The Promise of Violence

Revolutionaries in Iran choose to identify memories of the Iran-Iraq War as their ‘collective’ memory to mark the war era as the temporal reference in history – the time of times, or sometimes even a time beyond time. Can a sole event and its violence truly become – for some – the all-encompassing, constituting element of history and memory? This book pursues this question and follows revolutionaries in the maze of ‘collective’ memory to offer a temporal account of the breakdown of happenings – as well as the mending of happenings through the force of remembrance.