Abstract
In studies of the 1979 Iranian revolution, much has been written about the role that cassette tapes played in arousing the masses to take part in (or, more accurately, create) the revolution. Most famously, cassette tapes of the speeches of Ayatollah Khomeini who had been in exile since 1964 were smuggled into Iran, duplicated by activists, and distributed among the population. Lessdiscussed is the crucial role that books played as political and politicizing objects (as opposed to their content) in defining political activity and creating revolutionary networks across a wide spectrum of thought. How did interactions with books (and relatedly pamphlets) shape what being political meant in the decades preceding the 1979 revolution? From hand copying illegal books to the evolution of book censorship to “white books” (books with no name, author, or publishing house printed on their cover), in this talk Naghmeh Sohrabi traces the intimate and often secretive life of books in pre-revolutionary Iran.