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Revolution of Things: The Islamism and Post-Islamism of Objects in Tehran
An exploration of the ways that shifting relations between materiality and language bring about different forms of politics in Tehran
In Revolution of Things, Kusha Sefat traces a dynamism between materiality and language that sheds light on how the merger of the two permeates politics. To show how shifting relations between things and terms form the grounds for different modes of action, Sefat reconstructs the political history of postrevolutionary Iran at the intersection of everyday objects and words. Just as Islamism fashioned its own objects in Tehran during the 1980s, he explains, tyrannical objects generated a distinct form of Islamism by means of their material properties; everyday things from walls to shoes to foods were active political players that helped consolidate the Islamic Republic. Moreover, President Rafsanjani's "liberalization" in the 1990s was based not merely on state policies and post-Islamist ideologies but also on the unlikely things--including consumer products from the West--that engendered and sustained "liberalism" in Tehran.
Sefat shows how provincial vocabularies transformed into Islamist and post-Islamist discourses through the circulation of international objects. The globalization of objects, he argues, was constitutive of the different forms that politics took in Tehran, with each constellation affording and foreclosing distinct modes of agency. Sefat's intention is not to alter historical facts about the Islamic Republic but to show how we can rethink the matter of those facts. By bringing the recent "material turn" into conversation with the canons of structural analysis, poststructuralist theory, sociolinguistics, and Middle East Studies, Sefat offers a unique perspective on Iran's revolution and its aftermath.
In Revolution of Things, Kusha Sefat traces a dynamism between materiality and language that sheds light on how the merger of the two permeates politics. To show how shifting relations between things and terms form the grounds for different modes of action, Sefat reconstructs the political history of postrevolutionary Iran at the intersection of everyday objects and words. Just as Islamism fashioned its own objects in Tehran during the 1980s, he explains, tyrannical objects generated a distinct form of Islamism by means of their material properties; everyday things from walls to shoes to foods were active political players that helped consolidate the Islamic Republic. Moreover, President Rafsanjani's "liberalization" in the 1990s was based not merely on state policies and post-Islamist ideologies but also on the unlikely things--including consumer products from the West--that engendered and sustained "liberalism" in Tehran.
Sefat shows how provincial vocabularies transformed into Islamist and post-Islamist discourses through the circulation of international objects. The globalization of objects, he argues, was constitutive of the different forms that politics took in Tehran, with each constellation affording and foreclosing distinct modes of agency. Sefat's intention is not to alter historical facts about the Islamic Republic but to show how we can rethink the matter of those facts. By bringing the recent "material turn" into conversation with the canons of structural analysis, poststructuralist theory, sociolinguistics, and Middle East Studies, Sefat offers a unique perspective on Iran's revolution and its aftermath.
184 pages, Hardcover
Published May 23, 2023
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November 30, 2023
Before I act on anything, before I invest in anyone or any ideal, this “I” is already acted on; in fact, only by being acted on can I emerge as an “I” at all; and so, in this sense, I am inserted into a signifying chain that I never chose.
—JUDITH BUTLER, “LACLAU, MARX, AND THE POWER OF NEGATION”
با ترکیب ادبیات انسانشناسی و تحلیل جامعهشناختی، گرجیصفت واکاوی میکند که چگونه در پسزمینهای متمایز، معنای مشترک در ادغام اجسام/اشیاء و گفتمانهای provincial ایجاد میشود، و چگونه ژئوپلیتیک از طریق چیزها و اصطلاحات توسط روزمره ایرانیها به وجود آمده و معنا پیدا کرده است. پژوهش او نشان میدهد که اشیا روزمره زمانی میتوانند به عوامل مولد سلطه تبدیل شوند که ظهور، ناپدید شدن و استانداردسازی آنها واژگان عمومی، گفتمانهای سیاسی و پسزمینههای معنای مشترک ما را منظم کند. کتاب یک تبیینِ تجربی و تحلیلی از روابط مادیت (materiality)، زبان و سیاست در تهران، در چارچوبی بینالمللی و با نظریهپردازی یک شکل متمایز روابط اجتماعی در ایران انقلابی و پساانقلابی ارائه میدهد.
—JUDITH BUTLER, “LACLAU, MARX, AND THE POWER OF NEGATION”
با ترکیب ادبیات انسانشناسی و تحلیل جامعهشناختی، گرجیصفت واکاوی میکند که چگونه در پسزمینهای متمایز، معنای مشترک در ادغام اجسام/اشیاء و گفتمانهای provincial ایجاد میشود، و چگونه ژئوپلیتیک از طریق چیزها و اصطلاحات توسط روزمره ایرانیها به وجود آمده و معنا پیدا کرده است. پژوهش او نشان میدهد که اشیا روزمره زمانی میتوانند به عوامل مولد سلطه تبدیل شوند که ظهور، ناپدید شدن و استانداردسازی آنها واژگان عمومی، گفتمانهای سیاسی و پسزمینههای معنای مشترک ما را منظم کند. کتاب یک تبیینِ تجربی و تحلیلی از روابط مادیت (materiality)، زبان و سیاست در تهران، در چارچوبی بینالمللی و با نظریهپردازی یک شکل متمایز روابط اجتماعی در ایران انقلابی و پساانقلابی ارائه میدهد.
July 5, 2025
Kusha Sefat’s Revolution of Things is a bold attempt to rethink Iranian politics through the lens of objects and language. The book, with its conceptual clarity and accessible prose, is clearly written for a Western academic audience. It introduces productive concepts such as affordance and disaffordance to explain how objects and words co-constitute political structures across phases of Islamism and post-Islamism in Iran. However, for an Iranian reader—someone who has not merely read about these moments but lived through them—the book often feels like a fast-forwarded memory tour rather than an interpretive analysis. What is condensed into theoretical transitions in the book often represents entire eras of suffering, repression, and helplessness for those who experienced them.
The book ends precisely where the reader expects it to go deeper: following Rouhani’s election, it swiftly skips over the 2019 (Aban 98) uprising—arguably a decisive rupture in state–society relations—and jumps to the killing of Qassem Soleimani. There, Sefat writes that many Iranians had not yet "moved on" from the symbolic memory of his body. Yet this framing echoes the discourse of Islamic Republic propaganda more than the sentiment of the very generation that had earlier chanted, “Reformist, principalist—game over.” For many of them, Soleimani was not a martyr but the military enforcer of domestic repression and the slaughterer of Syrians. His death did not register as a national loss but, at best, as a spectacle void of emotional or symbolic weight.
One of the points mentioned in the book’s conclusion is the Islamic Republic’s missile strike on the U.S. Ayn al-Asad base in Iraq. Though it caused no casualties, the author highlights it as a moment of material power and historic military confrontation between Iran and the United States. However, the book makes no mention whatsoever of what happened three days later: the downing of Ukraine International Airlines Flight PS752 by the IRGC, killing 176 innocent passengers, most of them young Iranians. In a work that theoretically emphasizes the political power of bodies and materiality, this omission is not only noticeable—it is contradictory.
Within the book’s own conceptual framework, if the missile strike attempted to restore the meaning of “power” through a material act of military performance, then the downing of the passenger plane—and the burned bodies of its victims—immediately and materially dismantled that meaning from within. Those bodies, quite literally, emptied the regime’s narrative of revenge. Why, then, does the book remain silent on this moment of rupture and disaffordance—precisely where bodies and objects most clearly unravel the symbolic order? The omission, if not a signal of ideological alignment, at least testifies to a fundamental inconsistency between the book’s stated theory and its narrative choices.
Similarly, the book omits key symbolic shifts—such as the eventual abandonment of the “Allahu Akbar” chant, which, while briefly revived during the Green Movement, was soon replaced by the unambiguous “Death to the Dictator.” This shift itself marked a complete rupture from the religious revolutionary discourse. Moreover, Sefat’s depiction of the social spectrum sometimes flattens into a simplistic binary between "liberals" and "monarchists," overlooking the far more complex, diverse, and radical political subjectivities shaping today’s Iran: anarchists, radical feminists, queer activists, and grassroots movements are either absent or only faintly acknowledged.
Most glaring, however, is the book’s near-total silence on the Iranian women’s movement. While the book discusses changes in women’s dress—such as lighter fabrics, looser scarves, or visual shifts in urban style—it attributes these entirely to structural and material conditions like space, commodity access, and aesthetic shifts in middle-class life.
What is missing is any account of women’s political agency, of resistance through the body, or of decades of feminist activism, both underground and visible. In a book so attuned to the politics of the body and material culture, this absence is both ironic and profoundly telling.
The book ends precisely where the reader expects it to go deeper: following Rouhani’s election, it swiftly skips over the 2019 (Aban 98) uprising—arguably a decisive rupture in state–society relations—and jumps to the killing of Qassem Soleimani. There, Sefat writes that many Iranians had not yet "moved on" from the symbolic memory of his body. Yet this framing echoes the discourse of Islamic Republic propaganda more than the sentiment of the very generation that had earlier chanted, “Reformist, principalist—game over.” For many of them, Soleimani was not a martyr but the military enforcer of domestic repression and the slaughterer of Syrians. His death did not register as a national loss but, at best, as a spectacle void of emotional or symbolic weight.
One of the points mentioned in the book’s conclusion is the Islamic Republic’s missile strike on the U.S. Ayn al-Asad base in Iraq. Though it caused no casualties, the author highlights it as a moment of material power and historic military confrontation between Iran and the United States. However, the book makes no mention whatsoever of what happened three days later: the downing of Ukraine International Airlines Flight PS752 by the IRGC, killing 176 innocent passengers, most of them young Iranians. In a work that theoretically emphasizes the political power of bodies and materiality, this omission is not only noticeable—it is contradictory.
Within the book’s own conceptual framework, if the missile strike attempted to restore the meaning of “power” through a material act of military performance, then the downing of the passenger plane—and the burned bodies of its victims—immediately and materially dismantled that meaning from within. Those bodies, quite literally, emptied the regime’s narrative of revenge. Why, then, does the book remain silent on this moment of rupture and disaffordance—precisely where bodies and objects most clearly unravel the symbolic order? The omission, if not a signal of ideological alignment, at least testifies to a fundamental inconsistency between the book’s stated theory and its narrative choices.
Similarly, the book omits key symbolic shifts—such as the eventual abandonment of the “Allahu Akbar” chant, which, while briefly revived during the Green Movement, was soon replaced by the unambiguous “Death to the Dictator.” This shift itself marked a complete rupture from the religious revolutionary discourse. Moreover, Sefat’s depiction of the social spectrum sometimes flattens into a simplistic binary between "liberals" and "monarchists," overlooking the far more complex, diverse, and radical political subjectivities shaping today’s Iran: anarchists, radical feminists, queer activists, and grassroots movements are either absent or only faintly acknowledged.
Most glaring, however, is the book’s near-total silence on the Iranian women’s movement. While the book discusses changes in women’s dress—such as lighter fabrics, looser scarves, or visual shifts in urban style—it attributes these entirely to structural and material conditions like space, commodity access, and aesthetic shifts in middle-class life.
What is missing is any account of women’s political agency, of resistance through the body, or of decades of feminist activism, both underground and visible. In a book so attuned to the politics of the body and material culture, this absence is both ironic and profoundly telling.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews