ABSTRACT
Since the formation of the first university in Iran in the early 1930s, students have been a persistent opposition group to the state. This resistance movement’s history has not been adequately documented partly because social movements were unable to archive their activism for fear of repression by the authoritarian regimes of the Pahlavi monarchy and the subsequent Islamic theocracy. Under these conditions, the act of preserving and archiving the movement’s struggle was itself a political commitment.
This chapter reviews an issue of a rare journal, aan zamaan, in zamaan (Those Days, These Days), published in 1972 by a literary club of the Faculty of Science in Mashhad University. The journal covers a variety of topics and includes poetry, cartoons, and fiction mostly by authors who were later known as major literary and political figures in the anti-monarchical struggle and the left radical movement. It analyses this journal in the context of the student movement in ‘those days, these days’ in Iran. This chapter builds on current debates on activist knowledge, resistance memory, movement building and learning. It argues that archiving and memory are sites of struggle in the context of the conflict and confrontation between social movements and the state.
