Description
Please consider this paper to the CTS/CPD panel on Anticolonial Solidarities and Resistance.
This paper intends to discuss the "Woman, Life, Freedom" revolution in Iran by investigating the nation-state’s incapacity to provide a means for liberation, instead functioning as a cooptation mechanism for radical projects. I argue that the 2022/2023 uprisings in Iran embodied a translocal aspiration in a way reminiscent of the 1979 revolutionary movement, although the former was led by Iranian women, Kurds, and other groups that have been erased in official revolutionary narratives. I delve into its afterlives by following the transformations of an affective anticolonial archive that took the shape of a contingent and conspicuous dynamic between utopian and nostalgic imaginaries, expressed as an ambivalent longing for a national past (Pahlavi) and striving for translocal futures. Manijeh Moradian’s concept of revolutionary affects is employed to understand how, contrary to the movement from which it emerged and which gave it its self-acclaimed global dissident identity, the Islamic Republic has consistently been a contention structure for the anticolonial translocality that has been latent, repressed, and disavowed in Iran, and which articulated an enduring affective infrastructure of hope, resistance, and solidarity.
