Camouflage, Conspiracy, and Collaborators: Rumors of the Revolution

Pliskin, Karen L.

doi:10.1080/00210868008701565

Cited by 31 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 2 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…One of the most eye-opening articles is by Karen Pliskin, a graduate student at the time, about the prevalence of rumors ranging from the Jaleh Square incident to those around a killing in a village outside Shiraz, which spirals into the destruction of Bahai homes in December 1978. Her article emphasizes how the fall of 1978 was "fraught with ambiguity," an ambiguity that as this essay has shown has sat uneasy with later scholars (Pliskin, 1980). Said Amir Arjomand's (1980) article on the other hand examines "Khomeini's attempt to create a Shi'ite theocracy in which the state is totally subordinated to the clergy and its powers are drastically circumscribed" (p. 147).…”

Section: Of 10mentioning

confidence: 99%

The “problem space” of the historiography of the 1979Iranian Revolution

Sohrabi

2018

History Compass

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This paper is an examination of the historiography of the 1979 revolution in Iran with the goal of highlighting aspects of the history that are marginalized or remain unwritten. It identifies two dominant strands in the historiography: scholarship produced inside Iran and scholarship produced outside of it, particularly in the United States. Borrowing from David Scott, it argues that the same anti‐colonial “problem space” has shaped both strands, leading to a preference for a positivist historical arc in the historiography over one that highlights historical contingencies. As a result, the messy intermingling of Islamist, socialist, secularist, and Third Worldist ideas in the post‐colonial world that gave birth to the revolution itself is ignored, and events that actually do occur at their intersection are disavowed. The article ends by noting that a focus on the revolution's multi‐layered, contingency‐laden, and transnational roots can re‐position it both as one of the last great successful revolutions of the post‐colonial world and as one of the first to answer the questions and anxieties of its global south ethos in an Islamic form.

show abstract

Section: Of 10mentioning

confidence: 99%