Reading “Legitimation Crisis” in Tehran:
Iran and the Future of Liberalism
By Danny Postel’91
Prickly Paradigm Press
Chicago, Ill., 2006
The Iran depicted in headlines is a rogue state ruled by ever-more defiant Islamic fundamentalists. Yet inside Iran’s borders, a “liberal renaissance,” as one Iranian puts it, is emerging. In Reading “Legitimation Crisis” in Tehran, Postel examines the contours of that intellectual upheaval, including the conflicted positions of the Left toward Iran since 1979, and in particular, Foucault’s connection to the Iranian Revolution. Postel explores the various elements of the subtle liberal revolution and proposes a host of potential implications of this transformation for Western liberalism.
Postel is senior editor of openDemocracy (www.opendemocracy.net) and a contributing editor to Daedalus, the journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Key Bridge
By Ken Rumble’96
Carolina Wren Press
Durham, N.C., 2007
Key Bridge is a poem about race, sex, birth, and death set against the backdrop of Washington, D.C. Traveling through the city’s present and past, its geography, its dream-world double, and its flora and fauna, Key Bridge examines the gap between Washington’s day-to-day street-life and its status as a tourist spot and seat of the federal government. The city is presented as constantly shifting and evolving, a place that is impossible, finally, to pin down. Rumble was born in D.C., and grew up just outside the District in Maryland. He is director of the Desert City Poetry Series and a member of the Lucifer Poetics Group.
