On October 7, 2022, Manijeh Moradian, assistant professor of women’s, gender and sexuality studies, published her new book, titled This Flame Within: Iranian Revolutionaries in the United States. Her work draws on testimony from Iranian students who joined global movements against United States imperialism in the 1960s and 1970s, and reframes Iranian migration to the U.S. as a pre-1979 diaspora of these foreign students.
Using archival evidence and detailed interviews with members of the Iranian Students Association, Moradian traces the impact of “revolutionary affects,” or force of affect generated by experiences of repression and resistance, on Iranian student activism in the United States during the 1960s and 1970s. Moradian examines “affects of solidarity” that advanced student participation in antiracist and anticolonial movements and the gendered manifestations of revolutionary affects during the rise of Third World feminism. Supporting a transnational feminist interpretation of the Iranian Student Association’s legacy, This Flame Within illustrates how sources of oppression in Iran and the West influence Iranian diasporatic politics today.