Not Your Usual Resistance

March 7, 2025

Habibe Jafarian and the translator of her work, Salar Abdoh, discuss the advent of the contemporary personal essay form in Iran, its relation to the larger direction of her work as an editor and biographer, and the politics of its translation. This hybrid event was conducted in conversation with Professor Mana Kia and focused on how Jafarian’s work articulates the experiences and perspectives of a professional woman in Iran that are often in contrast to usual representations in English.

This event is part of the Against the Grain: Gender and the Fraught Politics of Translation in Persophone World series. These spring events are themed, "In Their Own Words: Iranian Lives and the Personal Essay." Learn more about the series here.

Speakers

Considered one of Iran’s preeminent essayists, Habibe Jafarian’s latest collection is Rescue From an Artificial Death. She has worked as senior editor and consultant at such journals as Hamshahri Javan, Mostanad, Dastan, 24, and Nadastan Magazine. Her seminal biographical works on such luminaries as the fabled Shia cleric, Imam Musa Sadr, the late renowned war photographer, Kaveh Golestan, and one of the legendary commanders of the Iran-Iraq war, Mostafa Chamran, are winners of numerous prizes. Her work has also been published widely in various journals globally, including at The Millions, Guernica Magazine, Adi, and Words Without Borders, and her essay, “How to be a Woman in Tehran,” translated into English, was named as one of the best 100 essays of 2015. Currently she is contributing writer and consultant to Andishe Pooya, a magazine of politics, art and culture. Born in Mashhad, she lives and works in Tehran.

Salar Abdoh was born in Iran and splits his time between Tehran and New York City. He is the editor of Tehran Noir and author of several novels, most recently Out of Mesopotamia, which was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice and one of Publishers Weekly’s best books of 2020, and A Nearby Country Called Love, just released in paperback by Penguin and called “a complex portrait of interpersonal relationships in contemporary Iran” by the New York Times and “brutally poignant” by the Washington Post. A prolific essayist and translator as well, Abdoh teaches in the MFA program at the City College of New York.

Mana Kia was born in Iran and is Associate Professor in the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University. She is an interdisciplinary scholar of the connected histories of early modern Persianate Asia with a focus on the circulation of people, texts, practices, and ideas just before the dominance of modern European colonial power. She is the author of Persianate Selves: Memories of Place and Origin before Nationalism (Stanford, 2020), which was translated into Persian last year. She was a 2023-2024 Heyman Center Fellow.

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