{"id":9,"date":"2024-03-21T01:11:20","date_gmt":"2024-03-21T01:11:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/kushasefat.com\/?page_id=9"},"modified":"2025-10-12T15:04:17","modified_gmt":"2025-10-12T15:04:17","slug":"book","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/kushasefat.com\/?page_id=9","title":{"rendered":"

Book<\/p>"},"content":{"rendered":"

Revolution of Things: The Islamism and Post-Islamism of Objects in Tehran (Princeton University Press 2023)<\/a><\/h2>\n\n\n
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In Revolution of Things<\/em>, I tell the story of political transformations in Iran from the vantage point of the relationships between everyday objects and words. Drawing on fifteen years of involvement with Iran and twenty-five months of fieldwork in Tehran, my book explores politics in terms of the discursive possibilities that the presence and absence of material things generate. I show that material things from the moon to corpses to walls can reveal the ontological indiscernibility of medium and world for many Iranians, affording distinct sets of signifiers and shaping dominant referential systems. In the process, I illustrate how everyday things act, by means of their very materiality, as political players that mobilize Islamist and post-Islamist discourses in revolutionary Iran, with wide-ranging consequences.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Taking things and terms as generative actors, the book then explores how shifting relations between the two occasion different kinds of politics. Specifically, I show that the different confluences of the material and linguistic worlds have brought about qualitatively distinct social fields, with each constellation affording and foreclosing unique possibilities for political action in Tehran. The book seeks to contribute to: first, posthuman critiques of the ways in which we have treated humans as the primary source of agency; second, the material turn critique of post-structuralist models of resistance that are linked to the internal dynamics of referential systems, and not the relations between those systems and the object world; and finally, our understanding of how shifting relations between things and terms have brought about structural political transformations in postrevolutionary Iran. The point here is not to alter historical facts about Iran but to show how we can rethink the matter<\/em> of those facts. It is an attempt to recover the possibilities that our dominant historiographical and analytical forms have stifled and to prepare ourselves for the possibility of a new critical scheme with which to scrutinize the present and its formative absences. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Revolution of Things <\/em>has been reviewed in numerous scholarly journals, including American Journal of Sociology<\/em>, American Ethnologist<\/em>, Social Forces<\/em>, Cultural Sociology<\/em>, Contemporary Sociology<\/em>, Material Culture<\/em>, Iranian Studies<\/em>, British Journal of Middle East Studies<\/em>, and, not least, Middle East Journal<\/em>. I have been invited to present the book at Yale University, MacMillan Center; Columbia University, Center for Global Thought; The New School, Department of Sociology; University of Pennsylvania, Middle East Center; Princeton University, Center for Iran and Persian Gulf Studies; LSE, Department of Sociology; UCL, Department of Sociology; University of Duisburg-Essen, Department of Sociology; and, VU Amsterdam, Department of Anthropology.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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