Foucault, the Iranian Revolution and Contemporary Thought on Spirituality,
Feminism and Political Struggle – A Call for Papers, AAG 2006 Chicago
Organisers: Louisa Cadman (University of Sheffield) and Camila Bassi
(Sheffield Hallam University)
For Michel Foucault, working as a journalist in Iran during 1978,
the “political spirituality” of the popular uprisings, in which
secularists, nationalists, socialists and feminists allied with Islamists
to overthrow the Shah, exemplified a revolutionary event that in some
respects was ‘beyond politics’. The outcome of the 1979 Iranian
revolution - the domination of a fiercely oppressive Khomeini regime and
the high price paid by many earlier revolutionary ‘allies’ with their
lives - led both to Foucault’s writings on Iran coming under attack from
notable figures on the French intellectual left and, arguably, to a
retreat by Foucault from his initial analyses. This episode deposits a
number of concerns for Foucauldian scholars centring on Foucault’s
fascination with martyrdom, religion and our relation towards death, but
also raises questions to how (leftist) academics respond to/in our current
political climate. Moreover, the envisioning of alternative anti-
imperialist modes of being poses critical issues in terms of gender and
sexuality. Contributions to this session are welcome on a broad range of
themes, these might include:
The positioning of gender and sexuality in anti-imperialist struggles
Life, death and the (bio)political
Religion, enchantment and politics
The relationship between the intellectual and the political
The role of political spirituality in counter-hegemonic contestations
The problematic interface between Islamist groups and leftist ‘popular
front’ campaigning
Abstracts should be no more than 250 words in length and can be emailed to
[log in to unmask] and/or [log in to unmask] prior to the session
deadline of 16th September 2005.
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