Ms. Roxane Razavi

École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales

Bio

Roxane Razavi is a PhD candidate in History at EHESS (Paris, France) and a visiting student at the University of Chicago. Her research examines the cultural and material history of war in modern Iran, with particular attention to bodies, martyrdom, visual culture, and political symbolism during the Iran–Iraq War and its afterlives. Her work combines archival research, visual analysis, semiology, and oral history.

The Scarf and the Ribbon: A Material and Political History of Green in Iran (1979–2009)

Abstract

Following green textiles from the Iran–Iraq War to the 2009 Green Movement, this article argues that political color in Iran changed through material and bodily reconfiguration. Headbands, scarves, shawls, and wrist ribbons carried an inherited Shi‘i charge while shifting from state-sponsored martyrological inscription to dissenting collectivity. Their portability, visibility, gendered uses, and attachment to bodies made textile materiality central to struggles over political legitimacy and memory.