Arash Davari | University of Minnesota - Twin Cities (original) (raw)

Articles & Book Chapters by Arash Davari

Philosophy and Global Affairs, 2022

Known as a revolutionary ideologue and a religious reformer, Ali Shariati’s activities as a trans... more Known as a revolutionary ideologue and a religious reformer, Ali Shariati’s activities as a translator have not garnered substantial scholarly attention. We reconstruct a history of Shariati’s translations, situating these endeavors at the center of his intellectual project. Shariati’s thought itself, we show, is a form of translation in the service of decolonization. This history reveals a nascent theory of decolonization as open-ended and indeterminate. We advance this claim by staging a conversation between Shariati’s reflections on decolonization and Morad Farhadpour’s evolving concept of thought/translation, a dissident theory of translation influential in contemporary Iran that bears resemblance to Shariati’s performative works. More than an abstruse debate in Iranian intellectual history, these continuities raise questions of pressing concern for postcolonial states, in particular the specificity of local situations as they relate to ongoing global hierarchies.

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Philosophy and Global Affairs, 2022

This introduction frames the special issue titled "Mystical Solidarities: Ali Shariati and the Ac... more This introduction frames the special issue titled "Mystical Solidarities: Ali Shariati and the Act of Translation." Drawing from insights across the collection's essays, it foregrounds a notion of translation as a transformative act, anchored in Shariati's mystical ontology, that fosters and sustains anticolonial solidarities. To illustrate, we explore differences and affinities between Shariati and Frantz Fanon with regard to truth-telling, translation, alienation, and subjectivity. The comparison reveals a generative distinction in Shariati's thought between cultural and existential alienation, "translated intellectuals" and the act of translation. The distinction creates grounds for a vision of anticolonial solidarity responsive to circumstances in postrevolutionary Iran, a vision that reaches beyond the postcolonial state.

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Political Theory, 2021

This article reevaluates the Iranian polymath Ali Shariati’s most controversial lectures. Scholar... more This article reevaluates the Iranian polymath Ali Shariati’s most controversial lectures. Scholarly consensus reads 1969’s Ummat va Imāmat as derivative, comprising an imitation of Sukarno’s guided democracy and hence an apology for postcolonial authoritarian rule. Shariati’s rhetorical performance suggests otherwise. The lectures address a postcolonial iteration of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s paradox of founding—a call for self-determination alongside the external intervention needed to prepare for it in the wake of moral dispositions accrued during colonization. Shariati proposes to resolve the problem of enduring colonial domination by citing a fabricated French professor, a foreigner, as an authoritative source. He practices a noble lie, believable because it draws from colonized sensibilities but laden with hints encouraging audiences to see past it. If audiences develop the requisite ability to decipher the lie, Shariati wagers, they at once develop the autonomy implied by self-determination. On these grounds, Shariati theorizes the paradox of politics as decolonization.

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With Stones In Our Hands: Reflections on Racism, Muslims and U.S. Empire (eds. Sohail Daulatzai and Junaid Rana), 2018

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A Political Companion to W.E.B. Du Bois (ed. Nick Bromell), 2018

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Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 2014

This essay considers the overlap between ʿAli Shari’ati’s ethical reflections and his discussion ... more This essay considers the overlap between ʿAli Shari’ati’s ethical reflections and his discussion of insurrectionary violence. Davari argues that the earlier lectures discussing bāzgasht be khishtan (a return to self) formed the conceptual foundation for his advocacy of shahādat (martyrdom) as a model of self-formation. These intellectual tendencies were rooted in a tradition of anticolonial and insurgent political thought, exemplified in Shari’ati’s case by an engagement with the writings of Frantz Fanon. Shari’ati’s borrowing of Fanon’s notions of return and decolonial violence involved alterations within a shared framework. Most notably, Shari’ati emphasized the prospect of a return to a religious self, redefined as political ethics. Whereas Fanon privileged an embodied experience of racialization as the most fundamental constraining and enabling factor in the realization of a new humanism, Shari’ati’s presentation of the “new man” as shahid involved a hermeneutic relationship with a collective self imagined across historical time. In Shari’ati’s hands, Fanon’s eschewal of history became an engagement with historical memory in the present tense. In the process, the body was reimagined as that which dies, its physical death marking the future where Fanon’s new man was said to be found. The shahid’s choosing to die—as opposed to the colonized’s need to kill the colonizer—led to the revision of two central conclusions pertaining to the process of decolonization: the discussion of means as ends, and the critique of a hierarchical relationship between revolutionary leaders and the led.

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Review Essays by Arash Davari

Radical Philosophy, 2021

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Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, 2020

This essay extends themes in Adom Getachew's Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-... more This essay extends themes in Adom Getachew's Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination (2019) by introducing Iran as a mediating element in Cold War worldmaking. It recovers the story of Pahlavi Iran's diplomatic efforts during the Sixth Special of the United Nation General Assembly, which resulted in the declaration of the New International Economic Order. Getachew's book provides a framework to interpret these diplomatic efforts with greater precision. The same framework explains the Islamic Republic's internationalist policies in the 1980s. Worldmaking after Empire is less equipped, however, to explain the popular revolution separating different modes of Iranian statecraft between the 1970s and 1980s. This observation reveals the limits of the book's methodological approach—namely, its overemphasis on elites and its overinvestment in exactitude. These limits invite a revised approach to writing histories of anticolonial worldmaking. An alternate approach focuses on statecraft (exactitude) and popular politics (inexactitude) at once, echoing the simultaneous affirmation of nation building and worldmaking in Getachew's theory of decolonization.

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Comparative Islamic Studies, 2017

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Book Reviews by Arash Davari

Rethinking Marxism, 2022

This review essay interprets Ali Rahnema’s Call to Arms: Iran’s Marxist Revolutionaries: Formatio... more This review essay interprets Ali Rahnema’s Call to Arms: Iran’s Marxist Revolutionaries: Formation and Evolution of the Fada’is, 1964-1976 through a fragment drawn from Amir Parviz Pouyan’s treatise “The Necessity of Armed Struggle and the Refutation of the Theory of Survival.” The fragment illustrates a peculiar aspect of Marxist guerrilla warfare in 1970s Iran: its emphasis on political education through political violence in lieu of conventional organizing. Rahnema recovers this history in Iran’s most prominent leftist guerrilla group, the Fada’is, of which Pouyan was a founding member. This essay situates Rahnema’s work in opposition to three prominent trends in the historiography of modern Iran and demonstrates the book’s unresolved relationship to a fourth, an approach that privileges gender as an analytic. Precisely where Call to Arms succeeds in correcting the historical record, repudiating judgments directed against Pouyan’s branch of the Fada’is, it overlooks the lifeworld of affect and ethics implied in the Pouyan fragment.

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Perspectives on Politics, 2020

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Political Theory, 2019

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International Journal of Middle East Studies, 2018

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British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 2017

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Short Writings by Arash Davari

Middle East Brief, Brandeis University, Crown Center for Middle East Studies, 2020

In 2018, the Trump administration withdrew from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) an... more In 2018, the Trump administration withdrew from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) and began its "maximum pressure campaign" to compel Iran to renegotiate the nuclear deal. Almost two years later, sanctions on Iran continue, talks have not recommenced, and U.S.-Iranian relations remain at a stalemate. This has led to speculation that the campaign is regime change in disguise. In this Brief, Arash Davari unpacks the maximum pressure campaign's internal logic to identify the conditions under which it would induce the true power brokers in Iran to engage in negotiations. He concludes that the current U.S. policy appears to be a regime change one because the narrow set of preconditions under which negotiations would happen have not occurred. But this analysis also suggests that, under different circumstances, the maximum pressure campaign may yet lead to renewed talks between the U.S. and Iran.

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TRAFO: Blog for Transregional Research, 2019

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Translations by Arash Davari

Spectre Journal, 2023

This article was published by the website Political Economy Critique (Naqd-e Eqtesadi Siyasi) on ... more This article was published by the website Political Economy Critique (Naqd-e Eqtesadi Siyasi) on December 24, 2022, where the original Persian-language version can be found. It is a comment on the Fall 2022 uprising in Iran, a little over three months after it began on September 16, 2022.

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ARTMargins, 2021

“To Mohassess, For the Wall” is an article written in 1964 by Jalal Al-e Ahmad, one of the most i... more “To Mohassess, For the Wall” is an article written in 1964 by Jalal Al-e Ahmad, one of the most influential and charismatic Iranian intellectuals of the time. Three years before writing this article, Al-e Ahmad had published Weststruckness, discussing the Iranians’ cultural alienation caused by the dependence on the west. In “To Mohassess, For the Wall”, Al-e Ahmad shifts his analysis to Iranian painting, arguing that Iranian painters during the 1960s merely repeat Western cultural processes and strategies instead of constructing Iranian ones. The context for Al-e Ahmad's argument is the Pahlavi regime's radical program of rapid modernization, which in the area of the arts was systematically expanded. Critical, provocative or problematic, the article offers a crucial window into the adoption of Western-style modernism by Iranian painters during the 1960s and into how an “insider” intellectual such as Al-e Ahmad evaluated the modernization of Iranian art before the background of what he perceived as the critical neglect of Iranian traditions. The text is addressed to Bahman Mohassess, a painter whom Al-e Ahmad considered to be one of the few who had not been coopted by the cultural policies of the Shah's regime.

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Encyclopedia Entries by Arash Davari

The Encyclopedia of Political Thought, 2015

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Interviews by Arash Davari

B|ta'arof Magazine, 2014

Ardeshir Mohasses is considered one of Iran's foremost visual artists. His works often pit the ru... more Ardeshir Mohasses is considered one of Iran's foremost visual artists. His works often pit the ruled against the ruling, the oppressed against the oppressing, focusing more on the absurd nature of government than expressing a particular affection for any one political face. Mohasses left Iran in 1976 and settled in new York City. He adapted his work in response to the effects of Parkinson's disease (beginning in 1986) and a deep burn in his right hand (1997). He died in October 2008 at the age of 70. An archival collection of previously unseen work produced in new York City will be presented at Art Dubai in 2014 by the newly established New York City branch of Shirin Gallery. B|ta'arof's Arash Davari sat down with Ava Ansari, director of sales and exhibitions at Shirin gallery NY, and Molly Kleiman, deputy editor at Triple Canopy magazine, the curators behind the exhibition, for a discussion about Mohasses' style, substance, and signature.

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Philosophy and Global Affairs, 2022

Known as a revolutionary ideologue and a religious reformer, Ali Shariati’s activities as a trans... more Known as a revolutionary ideologue and a religious reformer, Ali Shariati’s activities as a translator have not garnered substantial scholarly attention. We reconstruct a history of Shariati’s translations, situating these endeavors at the center of his intellectual project. Shariati’s thought itself, we show, is a form of translation in the service of decolonization. This history reveals a nascent theory of decolonization as open-ended and indeterminate. We advance this claim by staging a conversation between Shariati’s reflections on decolonization and Morad Farhadpour’s evolving concept of thought/translation, a dissident theory of translation influential in contemporary Iran that bears resemblance to Shariati’s performative works. More than an abstruse debate in Iranian intellectual history, these continuities raise questions of pressing concern for postcolonial states, in particular the specificity of local situations as they relate to ongoing global hierarchies.

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Philosophy and Global Affairs, 2022

This introduction frames the special issue titled "Mystical Solidarities: Ali Shariati and the Ac... more This introduction frames the special issue titled "Mystical Solidarities: Ali Shariati and the Act of Translation." Drawing from insights across the collection's essays, it foregrounds a notion of translation as a transformative act, anchored in Shariati's mystical ontology, that fosters and sustains anticolonial solidarities. To illustrate, we explore differences and affinities between Shariati and Frantz Fanon with regard to truth-telling, translation, alienation, and subjectivity. The comparison reveals a generative distinction in Shariati's thought between cultural and existential alienation, "translated intellectuals" and the act of translation. The distinction creates grounds for a vision of anticolonial solidarity responsive to circumstances in postrevolutionary Iran, a vision that reaches beyond the postcolonial state.

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Political Theory, 2021

This article reevaluates the Iranian polymath Ali Shariati’s most controversial lectures. Scholar... more This article reevaluates the Iranian polymath Ali Shariati’s most controversial lectures. Scholarly consensus reads 1969’s Ummat va Imāmat as derivative, comprising an imitation of Sukarno’s guided democracy and hence an apology for postcolonial authoritarian rule. Shariati’s rhetorical performance suggests otherwise. The lectures address a postcolonial iteration of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s paradox of founding—a call for self-determination alongside the external intervention needed to prepare for it in the wake of moral dispositions accrued during colonization. Shariati proposes to resolve the problem of enduring colonial domination by citing a fabricated French professor, a foreigner, as an authoritative source. He practices a noble lie, believable because it draws from colonized sensibilities but laden with hints encouraging audiences to see past it. If audiences develop the requisite ability to decipher the lie, Shariati wagers, they at once develop the autonomy implied by self-determination. On these grounds, Shariati theorizes the paradox of politics as decolonization.

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

With Stones In Our Hands: Reflections on Racism, Muslims and U.S. Empire (eds. Sohail Daulatzai and Junaid Rana), 2018

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

A Political Companion to W.E.B. Du Bois (ed. Nick Bromell), 2018

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 2014

This essay considers the overlap between ʿAli Shari’ati’s ethical reflections and his discussion ... more This essay considers the overlap between ʿAli Shari’ati’s ethical reflections and his discussion of insurrectionary violence. Davari argues that the earlier lectures discussing bāzgasht be khishtan (a return to self) formed the conceptual foundation for his advocacy of shahādat (martyrdom) as a model of self-formation. These intellectual tendencies were rooted in a tradition of anticolonial and insurgent political thought, exemplified in Shari’ati’s case by an engagement with the writings of Frantz Fanon. Shari’ati’s borrowing of Fanon’s notions of return and decolonial violence involved alterations within a shared framework. Most notably, Shari’ati emphasized the prospect of a return to a religious self, redefined as political ethics. Whereas Fanon privileged an embodied experience of racialization as the most fundamental constraining and enabling factor in the realization of a new humanism, Shari’ati’s presentation of the “new man” as shahid involved a hermeneutic relationship with a collective self imagined across historical time. In Shari’ati’s hands, Fanon’s eschewal of history became an engagement with historical memory in the present tense. In the process, the body was reimagined as that which dies, its physical death marking the future where Fanon’s new man was said to be found. The shahid’s choosing to die—as opposed to the colonized’s need to kill the colonizer—led to the revision of two central conclusions pertaining to the process of decolonization: the discussion of means as ends, and the critique of a hierarchical relationship between revolutionary leaders and the led.

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Radical Philosophy, 2021

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, 2020

This essay extends themes in Adom Getachew's Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-... more This essay extends themes in Adom Getachew's Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination (2019) by introducing Iran as a mediating element in Cold War worldmaking. It recovers the story of Pahlavi Iran's diplomatic efforts during the Sixth Special of the United Nation General Assembly, which resulted in the declaration of the New International Economic Order. Getachew's book provides a framework to interpret these diplomatic efforts with greater precision. The same framework explains the Islamic Republic's internationalist policies in the 1980s. Worldmaking after Empire is less equipped, however, to explain the popular revolution separating different modes of Iranian statecraft between the 1970s and 1980s. This observation reveals the limits of the book's methodological approach—namely, its overemphasis on elites and its overinvestment in exactitude. These limits invite a revised approach to writing histories of anticolonial worldmaking. An alternate approach focuses on statecraft (exactitude) and popular politics (inexactitude) at once, echoing the simultaneous affirmation of nation building and worldmaking in Getachew's theory of decolonization.

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Comparative Islamic Studies, 2017

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Rethinking Marxism, 2022

This review essay interprets Ali Rahnema’s Call to Arms: Iran’s Marxist Revolutionaries: Formatio... more This review essay interprets Ali Rahnema’s Call to Arms: Iran’s Marxist Revolutionaries: Formation and Evolution of the Fada’is, 1964-1976 through a fragment drawn from Amir Parviz Pouyan’s treatise “The Necessity of Armed Struggle and the Refutation of the Theory of Survival.” The fragment illustrates a peculiar aspect of Marxist guerrilla warfare in 1970s Iran: its emphasis on political education through political violence in lieu of conventional organizing. Rahnema recovers this history in Iran’s most prominent leftist guerrilla group, the Fada’is, of which Pouyan was a founding member. This essay situates Rahnema’s work in opposition to three prominent trends in the historiography of modern Iran and demonstrates the book’s unresolved relationship to a fourth, an approach that privileges gender as an analytic. Precisely where Call to Arms succeeds in correcting the historical record, repudiating judgments directed against Pouyan’s branch of the Fada’is, it overlooks the lifeworld of affect and ethics implied in the Pouyan fragment.

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Perspectives on Politics, 2020

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Political Theory, 2019

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

International Journal of Middle East Studies, 2018

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 2017

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Middle East Brief, Brandeis University, Crown Center for Middle East Studies, 2020

In 2018, the Trump administration withdrew from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) an... more In 2018, the Trump administration withdrew from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) and began its "maximum pressure campaign" to compel Iran to renegotiate the nuclear deal. Almost two years later, sanctions on Iran continue, talks have not recommenced, and U.S.-Iranian relations remain at a stalemate. This has led to speculation that the campaign is regime change in disguise. In this Brief, Arash Davari unpacks the maximum pressure campaign's internal logic to identify the conditions under which it would induce the true power brokers in Iran to engage in negotiations. He concludes that the current U.S. policy appears to be a regime change one because the narrow set of preconditions under which negotiations would happen have not occurred. But this analysis also suggests that, under different circumstances, the maximum pressure campaign may yet lead to renewed talks between the U.S. and Iran.

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

TRAFO: Blog for Transregional Research, 2019

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Spectre Journal, 2023

This article was published by the website Political Economy Critique (Naqd-e Eqtesadi Siyasi) on ... more This article was published by the website Political Economy Critique (Naqd-e Eqtesadi Siyasi) on December 24, 2022, where the original Persian-language version can be found. It is a comment on the Fall 2022 uprising in Iran, a little over three months after it began on September 16, 2022.

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

ARTMargins, 2021

“To Mohassess, For the Wall” is an article written in 1964 by Jalal Al-e Ahmad, one of the most i... more “To Mohassess, For the Wall” is an article written in 1964 by Jalal Al-e Ahmad, one of the most influential and charismatic Iranian intellectuals of the time. Three years before writing this article, Al-e Ahmad had published Weststruckness, discussing the Iranians’ cultural alienation caused by the dependence on the west. In “To Mohassess, For the Wall”, Al-e Ahmad shifts his analysis to Iranian painting, arguing that Iranian painters during the 1960s merely repeat Western cultural processes and strategies instead of constructing Iranian ones. The context for Al-e Ahmad's argument is the Pahlavi regime's radical program of rapid modernization, which in the area of the arts was systematically expanded. Critical, provocative or problematic, the article offers a crucial window into the adoption of Western-style modernism by Iranian painters during the 1960s and into how an “insider” intellectual such as Al-e Ahmad evaluated the modernization of Iranian art before the background of what he perceived as the critical neglect of Iranian traditions. The text is addressed to Bahman Mohassess, a painter whom Al-e Ahmad considered to be one of the few who had not been coopted by the cultural policies of the Shah's regime.

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

B|ta'arof Magazine, 2014

Ardeshir Mohasses is considered one of Iran's foremost visual artists. His works often pit the ru... more Ardeshir Mohasses is considered one of Iran's foremost visual artists. His works often pit the ruled against the ruling, the oppressed against the oppressing, focusing more on the absurd nature of government than expressing a particular affection for any one political face. Mohasses left Iran in 1976 and settled in new York City. He adapted his work in response to the effects of Parkinson's disease (beginning in 1986) and a deep burn in his right hand (1997). He died in October 2008 at the age of 70. An archival collection of previously unseen work produced in new York City will be presented at Art Dubai in 2014 by the newly established New York City branch of Shirin Gallery. B|ta'arof's Arash Davari sat down with Ava Ansari, director of sales and exhibitions at Shirin gallery NY, and Molly Kleiman, deputy editor at Triple Canopy magazine, the curators behind the exhibition, for a discussion about Mohasses' style, substance, and signature.

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East

This dialogue, recorded in 2021, explores the sound and feel of South-South political theory from... more This dialogue, recorded in 2021, explores the sound and feel of South-South political theory from the perspective of Southern Africa. The interlocutors discuss the question of violence and nonviolence in revolutionary change across generational divides. It centers the enduring place of spirit and ancestral voices in South Africa and Zimbabwe.

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Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 2022

This essay outlines a research agenda the authors call “Third World Historical,” combining reflec... more This essay outlines a research agenda the authors call “Third World Historical,” combining reflections from Ethiopia and Iran to query the legacies of revolutionary politics in our present. Third world activists from the 1960s and 1970s engaged 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 our effort to think 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?

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