In his treatise on sex, passion and the color white, the Tunisian intellectual, Abdelwahab Meddeb wanders through vernacular Arabic and French uses of “blanc” (“white”) to trace a semiotic confusion of whiteness with the sacred and woman with the profane. Arguing that whiteness has been sublimated as purity in both languages, Meddeb assembles out of fragments of memory and phrases, both colloquial and liturgical, a set of ambivalent counter-senses of whiteness that resist the erasure of materiality and the emergence of new images. Blanches traverses du passé offers a distinct theory of the impurity of signs and images which are dependent upon base matter and ambivalence. Mixing philosophical meditation with ethnographic detail (e.g. the text provides a surprising record of pious undergarments circa 1950), Meddeb’s meditation complicates a trend of cultural studies that would elevate one set of affective disorders, melancholia, to a master category capable of organizing and comprehending Arabic letters and cultural sensibilities since 1967 (al-naksa). Situating Meddeb’s poetic meditation in the context of his cultural writings of the last two decades both as author of several influential book length engagements with political Islam and revolution and as editor (Dédale) and in the context of his influential weekly radio broadcast on France Culture, “Cultures d’Islam”, we find that the short poetic work crystalizes an argument under way over his entire career and articulated in disciplines as diverse as literature, religious studies, sociology, art history and political commentary. Throughout the range of his considerations, Meddeb produces an understanding of the political usefulness of sublimation, the psychoanalytic notion that drives can modify both aim and object through consideration of “social valuation” (Freud). While this critical practice does not prescribe remedies for crisis, it continually foregrounds existing and historical discourses on minoritarian identity from a rich and erudite command of texts by muslim writers while countering this high cultural legacy with partial, fragmentary perceptions attentive to the feminine, bedouin or foreigner in Tunisian landscapes. This is a critical practice not stalled by loss or melancholia but propelled by it. In a consideration of the work as whole and through the example of Blanches traverses du passé in particular, we examine this critical practice of sublimation vitally concerned with the ways that racial and sexual purity are even now being reconsolidated as timeless tradition.

After the disputed 2009 Iranian presidential elections, under the cloak of darkness, residents of Iran’s major cities climbed to the rooftops of their residential buildings to chant “Allah-o-Akbar” in numbers – a brief reprieve from the violent suppression of their street protests by Basiji militiamen. “The cry of “Allah-o-Akbar” was the defining sound of the 1978 protests against the Shah of Iran, during a revolution that toppled the Pahlavi monarchy and established the Islamic Republic of Iran.”1 During this earlier period the exiled Ayatollah Khomeini called upon his followers to invoke Allah against the tyranny of the Pahlavi monarchy.2 Not only has this chant been employed by dissenting Iranians over the last thirty years in opposition to various national and foreign forces, it has been hyper-mediated and has circulated widely through various media formats.3 The subsequent Islamic Republic of Iran, born as a result of such demonstrations, adopted a proprietary relationship to what is otherwise one of the most ubiquitous Islamic utterances, translated as “God is Great”. Despite its pious provenance the Islamic Republic that was inaugurated by these earlier revolutionary calls has interpreted the post-2009 chanting of “Allah-o-Akbar” as blasphemous and an affront to their authority. My paper focuses on video representations of the rooftop chants that began to circulate online after the announcement of Ahmadinejad’s incumbent win. This genre of videos stage the politicization of a sonic performative, which I argue has its roots in performance practices employed during the ’79 revolution as well as in the elegiac tradition of ta’ziyeh more broadly. I inquire into the emotional force these recordings have had on a transnational scale through internet distribution paying particular attention to what I call the “aural imaginary” through which the rooftop chants of “Allah-o-Akbar” are heard. I also examine these chants as sonic performatives, cries that, through the deployment and resignification of an Islamic Revolutionary ethos, have the capacity to enact a counter-politics. 1 Mightierthan, “Poem for the Rooftops of Iran: “Where is this Place”—June 19, 20019, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKUZuv6_bus&list=PLQwQL-vuib8qV3EnDdGC6IxMAOSTi4E5p&index=18&feature=plpp_video, accessed January 29, 2014. 2 Setrag Manoukian, “Where is this Place,” Public Culture, no. 22: 2(2010), 241. 3 See Setrag Manoukian, “Where is this Place?”: Crowds, Audio-Vision and Poetry in Post-Election Iran,” Public Culture 22: 2(2010). And also Babak Rahimi, “Affinities of Dissent: Cyberspace, Performative Networks and the Iranian Green Movement,” CyberOrient: Online Journal of the Virtual Middle East 5: 2 (2011).

This paper examines political setbacks of Iranian feminists during the Iranian Revolution of 1979 as embodied, melancholic affects. I look to a diasporic civil rights group known as CAIFI (Committee for Artistic and Intellectual Freedom in Iran), who arrived in Iran in the thick of demonstrations after the revolution’s victory to participate in the women’s liberation movement. Documented in Kate Millett's book Going to Iran, CAIFI members joined rallies, held press conferences and organized a march for International Women's Day, in order to show international solidarity with Iranian feminists. Upon arrival however, CAIFI members found themselves on the margins of local feminist demonstrations. While the expatriate, Farsi speaking women presented themselves (and passed as) "locals," the group's US nationals (Kate Millett and Sophie Kier), were expelled from Iran in 1979 as representatives of US imperial interests. By examining Millett's book and her audio recordings available in her archives at Duke University, I show that CAIFI's feminism employed the rhetoric of "loss" as a political strategy for gaining civil liberties. Yet this strategy failed in Iran because the Iranian revolution was itself mobilized around loss, albeit one that was at odds with CAIFI’s feminism. As a recuperative movement itself, the Iranian revolution’s stated aim was to return the nation to its "authentic" Islamic past that had been lost and overshadowed by imperial interests. CAIFI's feminist politics therefore, were marginalized in relation to this collective narrative of "loss" that was supported transnationally (most notably by leftists such as Michel Foucault) as a post-imperial struggle. Freud's theorization of melancholia as an obstinate attachment to loss, has been taken up by feminist and critical race theorists in recent years to account for dispossessed groups’ attachment to their political loss. My paper extends this argument by examining post-imperial nationalist movements, such as the Iranian Revolution, in relation to melancholic resistance and the privileges that the transformative economy of turning loss into gain can imply. I argue that loss can in such cases become a site of struggle whose appropriation by one group can lead to further alienation of others along the lines of gender and sexuality.

Nahid Persson 2013 documentary, My Stolen Revolution considers the transformational possibilities of emotion, of human cruelty and empathy, of guilt and shame, of forgiveness and self-forgiveness. Beginning with news footage from the 1979 revolution, and ending with images of the brutal crackdown on activists on the streets of Tehran in the summer of 2009, the film, dedicated to past and current Iranian political prisoners, bears witness to their suffering. At its heart, this documentary carries Persson’s engulfing guilt regarding the death of her younger brother, Rostam, who was arrested by the newly-established Islamic Republic in the early 1980s and subsequently executed. Throughout the film, Persson returns to an overwhelming sense of responsibility and guilt for his death. While the film takes guilt as its starting point, shame gradually takes a more central place in the documentary; while the documentary begins from a clear position of guilt (Persson’s feelings of culpability in the death of her brother and her escape from Iran while her friends were arrested), the film tilts in interesting ways towards a prioritization of shame: first, Persson’s disbelief and revulsion at an old friend’s turn to religion is communicated through a kind of shaming. Here, shame works as an uncovering, an exposure of the shame to which her friend, Shahin, has brought upon herself. Shame also works as an uncovering of testimonials of prison experiences; here the subject being shamed is the Islamic Republic. And finally, a third and most problematic way in which shame operates in the documentary is the camera’s focus on the shame of one woman in particular who recounts her experience of being raped in prison. Here her feeling of shame at being raped is uncovered and revealed for our uncomfortable viewing.