Abstract

In this book, Kusha Sefat shows how provincial vocabularies transformed into Islamist and post-Islamist discourses through the circulation of international objects. The globalization of objects, he argues, was constitutive of the different forms that politics took in Tehran, with each constellation affording and foreclosing distinct modes of agency. Sefat’s intention is not to alter historical facts about the Islamic Republic but to show how we can rethink the matter of those facts. By bringing the recent “material turn” into conversation with the canons of structural analysis, poststructuralist theory, sociolinguistics, and Middle East studies, Sefat offers a unique perspective on Iran’s revolution and its aftermath.

Bio

Kusha Sefat is an Assistsant Professor in Sociology at the University of Tehran. He received his Ph.D. in sociology as a Queens’ College Walker Scholar at the University of Cambridge in 2017 and was the recipient of the Best Dissertation Prize, awarded by the Foundation for Iranian Studies. Trained in both sociology and anthropology, he brings Science and Technology Studies and, interrelatedly, the new materialism to bear on global, historical, and cultural sociology with an emphasis on the global south. His work has been published in English and Persian in various journals, including Media Culture and Society (forthcoming), International Political Sociology, International Journal of Baudrillard Studies, Michigan Quarterly Review, and in Persian Faslnameh Motaleaat-e Farhangi va Ertebataat, Faslnameh Motaleaat va Tahghighat-e Ejtemaee Dar Iran, and Jame-e Shenasi-e Honar va Adabiyat.