Global 1979
Geographies and Histories of the Iranian Revolution

A multi-disciplinary approach, placing the 1979 Iranian revolution within global and transnational contexts, showing how the revolution became possible and consequential.

Arang Keshavarzian (Edited by), Ali Mirsepassi (Edited by)

9781108839075, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 15 July 2021

304 pages
23.5 x 15.8 x 3 cm, 0.82 kg

'Transcending scholars' focus on causes and outcomes of 1979, this volume simultaneously de-exceptionalizes the revolution and illuminates its specifically Iranian mix of global backgrounds, relationships, and imaginations. Wonderful chapters covering a boy from a small town, the Fedai's Iranization of Brazilian insurgency, Takhti's 1968 funeral, and the IRGC's regional guerilla dimension will inspire Iranian and global historians alike.' Cyrus Schayegh, Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies

The Iranian revolution of 1979 not only had an impact on regional and international affairs, but was made possible by the world and time in which it unfolded. This multi-disciplinary volume presents this revolution within its transnational and global contexts. Moving deftly from the personal to the global and from the provincial to the national, it draws attention to the multiplicity of spaces of the revolution such as streets, schools, prisons, personal lives, and histories such as the Cold War and Global 1960s and 70s. With a broad range of approaches, Global 1979 conceives of the Iranian Revolution not as exceptional or anachronistic, but as an uprising constituted by multiple, interwoven geographies and histories, which disrupt static and bounded notions of the local, national, regional, and global.

Introduction Arang Keshavarzian and Ali Mirsepassi
1. A quiet revolution: in the shadow of the cold war Ali Mirsepassi
2. Globalizing the Iranian revolution: a multiscaler history Arang Keshavarzian
Part I. Global Shadows: 3. Seeing the worlds from a humble corner: a political memoir Ali Mirsepassi
4. Iranian diasporic possibilities: tracing transnational feminist genealogies from the revolutionary margins Manijeh Moradian
Part II. Militarized Cartographies: 5. 'In a forest of humans': the urban cartographies of theory and action in 1970s Iranian revolutionary socialism Rasmus Elling
6. Revolutionaries for life: the IRGC and the global guerrilla movement Maryam Alemzadeh
Part III. Hidden Genealogies: 7. 'A sky drowning in stars': global '68, the death of Takhti, and the birth of the Iranian revolution Arash Davari and Naghmeh Sohrabi
8. 'We must have a defense build-up': the Iranian revolution, regional security, and American vulnerability Christopher Dietrich
Part IV. Circulating Knowledge: 9. The criminal is the patient, the prison will be the cure: building the carceral imagination in Pahlavi Iran Golnar Nikpour
10. The cold war and education in science and engineering in Iran, 1953-1979 Hossein Kamali
Part V. Aspirational Universalisms: 11. Between illusion and aspiration: Morteza Avini's cinema and theory of global revolution Hamed Yousefi
12. Planetarity: the anti-disciplinary object of Iranian studies Negar Mottahedeh.

Subject Areas: Revolutions, uprisings, rebellions [HBTV], 20th century history: c 1900 to c 2000 [HBLW], Middle Eastern history [HBJF1]