Contributing Editor, The Liberal and Logos: A Journal of Modern Society & Culture
Member, Organizing Committee, The Past and Future(s) of Revolution: A Global Exploration
My book, Reading Legitimation Crisis in Tehran (published by Prickly Paradigm Press), is available for sale here or here
is nothing less than a masterpiece of moral and political criticism."— Afshin Molavi, author of The Soul of Iran
"The importance of Postel's book
reaches far beyond a mere exercise in intellectual history. The temptation is either to castigate Iran as a state run by dangerous fundamentalist fanatics, or to celebrate it as a beacon of anti-imperialist resistance. Both approaches miss the complexity of intellectual and political life in Iran where, in a unique short-circuit, political battles reverberate in the terms of modern Western philosophy: some traditionalist clerics refer to Heidegger, liberals to Habermas, feminists to Arendt, some young 'nihilists' to deconstruction.... The specter of an exotic country is thus dispelled, and we can recognize in Iran our own battles, fought more passionately than in our own countries. This is Postel's great lesson: Iran's story is our own."— Slavoj Žižek
Danny Recommends
Conferring about Revolution
I'm excitedly engrossed in organizing a major four-day conference March 9-12 at Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago called The Past and Future(s) of Revolutions: A Global Exploration. Among the speakers will be Ron Aronson, author of After Marxism; John Foran, editor of The Future of Revolutions: Rethinking Radical Change in the Age of Globalization; Edward Friedman, author of Revolution, Resistance, and Reform in Village China; Doris Garraway, editor of Tree of Liberty: Cultural Legacies of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World; Karen Kampwirth, author of Feminism and the Legacy of Revolution: Nicaragua, El Salvador, Chiapas; Friedrich Katz, author of The Secret War in Mexico: Europe, the United States, and the Mexican Revolution; Stephen Kinzer, author of Blood of Brothers: Life and War in Nicaragua; James Le Sueur, editor of The Decolonization Reader; David Mason, author of Revolutionary Europe, 1789–1989: Liberty, Equality, Solidarity; Julie Mertus, author of Human Rights Matters: Local Politics and National Human Rights Institutions; Val Moghadam, author of Globalization and Social Movements: Islamism, Feminism, and the Global Justice Movement; Misagh Parsa, author of States, Ideologies, and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of Iran, Nicaragua, and the Philippines; Jonathan Schell, author of A Hole in the World: An Unfolding Story of War, Protest and the New American Order. I'll be chairing the keynote panels (7:00 PM) on Wednesday, March 11 and Thursday, March 12. Mark your calendars!
Dialogue
Akbar Ganji and Charles Taylor
The Immanent Frame, which is a rich online forum published by the Social Science Research Council, recently posted excerpts from a dialogue between the Iranian dissident Akbar Ganji and the Canadian political philosopher Charles Taylor. My friend Nader Hashemi and I wrote an introduction to the excerpt (actually, Nader wrote most of it, but insisted on giving me co-authorship).
Click here for a piece Nader and I co-authored for Truthdig back in 2006 (a take-down of a fatuous effusion by the neoconservative sophist Max Boot). More importantly, Nader has a major book coming out in March titled Islam, Secularism, and Liberal Democracy: Toward a Democratic Theory for Muslim Societies (it can be pre-ordered here).
Danny Speaks
Immigration Raids
I have an article in the December 19 issue of the magazine Commonweal about the disturbing wave of workplace immigration raids in recent months. I report on a trip I made to Mississippi in the aftermath of the largest immigration raid in U.S. history in August. A one-page PDF of the article is available here. An online version replete with hyperlinks is available at AlterNet here. Each version has something to recommend it: the PDF has a photo I took that I think adds a lot to the piece; the AlterNet version lacks the photo, but does contain the aforementioned hyperlinks, which are helpful.
Danny Recommends
Kim Bobo's new book
Kim Bobo’s hard-hitting book Wage Theft in America: Why Millions of Working Americans Are Not Getting Paid — And What We Can Do About It will be published by the New Press on December 9, 2008. To invite the author to give a talk on the book, contact Danny at dpostel [at] iwj [dot] org.
Danny Speaks
Death of a Tennis Intellectual
Whatever one thought (or didn't think) of David Foster Wallace as a writer, his unfortunate death leaves us without, arguably, the greatest tennis intellectual of all time.
[Continued]From the archives
On Iran
It occured to me recently that there's no one-stop shop containing my various articles on Iran. So here goes...
[Continued]
