Resistance from Aristotle to Star Wars

“The powerful will stay mighty so long as the legitimacy of their acts remains unquestioned and their authority uncontested.”¹ – Behrooz Ghamari  

Introduction

We live in a time where political leaders bring “the language of brutality, rape, racism, xenophobia, homophobia, and misogyny into an open element of normative political discourse.”² This normalized hatred seeps into every nook and cranny of everyday life. Because of this, I am scared and my students are scared. Now, more than ever, teachers and students should be thinking about and discussing tyranny and resistance, and there is no better way to do this than through literature. This unit will use the graphic novel Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood by Marjane Satrapi to navigate these difficult topics and to use a story from the past to make sense of our present and hopefully change our future. This unit is less about the content of Persepolis and more about its historical context and reading the book through the lens of power and resistance.

As we look around at worldwide power struggles, “Persepolis remains hauntingly relevant.”³ The study of the Iranian Revolution of 1979 and Iran’s culture of resistance will help my students contextualize our current political climate. Grace Guernsey writes, “Persepolis would be a necessary read in ordinary times but is a mandatory read amidst the political turmoil of the present.”⁴ This shows us the power literature has to help us understand our world and to fight against tyranny. Guernsey posits, “Youth no longer means innocence. In such trying times, it demands the opposite: involvement.”⁵ We see this through students walking out of school in defiance of ICE, participating in local protests, and posting their political views on social media. This is what Persepolis teaches students: resistance to tyranny demands action. And if I can teach this to my students, I have hope for our world.