Ann Rigney respondent at Columbia University’s Seminar on Cultural Memory: “Revolutionary Affects and the Archive of Memory”

Join  Thursday May 6th, 3 – 4:30pm (EST/Zoom link here) for a talk and discussion “Revolutionary Affects and the Archive of Memory” with Professor Manijeh Moradian (Barnard College) and respondents Persis Karim (SFSU) and Ann Rigney (Utrecht). The talk will focus on the first chapter of Manijeh Moradian’s upcoming book This Flame Within: Iranian Revolutionaries in the United States (Duke University Press 2022) which seeks to revise the standard narrative of Iranian migration to the U.S. as a post-1979 phenomenon characterized by the flight of wealthy, westernized Iranians from the Islamic Republic This Flame Within looks at the leftist student activists who came to the U.S. in the 1960s and 1970s and joined a global uprising against U.S. imperialism. It investigates the transnational process that transformed privileged foreign students into revolutionaries determined to end U.S. support for the Shah of Iran. Drawing on in-depth interviews with veterans of the Iranian Students Association, the U.S. affiliate of the Confederation of Iranian Students, as well as extensive archival research, Moradian traces what she calls “revolutionary affects” from encounters with empire and dictatorship in Iran to joint organizing with other radicalized student activists in the U.S.

Manijeh Moradian received her PhD in American Studies from NYU and her MFA in creative nonfiction from Hunter College, City University of New York. She is the former co-director of the Association of Iranian American Writers and currently Assistant Professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Barnard College. Her essays and articles have appeared in 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, tehranbureau.com, Bi Taarof, and Callaloo. She is a member of Jadaliyya’s Iran Page editorial board and a founding member of Raha Iranian Feminist Collective.