Forum: Reflections on Radical History
A Better World
Nikki R. Keddie
I grew up in a leftist family in New York City in the 1930s and 1940s, and like many others for some years thought that communism, American style, could lead to a far better society. In high school, at Radcliffe, and then to a lesser degree at U.C. Berkeley, I was engaged in various political activities, including the peace movement, helping form a chapter of the NAACP at Harvard-Radcliffe, fighting to let women into the Lamont Library at Harvard, and others. I chose Modern European History and Literature as my major at Radcliffe, and thought that a real understanding of the past would help people understand what should be done in the present to lead to a better world. I did my undergraduate thesis on the Italian Socialist Party to 1924, with H. Stuart Hughes.
I got my M.A. at Stanford with a thesis on the philosophy of history of Giambattista Vico, and then went to U.C. Berkeley for my Ph.D. in the 1950s. I thought that not enough attention by serious or leftist scholars had been given to what was for a time called the Third World, and though my favorite Berkeley professor, Joseph Levenson, was in Chinese history, I decided to go into an even less known field, Middle Eastern history. I emphasized Iran, which was then in the Mosaddeq period and seemed about to shake the world, though in 1953 Mosaddeq was overthrown with CIA help, and Iran did not shake the world again until 1979. Although nobody then taught Middle Eastern history at Berkeley, I began to learn [End Page 102] Persian and wrote my dissertation, "The Impact of the West on Modern Iranian Social History," which is still read by some people, though I would not today endorse everything in it. It was, however, useful in writing my 1981 book, Roots of Revolution, which has sold 30,000 copies and, I hope, influenced people to have a more informed and progressive view of Iran.
In my writings and teachings I have tried to stress the important role in history of underresearched groups, including peasants, nomads, urban popular classes, and women. I coedited the first scholarly collection on Middle Eastern women, Women in the Muslim World (1978), and the later collection Women in Middle Eastern History (1991) and have written several articles on women's history, most recently on Iranian women since 1979 for a special summer 2000 issue on Iran of Social Research.
I no longer use the word "radical" for myself, both because I have somewhat changed regarding what is possible in the world and because the word is now overwhelmingly used for the radical right, not the left. I would call myself progressive, or concerned. I think that, whatever term one uses, there are opportunities to influence both the scholarly community and the wider world. Among these I would stress:
1. I think those on the left should not be seduced by postmodernist trends and should devote more effort to showing where these trends have diverted scholars from real-world struggles. This is not to say that some degree of relativism is incompatible with a progressive agenda, as is seen in works like Hobsbawm and Ranger's The Invention of Tradition and Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities. But much of what is done under headings like discourse theory, gender theory, deconstruction, postmodernism, and even postcolonialism has turned people who consider themselves to be on the left away from understanding real struggles in the real world to recondite points comprehensible only to the initiated. There need to be more penetrating critiques of these writings and trends.
2. Along with this, leftists should make an effort to write comprehensibly, and in forums that reach more people.
3. The current period gives opportunities to work with the labor movement, and in unified protest movements, which I think should be taken advantage of more than they are. I think trends toward "identity politics" have gone so far as to undermine common agendas, and am glad to see trends in the opposite, combined and unity, directions, in the AFL-CIO and also in protest movements around the WTO, World Bank, and party and shadow conventions. In these, those on the left in their writings and actions can now take advantage of the participation of some fairly conservative people, as in the focus of the "Shadow Conventions" on campaign finance, the gap [End Page 103] between rich and poor, and the war on drugs. These three topics are among those that could benefit from writings and talks by historians who know how to research them historically.
4. In my own area of Third World studies, there should be more efforts to reach the public with good information on many of the issues involved, such as the horrible starving and deaths coming from our Iraq policy, a less biased view of the Arab-Israeli question, and the role of corporations and globalization in Third World poverty.
5. In general, historians and academics should seek out ways to write for, and have contact with, people other than academics and students. Entry into current programs regarding what is to be done in the schools is one of many ways to do this. Leftist historians are strong within the history profession, but not outside of academe.
Nikki R. Keddie teaches Middle Eastern history at UCLA. Her publications include Roots of Revolution, Women in the Muslim World, and Women in Middle Eastern History.
Note
For more information about Nikki Keddie's life and ideas, see Nancy Elizabeth Gallagher, Approaches to the History of the Middle East: Interviews with Leading Middle East Historians (Reading, UK: Ithaca Press, 1994) and Iran and Beyond: Essays in Middle Eastern History in Honor of Nikki R. Keddie, ed. Rudi Matthee and Beth Baron (Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda Press, 2000).
