The Intimate Lives of a Revolution: Iran 1979

Based on years of archival research and ethnographic interviews with former revolutionaries outside of Iran, Sohrabi’s Academy project is a reconstruction of the intimate lives that were folded into the vastness of the 1979 Iranian revolution. Her goal is to illuminate the small-scale experiences that together—and after the fact—came to define “revolutionary experience.” What does a revolution feel like to those in its midst before this term is used to define their experience? Sohrabi’s premise is that a revolution is the culmination of short- and long-term processes that unfold both as extraordinary moments in time and also as ordinary experiences—what it felt to be a student, an artist, or a cleric in the midst of a social and political movement before it was understood to be a revolution. How can lived experience, “such a small, amorphous, and inherently individual phenomenon,” she writes, be written against the backdrop of something “so vast, roaring, powerful, and collectively transformative as a revolution?” Unlike most works of history on 1979 Iran, Sohrabi’s book “places the fractured and muddled qualities of revolutionary action at its center rather than attempting to explain them away.” Berlin provides two important sources for Sohrabi’s project: first, the Archiv für Forschung und Dokumentation Iran (AFDI), which offers published materials, ephemera such as pamphlets, films, and sound recordings from the revolutionary period; second, a community of Iranian immigrants different from those she has interviewed in Paris, London, Los Angeles, and Boston.