This panel, co-organised with the Department of Gender Studies and the Firoz Lalji Institute for Africa at LSE, combines reflections from Ethiopia and Iran to query the legacies of revolutionary politics in our present, with particular focus on the current protests in Iran.
Third world activists from the 1960s and 1970s engaged in revolutionary talk to pose questions about the particularities of their immediate contexts, and they posed new concepts of revolution along the way. Congealed manifestations of the term revolution can preclude efforts to think of the event as experience. If revolution signals the disruption of existing categories, can we in turn disrupt congealed categories to rethink revolution? What could it mean to reposition the question of revolution in the specificity of the third world, against the tendency to map revolutions as models, patterns, and stages?
The panel will explore: (1) the politics of the body; (2) the possibilities (or lack thereof) for political experimentation in the Third World; (3) the difference between specificity and nationalist exceptionalism; and finally (4) the relationship between continuity and discontinuity in revolutions.
Arash Davari is Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. His writings have appeared in Political Theory, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, and Radical Philosophy, among other venues. His first book manuscript reappraises debates in political theory about self-determination, revolution, and the extraordinary through reconstruction of the discursive conditions that made the 1979 revolution in Iran possible.
Elleni Centime Zeleke is Assistant Professor of African Studies in the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University. Zeleke is the author of Ethiopia in Theory: Revolution and Knowledge Production, 1964–2016 (Brill/Haymarket). Her current project examines the ongoing civil war in Ethiopia in relation to the history of Black political thought.
Nazanin Shahrokni is Assistant Professor of Gender and Globalisation at the Department for Gender Studies, LSE. Her research interests fall at the intersection of gender politics, feminist geography, and ethnographies of the state in Iran, the Middle East, and beyond. Shahrokni is author of Women in Place: The Politics of Gender Segregation in Iran (University of California Press, 2019).
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