MATC Matters

On Friday, February 23, MATC will host a Global Horizons Distinguished Lecture by Danny Postel entitled, “Dissident Voices in Iran and the Current International Crisis.” (PDF: 1.1MB) The lecture will take place at 7 p.m. at the MATC DTEC Campus, Room D240, and is open to the community.

As NPR commentator Andrei Codrescu states, “They are not just reading Lolita in Tehran. They are also reading Hannah Arendt, Karl Popper, Jurgen Habermas and Richard Rorty. A Velvet Revolution inspired by Western liberal philosophers is under way in Iran.�

Author Danny Postel examines this movement and its implications in his recent book, Reading Legitimation Crisis in Tehran: Iran and the Future of Liberalism, and will share these perspectives on his visit to MATC this February. Postel examines the tensions in modern Iran between traditional Islamic law and a rising student movement that embraces Western liberal principles of freedom of speech and women’s rights. By examining liberalism in Iran, Postel draws attention to America’s own debates over these principles and the international crisis of war and confrontation with Iran.

Slavoj Zizek, the famous dissident from the former Yugoslavia says of Postel’s most recent book: “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… 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.â€?

Danny Postel is senior editor of the London‑based magazine Open Democracy and a contributing editor to Dædalus, the journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His work has appeared in The Washington Post Book World, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Nation, The Progressive, The American Prospect, Critical Inquiry, and Philosophy & Social Criticism, among many other publications. He is a member of the Committee for Academic and Intellectual Freedom of the International Society for Iranian Studies, and is currently co‑editing a book of dialogues between the Iranian dissident Akbar Ganji and western philosophers to be published in 2008.

This lecture is sponsored by the MATC Global Horizons Distinguished Lecture Series, an initiative in international and intercultural education for the campus and community. For more information, contact Dr. Geoff Bradshaw at (608)246‑6165.