This article examines the food culture of the Iranian diaspora in the United States to emphasize how politics intruded on the lives of Iranians (rather than the ways in which Iranians engaged in political activism). The immigrant experience is defined by an effort to assimilate, dissimulate, and exert one's unique character onto the landscape of a host society. In the United States, Iranians struggled with competing impulses, which presented unique challenges in the food industry. In an effort to formulate and offer an “authentic” dining experience against the backdrop of an alternatively hostile and orientalizing Anglo-American clientele, Iranians nimbly accommodated both the political pressures from Iran and the transforming demographics of their restaurant patrons and cookbook readers.

This article examines how post-Soviet Azerbaijani literature redefined creative and narrative forms, challenging Soviet literary norms through experimentation and new modes of characterization. Following independence in 1991, Azerbaijani literature moved from the transitional, trauma-marked works of the 1990s to the pluralism and experimentation of the 2000s and, after 2020, toward a discourse of triumph. Writers such as Aziza Jafarzadeh, Huseyn Ibrahimov, Elchin Afandiyev, Anar, and Afag Masud employ non-linear structures, allegory, symbolism, and introspection to transform inherited Soviet forms into vehicles of cultural resistance. Drawing on postcolonial theory (Bakhtin, Bhabha, Spivak, and Annus) and close textual readings, this article situates Azerbaijani literature within broader Eurasian and postcolonial frameworks, demonstrating how creative characterization fosters new expressions of identity, memory, and cultural reimagining.

In this article, we examine Iran’s 2022 “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement, coining the term “culture revolution” to underline this movement’s distinctive characteristic. While Iran’s “cultural revolution” (1981–83) forcefully usurped the country’s public, educational, and artistic sphere, the “culture revolution” decisively ended the regime’s ideological domination of the public sphere. We explain how culture, using its innate resources of language, performativity, resignification, free play, and the collective trauma process, successfully reclaimed the autonomy of the cultural sphere and the physical and moral integrity of its citizens. We examine the dynamic and dialectical interactions of Iranians in the country, those in the diaspora, and their role in bringing about Iran’s “culture revolution.”

This article examines diasporic Iranian responses to protests sparked by the death of Jina (Mahsa) Amini in September 2022. While Amini’s death galvanized widespread dissent inside Iran, it also spurred diasporic Iranian solidarity, often expressed through the call to “be the voice” of Iranian protestors. I analyze two key practices of diasporic narration: first, framing the Woman, Life, Freedom protests as a “revolution” in social media discourse; and second, the circulation of nostalgic video montages idealizing pre-1979 Iran as a lost era of political freedom. Together, these practices reveal how diasporic narratives may dilute protest demands by fitting them into revisionist frameworks. The conclusion reflects on both the potential and limits of diaspora narration in shaping political memory and understanding.

This article critiques certain factions of the Iranian diaspora opposition for embracing retrotopia–a romanticized, imagined past that reflects present despair and future anxiety. Instead of supporting Iran’s civil society, some rely on foreign powers, promote archaic nationalism and monarchist nostalgia, or advance ethnic exceptionalism, thereby distorting the emancipatory ideals of the Zan, Zendegi, Azadi (WLF) movement. Their rhetoric often glorifies war, employs exclusionary and patriarchal discourses, and undermines pluralism, gender equality, and indigenous democratic change. These factions are identifiable as an “opposition against the movement,” obstructing rather than advancing emancipatory change. The Israeli-American war on Iran (June 2025) further exposed their alignment with external aggression, as well as their strategic confusion, ethical bankruptcy, and detachment from Iran’s grassroots post–Islamist vision of pluralism, inclusivity, and peaceful coexistence.

This essay argues that the women, life, freedom movement should be understood as crucial site for the study of revolutionary praxis and feminist theory from which scholars and activists around the world can learn. While much attention has been given to efforts to co-opt the movement by monarchist and other “regime change” factions in diaspora, a lesser-known diasporic consequence has been the creation of Iranian feminist collectives oriented around intersectional and anti-colonial forms of transnational solidarity. By analyzing three such collectives that aimed to uplift critical feminist orientations emerging from the uprising in Iran, I chart shifts in ideas about organization, the meaning of revolution, and the contours of a “decolonial” feminist analysis in the Iranian context. I argue that these Iranian feminist collectives have built on the transnational feminist practice of making connections across differences, placing their critique of the Iranian state in relation to other iterations of patriarchal and militarized authoritarianism globally, including in the west.

This paper explores self-exile as a form of feminist resistance within the Iranian diaspora, focusing on feminist activists in Germany during the Jin, Jiyan, Azadî uprising of 2022–2023. Drawing on biographical interviews and Sara Ahmed’s concept of willfulness, the study examines how activists chose visible political engagement despite the risk of permanently losing the possibility of return to Iran. Self-exile is conceptualized as a complex act of agency: simultaneously disempowering due to physical separation from the place of origin and empowering through bodily autonomy, political consciousness, and resistance to fear. The testimonies highlight the ambivalence of self-exile—its empowering and transformative dimensions alongside profound emotional loss and turmoil. By framing self-exile as a deliberate feminist stance, this research contributes to understanding exile and diaspora as evolving, overlapping categories, foregrounding the embodied, affective, and political complexities of feminist subjectivity across borders.

This article analyzes the diasporic dimensions of the 2022 Jina Revolutionary Momentum and its transnational resonance in Berlin, where more than 80,000 protestors gathered in solidarity with events in Iran. It argues that the momentum is best understood not as a continuation of previous movements but as a revolutionary rupture that generates new horizons of possibility through the politics of care, contrasting fear as the regime’s dominant affective frame. Drawing on affect theory, the article explores how the revolutionary imaginary transformed both the Iranian diaspora and indirectly Berlin itself into sites of revolutionary performance. By situating the Iranian diasporic activism in the city’s longer history as a node for exiled revolutionary activity, the analysis highlights how diasporic activism influenced the national imaginary, fostered transnational solidarities, and reshaped the meaning of Kharej (abroad) from one of exclusion to one of affection within a broader revolutionary geography.