In September 2022, a young Kurdish woman, Zhina Mahsa Amini, was killed in police custody for failing to observe the strict dress code imposed on Iranian women. Her death sparked a massive social uprising within and outside of Iran. The slogan, “Woman, Life, Freedom,” spread like wildfire from Amini’s hometown to solidarity protests held in London, New York, Melbourne, Paris, Seoul and beyond. The pain felt by millions of Iranians, caused by the Islamic Republic, was on the global stage again.

Yet, misreadings of the Zhina uprising—both accidental and insidious—began to proliferate, with different parties vying for power. Iran in Revolt by author and scholar Hamid Dabashi cuts through the white noise of imperialist war mongers and social media bots to provide a careful and principled account of the revolution, and how it has forever altered the nature of politics in Iran and the wider region.

Iran in Revolt argues that “democracy” and the “nation-state” are tired concepts, exploring what it means to fight for a just society instead. Through detailed political, philosophical, and historical analysis, Dabashi shows that the vulnerable lives and fragile liberties of nations have never been so intimately connected, just as the pernicious cruelties of ruling regimes have never been so identical as they are today.

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Speakers:

Golnar Nikpour is an Assistant Professor of History at Dartmouth College. From 2015-2017, Nikpour was a Fellow at the Center for the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and in 2017-2018, she served as a Junior Research Fellow at the Crown Center for Middle East Studies at Brandeis University. Her research has been supported by the Social Science Research Council, the A.W. Mellon Foundation, and the Whiting Foundation, and her writing has been published in numerous forums, including Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East; Humanity; The International Journal of Middle East Studies; The New York Times, and Jadaliyya. Her first book, entitled The Incarcerated Modern: Prisons and Public Life in Iran, is out now on Stanford University Press.

Hamid Dabashi is the Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. Among Dabashi’s recent books are On Edward Said: Remembrance of Things Past, The End of Two Illusions: Islam after the West, and Iran in Revolt: Revolutionary Aspirations in a Post-Democratic World.

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