This Flame Within

From the early 1960s through the 1978-79 Iranian revolution, Iranian students in the United States organized into a militant leftist organization that they called the Iranian Students Association (ISA). The ISA supported Iranian national liberation by organizing on-campus and direct actions in protest of the US-Shah alliance and by targeting their universities' complicity with state repression in Iran. Anti-imperialist, Marxist, and internationalist, the ISA also aligned itself with other Third World liberation movements to oppose all forms of US imperialism abroad and state repression at home. This Flame Within traces how what Manijeh Moradian calls revolutionary affect" motivated Iranian students of all class backgrounds to imagine their futures as interdependent those of other oppressed people. Moradian also considers the affective dissonance of women activists, who resisted US imperial co-optation of Iranian women's rights, but also joined the mass uprising of women in Tehran in March 1979, a unique moment of anti-imperialist feminism-while also navigating sexism within the ISA. This book offers the history of Iranian revolutionaries in the United States as a model for imagining modes of diasporic identity oriented away from nationalism, assimilation, and exceptionalism and towards solidarity with multiple freedom struggles"--