Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

This paper explores the afterlives of political engagement in exile through autobiography and memoir. Reading the author's trajectory alongside Masih Alinejad and Shahla Talebi, it shows how activism is suspended, reconfigured, or amplified through migration and racialization.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines the uneven afterlives of political engagement among emigrants from Iran by foregrounding exile as a site of political reconfiguration rather than rupture or liberation. Drawing on the author’s autobiographical ethnographic account alongside two political memoirs—Masih Alinejad’s The Wind in My Hair (2018) and Shahla Talebi’s Ghosts of Revolution (2011)—the paper traces how political subjectivities are transformed through displacement, racialization, and differential regimes of visibility in the West.

Building on James Scott’s concept of everyday resistance and Asef Bayat’s notion of social non-movements, the paper conceptualizes political engagement beyond formal activism, centering forms of critique, presence, and embodied refusal that often remain unrecognized as political. Through a comparative reading of these three autobiographical trajectories, the paper shows how exile produces divergent political afterlives: amplified activism shaped by media visibility, ethical witnessing grounded in memory and refusal, and suspended or reactivated political engagement emerging through racialized encounters and precarity.

Frantz Fanon’s insights into embodied racialization and Saba Mahmood’s critique of liberal assumptions about agency provide the theoretical framework for understanding how political life is reshaped by exclusion, misrecognition, and uneven moral expectations placed on exiled subjects. Methodologically, the paper advances autobiography as a critical anthropological tool for capturing political lives that do not always conform to heroic or movement-centered narratives.

By centering non-heroic, fragmented political trajectories, the paper calls for an anthropology attentive to the ordinary, racialized, and often invisible continuities of resistance that persist beyond moments of mass mobilization and across borders.