Papers by Mahmoud Arghavan
De Gruyter eBooks, Oct 8, 2023
The Institute for Economics and Peace, an Australian think tank, recently estimated that in 2017 ... more The Institute for Economics and Peace, an Australian think tank, recently estimated that in 2017 alone, 18 million people-61.5 percent of global displacementswere forced to move due to natural disasters. [.. .] That same report noted that nearly 1 billion people currently live in areas of "very high" or "high" climate exposure, which could result in millions of people displaced by climate change in the future. [.. .] But, if we're talking about legally designated "climate refugees," there's a much different number being thrown around: zero. 3 These numbers stand in sharp contrast to one another, especially given the fact that a 2018 World Bank report warned that "we're on track for a 4°C warmer world (by the end of the twenty-first century) marked by extreme heat waves, declining global food stocks, loss of ecosystem and biodiversity, and life-threatening
Special Issue: Media Agoras: Islamophobia and Inter/Multimedial Dissensus
European journal of American studies, 2020
Ever since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the tropes of Islamist extremism, Islamic terrorism or ter... more Ever since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the tropes of Islamist extremism, Islamic terrorism or terrorist Islamism, and suicidal violence have become pervasive in public discourses about global politics and Western governments' rhetoric of the "War on Terror." This is partly due to the numerous terror attacks, mostly suicidal, by militant Islamists around the world, with locations ranging from the U.S., France, England, and Germany to Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan. These suicide attacks have been generating worldwide fear, anger, and anxiety towards a militant Other who is equipped with an extremist ideology and a readiness to use their own body as a weapon to destroy the enemy. Yet, the equations of Islam with terror and Muslims with terrorists show the post-9/11 Islamophobic fruit of a longstanding Orientalist representation of "the rest" by the West and for the West. Perhaps old but still worth citing is Edward Said's classic definition of Orientalism "as the corporate institution for dealing with the Orient-dealing with it by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it: in short, Orientalism as a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient" (Said 3). 2 Due to the Western media's strategy of what Said (1997) terms "covering Islam," Western publics seldom learn about the U.S.'s own history of neo-colonial interventions Islamophobia without Islamophobes: New Strategies of Representing Imperialist...
Tehrani Cultural Bricolage
Cultural Revolution in Iran, 2013
The Migrant Scholar of Color as Refugee in the Western Academy
Who Can Speak and Who Is Heard/Hurt?, 2019
Writing against neocolonial necropolitics: literary responses by Iraqi/Arab writers to the US ‘War on Terror’
European Journal of English Studies, 2018
Abstract This essay demonstrates that texts by Iraqi/Arab writers conceive the US invasion and oc... more Abstract This essay demonstrates that texts by Iraqi/Arab writers conceive the US invasion and occupation of Iraq as an assault on both biological and cultural life. It argues that in occupied Iraq, the very act of writing constitutes a performative survival of neocolonial necropolitics. Thus, Philip Metres’ abu ghraib arias employs visual poetry to bear witness to the suffering of Iraqi civilians subjected to torture at Abu Ghraib prison, by rendering visible what was repressed owing to trauma or silenced in the official investigation. Meanwhile, other literary works express distress about the destruction of Iraq’s cultural archive, since the arts have constituted a precious repository of Iraqi self-knowledge and spiritual nourishment throughout the country’s history of foreign domination and political tyranny. Reflecting on the bomb attack on Baghdad’s ‘Street of the Booksellers’ in 2007, poet Dunya Mikhail delivers a powerful invocation of literature’s longevity even after its material manifestations have been erased. Sinan Antoon’s novel The Corpse Washer (2013) highlights the ubiquity of death in post-2003 Iraq and its paralysing effect on the creative faculties as it tells the story of Jawad, an aspiring sculptor who gives up his artistic ambitions to follow in his father’s footsteps as a corpse washer.
The Dilemma of Postcolonial and/or Orientalist Feminism in Iranian Diasporic Advocacy of Womenʼs Rights in the Homeland
Who Can Speak and Who Is Heard/Hurt? Facing Problems of Race, Racism, and Ethnic Diversity in the Humanities in Germany: A Survey of the Issues at Stake
Kultur und soziale Praxis
Postcolonial Justice, 2000
IS M lays out the idea that longstanding representations of the East by European travellers, writ... more IS M lays out the idea that longstanding representations of the East by European travellers, writers, artists, missionaries, and academics have constructed a sense of superiority of 'the Occident' over 'the Orient'. This projection has aided the dominion of Europeans over the people of the East. Said conceptualizes this 'Orientalism' thus:
Kairos, 2020
The 1979 Revolution in Iran succeeded due to a unique cross-class coalition of social forces and ... more The 1979 Revolution in Iran succeeded due to a unique cross-class coalition of social forces and an interparty alliance of opposition groups with heterogeneous backgrounds and diverging interests such as the anti-imperialist National Front, anti-west traditionalist clerics and the anti-Capitalist Tudeh Party, bound together by a common enemy: 'The Shah' and his Pahlavi regime. This essay attempts to illuminate the ideological grounds and socioeconomic context which gave impetus to the formation of this unprecedented alliance in defeating the enemy but also to the irreversible historical failure in establishing a democratic political system in Iran. Considering the longstanding civic resistance of the nationalist parties and armed struggles of the leftist organisations against the Pahlavi regime, many opponents of Khomeini have argued that he took over the Revolution in the name of Islamist supporters. Taking into account the co-presence of leftist ideology and Islamic worldview among the active political forces on the ground of the Revolution, this essay proposes that Khomeini's pragmatic populism enabled him to appropriate a large part of leftist discourse into his theory of political Islam to articulate a socialist Islamism which would mobilise the lower middle class of the Iranian Muslim society. Simultaneously, some leftist organisations and Iran's intelligentsia incorporated Islamic values and Shi'a mythology into their Marxist ideology to introduce an Islamic Marxism which would speak to more educated Muslim revolutionary forces. The essay suggests that Islamic Marxism and socialist Islamism-as two sides of the same coin of populism-were driving forces of the pervasive protests which ultimately amounted to the 1979 Revolution in Iran.
European Journal of American Studies , 2020
This paper investigates the geopolitical context of the emergence of “suicide terrorism” to propo... more This paper investigates the geopolitical context of the emergence of “suicide terrorism” to propose that terrorism in its various forms has less to do with religious ideologies in general and with Islamic faith in particular, and more to do with the colonial and neocolonial politics of Empire in the colonies, postcolonies and occupied territories by the U.S. army and its allies in the Middle East in the post-9/11 era. Two representations of the figure of the suicide terrorist will be analyzed as they are presented in the narratives suggested in the Showtime series Homeland (2011-) and the film Syriana (2005). I argue that even though the Islamicate world and Muslims in the post-9/11 era have generally been portrayed in a differentiated fashion, these media productions have had almost the same effects on the public as earlier Orientalist productions. Although they appear to endorse antiracism and multiculturalism on the surface, these current narratives simultaneously produce what Evelyn Alsultany calls “the logics and affects necessary to legitimize racist policies and practices” (Alsultany 162). A “dialectical Islamophobia” (Beydoun 40) that is at play in the West and Western media productions legitimizes and values imperialist necropolitics while delegitimizing its opponent, namely the religious necropolitics of suicide terrorism.
Who Can Speak and Who is Heard/Hurt? Facing Problems of Race, Racism, and Ethnic Diversity in the Humanities in Germany, 2019
European Journal of English Studies, 2018
This essay demonstrates that texts by Iraqi/Arab writers conceive the US invasion and occupation ... more This essay demonstrates that texts by Iraqi/Arab writers conceive the US invasion and occupation of Iraq as an assault on both biological and cultural life. It argues that in occupied Iraq, the very act of writing constitutes a performative survival of neocolonial necropolitics. Thus, Philip Metres’ abu ghraib arias employs visual poetry to bear witness to the suffering of Iraqi civilians subjected to torture at Abu Ghraib prison, by rendering visible what was repressed owing to trauma or silenced in the official investigation. Meanwhile, other literary works express distress about the destruction of Iraq’s cultural archive, since the arts have constituted a precious repository of Iraqi self-knowledge and spiritual nourishment throughout the country’s history of foreign domination and political tyranny. Reflecting on the bomb attack on Baghdad’s ‘Street of the Booksellers’ in 2007, poet Dunya Mikhail delivers a powerful invocation of literature’s longevity even after its material manifestations have been erased. Sinan Antoon’s novel The Corpse Washer (2013) highlights the ubiquity of death in post-2003 Iraq and its paralysing effect on the creative faculties as it tells the story of Jawad, an aspiring sculptor who gives up his artistic ambitions to follow in his father’s footsteps as a corpse washer.
The Collaborative Research Centre 923 investigates threatened orders. In line with the wider mean... more The Collaborative Research Centre 923 investigates threatened orders. In line with the wider meaning of the German "Ordnungen," orders are conceptualized as arrangements of elements that are related to one another in a specific way and that structure social groups or whole societies. The Research Centre hypothesizes that orders are threatened when agents become convinced that their options for action are uncertain, when routines are called into question, when they feel they cannot rely on each other anymore, and when agents manage to establish a threat discourse.
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Papers by Mahmoud Arghavan