jalal al-e Ahmad. Malcolm X’s famous autobiography was published in 1965, just a few months after Al-e Ahmad had returned to Iran from the hajj trip that comprises the story narrated in 1966’s Khasi Dar Mighat. Similarly, The Autobiography of Malcolm X culminates in its author embarking on his own hajj, a journey that profoundly altered Malcolm’s ever-evolving political and philosophical worldview. Certainly, the hajj narrative is not merely a 20th century phenomenon. These particular hajj texts signal a new political and ethical imaginary of the anti-colonial era. Malcolm X and Jalal Al-e Ahmad were both political thinkers whose lives were marked by restless intellectual and political exploration. Though both men adopted politics that would later be become classified as “Islamist” in content, they are each more generally read from within the provincial national concerns found in American and Iranian studies respectively. It is my contention that Malcolm’s and Al-e Ahmad’s hajj writings represent an emergent 20th century imaginary of Islamicized universalism that was conceived of as an ethical alternative to the rigid nationalisms and leftist internationalisms that were then in vogue among engagé intellectuals. Whereas Malcolm’s sudden death in 1965 is often interpreted as the tragic cutting short of his newfound ethical engagements, Al-e Ahmad’s abrupt death in 1969 is seen as minor footnote in the locomotive momentum of the “Islamic Ideology” of the Islamic Republic he is said to have helped found with his writing. Against this historiographical tradition, I ask whether it is possible to read the ethical horizons imagined by these political theorists without collapsing them into common tropes of “black nationalism” (for Malcolm) and linear pre-cursors to the 1979 Iranian revolution (Al-e Ahmad). What kinds of readings of these texts emerge when we take them out of their nationalized homes? What are the implications of the universalist ethics that these texts imagine?

The Iranian Students Association (ISA), the U.S. affiliate of the Confederation of Iranian Students, contributed to and was transformed by the post-World War II era of social protest and Third World revolutionary consciousness. Beginning just after the 1953 coup d’état, tens of thousands of Iranian students arrived on U.S. campuses with a clear mission: to assimilate American expertise and return home to ‘modernize’ Iran. However, because their access to the ‘land of opportunity’ was the result of Iran’s subverted sovereignty, a minority of these students became fierce critics, rather than dutiful pupils, of American values. Far from home, this militant and raucous cohort organized a powerful transnational movement to expose the links between U.S. empire and dictatorship in Iran. In the process, they came to identify with and participate in other diasporic liberation movements, particularly those against racism and war. This paper focuses on the forgotten history of Iranian joint organizing with African American and African foreign student activists. ISA members fought police, went to jail, and risked deportation not only to oppose the Shah but to fight racism and state repression against Black and other racialized minorities in the U.S. Rather than simply a product of anti-imperialist ideology, I argue that memory, a melancholic relationship to loss, righteous indignation and an irrepressible desire for justice were the terrain on which Afro-Iranian connections were forged in the heat of struggle. Through interviews with former ISA members and archival materials from the ISA, Black radical organizations and student newspapers, I look at how different histories of repression and resistance became articulated through a set of revolutionary affects that could only emerge in the context of a U.S. diaspora. Iranian student revolutionaries in the U.S. situated themselves in a peer relationship to other victims of state-sponsored violence, understanding their struggles as inextricably intertwined rather than separate. The feeling and practice of solidarity that became possible in this context indexes a highpoint of resistance to the expansion of an empire the U.S. continues to disavow. It also places the Iranian freedom struggle in proximity to the histories, suffering, movements and migrations of others, mapping a global web of affiliations and internationalist identifications that have been almost unthinkable in the post-revolutionary diasporic context.

This paper will examine Shahla Talebi’s memoir Ghosts of A Revolution: Rekindled Memories of Imprisonment in Iran alongside Foucault’s 1976 Lectures on bio-politics. Reading Talebi’s memoir as part of a transnational critique of the “privatization of torture” (Arundhati Roy’s term) and the bio-politics of Iranian and U.S. nation-state discourses and discipline and violence, I will situate her memoir at the center of debates on torture and terror. By placing this memoir at the center of transnational critiques around policies and politics of torture allow us to examine the role of American empire in the global war against terrorism. Talebi’s memoir, which describes hers and her fellow inmates imprisonment during the reign of the Shah and the Islamic Republic is particularly important in these debates as it describes the ways in which putatively oppositional regimes of government (the United States and Iran) in fact inscribe their power by “cloning” similar practices of violent discipline of their body-politic. Situating this memoir at the center of these transnational debates on torture and terrorism allows us to examine the potential political implications of reading Iranian memoirs beyond the traditional and myopic frameworks of cultural translation. Talebi’s memoir stands in direct contrast to the canon of Iranian-American memoirs of the last decade and a half that focus on exile and displacement after the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Alongside Azar Nafisi’s critically acclaimed Reading Lolita in Tehran and Firoozeh Dumas’ popularly received Funny in Farsi, Asayesh’s Saffron Sky, Bahrampour’s To See and See Again, and Seyhan’s Lipstick Jihad, these texts consistently emphasize and revisit the binaries of East and West, Iranian versus American, The Shah versus the Islamic Republic, and themes of familial/generational tensions, language barrier, longing for home, and attempt to reconcile putatively disparate parts of their identity. Instead of reifying neoliberal discourses that support U.S. empires’ global hegemongy, Talebi’s account of imprisonment, torture, and bio-terrorism, inside Iran and meditations on similar practices in Guantanamo, highlight not the differences between Iran versus the United States, but point to the alarming points of similarity in maintaining control and power. In this way, this paper will examine the political implications of reading this scholarly acclaimed but largely ignored memoir alongside the ongoing debates on fighting terror, American empire, and the privatization of torture in the 21st century.