Islamism and Post-Islamism as Material Populism in Post-War Teheran

Tuesday, 14^th March 2023 (16:00, CEST) | Webinar

On March 14th, 4.00 pm, Dr Kusha Sefat, University of Tehran, will give an online lecture on Islamism and Post-Islamism as Material Populism in Post-War Tehran.

Based on his new book, he will illustrate how the physicality of post-war Tehran was interwoven with what became politically thinkable there. He shall demonstrate the “Islamist” vocabulary of the second-generation Hezbollahies (pro-regime groups in Iran) was reconfigured in relation to the same imported asymmetrical objects to which key segments of the impoverished population had no access. Iranian reformist and Hezbollahie discourses, along with the material things that afforded them, occasioned the rise of two unique modes of life that were also distinguished by asymmetrical global objects. The materialisation of these two distinct modes of life helped unleash new forms of populist politics in Tehran. As a result, new agencies could be mobilised at any moment, rendering radical contingency the norm and occasioning a situation where all factions seemed to face the possibility of strategic defeat, that is, elimination from state politics, state media, and the state economy. The 2009 Green Movement uprising was the culmination of this feud. The online lecture takes place in the framework of the Aurora project Global pasts, cultural heritage and the rise of populist storytelling.