MESSAGE FROM OUR TEAM

Social distancing has been difficult— no question. We at the ICC youth committee understand this so we've put together a quarantine reading list to help you pass the time. Our reading list is organized by theme and includes works of all sizes; this way you can read something while on a quick-break or explore more complex ideas that pique your interest. To check out a recommendation, click the title and it’ll redirect you to the proper resources. If you want to access the full materials, be sure to join our reading group. To make your reading even more digestible, interesting and enlightening, we’ve put together a package of cool videos and podcast episodes to compliment each theme of the reading list. Sign up below to join our reading group and e-mail list for more! We hope that once the quarantine is over, you will come back to your community feeling inspired and refreshed, and most importantly, ready to take action.

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HISTORY, IMPERIALSIM, & REVOLUTION

Dabashi tells the story of Iran through a detailed account of the cosmopolitan culture of a society normatively founded on its long anti-colonial struggles. Paying close attention to the multifaceted emancipatory movements of Iran — among them literature, poetry, music, art, cinema, all underwritten with a sustained concern with the Iranian women’s movement, Dabashi’s historiography is a radical departure from the existing narratives of modern Iranian history. Written in a highly ambitious literary narrative, Iran: A People Interrupted is a daring inroad into a provocative mode of historiography that combines critical narratives, detailed pauses on crucial events, and expansive theoretical speculations, all punctuated with autobiographical implosions of his overriding narrative.

CULTURE, IDENTITY, & REPRESENTATION

In Iran Without Borders, the acclaimed cultural critic and scholar of Iranian history Hamid Dabashi traces the evolution of this worldly culture from the eighteenth century to the present day, journeying through social and intellectual movements, and the lives of writers, artists and public intellectuals who articulated the idea of Iran on a transnational public sphere. Many left their homeland—either physically or emotionally—and imagined it from places as far-flung as Istanbul, Cairo, Calcutta, Paris, or New York, but together they forged a nation as worldly as it is multifarious.

IRANIAN DIASPORA

The Limits of Whiteness melds years of ethnographic fieldwork, including interviews with over 80 young second-generation Iranian Americans, together with analysis of historical archives and legal evidence to present an unprecedented examination of Iranians within America's racial landscape.

WOMEN & GENDER ISSUES

Drawing from a rich array of visual and literary material from nineteenth-century Iran, this groundbreaking book rereads and rewrites the history of Iranian modernity through the lens of gender and sexuality. Peeling away notions of a rigid pre-modern Islamic gender system, Afsaneh Najmabadi provides a compelling demonstration of the centrality of gender and sexuality to the shaping of modern culture and politics in Iran and of how changes in ideas about gender and sexuality affected conceptions of beauty, love, homeland, marriage, education, and citizenship. She concludes with a provocative discussion of Iranian feminism and its role in that country's current culture wars. In addition to providing an important new perspective on Iranian history, Najmabadi skillfully demonstrates how using gender as an analytic category can provide insight into structures of hierarchy and power and thus into the organization of politics and social life.

SOCIAL MOVEMENTS & ACTIVISM

ISLAM & ISLAMOPHOBIA

POETRY

COMIC