Keanu M. Heydari
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Resemblance Is Not Structure
Historiography

Resemblance Is Not Structure

Historians routinely flatten analogy and homology into near-synonymy, but the two concepts make claims of fundamentally different kinds, and recovering the distinction changes what a historical argument can demonstrate and how far it can travel beyond the case at hand.
17 Mar 2026 9 min read
Learning to Think Slowly: An Intellectual Memoir of Early Graduate School
Profession

Learning to Think Slowly: An Intellectual Memoir of Early Graduate School

I reconstruct my early graduate training as an uneven education in subordinating theory to evidence.
24 Nov 2025 9 min read
The Politics of Sartre’s Grabuge
Critical theory

The Politics of Sartre’s Grabuge

Sartre’s 1961 anecdote about rejecting Le Grabuge as a title for Les Temps modernes is no incidental aside but a compact demonstration of retotalization, showing how class position crystallizes in an act of naming and how refusing that name remade disposition into disciplined engagement.
31 Oct 2025 7 min read
Foucault’s Radical Historicism
Critical theory

Foucault’s Radical Historicism

Leonard D’Cruz asks whether Foucault’s radical historicism truly escapes transcendental philosophy or smuggles it back in through the historical a priori, omnipresent power, and subjectivation, arguing that naming this tension strengthens historicist critique rather than defeating it.
01 Mar 2025 5 min read
Power and the Limits of Critique: Engaging Cronin on Foucault and Bourdieu
Critical theory

Power and the Limits of Critique: Engaging Cronin on Foucault and Bourdieu

Ciaran Cronin argues that Bourdieu offers a more actionable account of power than Foucault, but his critique demands a normative framework neither thinker claims to provide and misreads Foucault as foreclosing resistance; the two are better combined than opposed.
26 Feb 2025 5 min read
Iranian Neo-Monarchism and the Politics of Diasporic Longing
Diaspora politics Featured

Iranian Neo-Monarchism and the Politics of Diasporic Longing

Royalist nostalgia in the Iranian diaspora and hawkish U.S. Iran policy operate as mutually reinforcing formations, each lending the other moral warrant and institutional durability; a genealogical reading exposes the contingency and silences that sustain this co-produced longing.
06 Feb 2025 10 min read
Temporal Multiplicity in E. P. Thompson and Reinhart Koselleck
Historiography

Temporal Multiplicity in E. P. Thompson and Reinhart Koselleck

Thompson and Koselleck offer mirror-image narratives of temporal modernity: Thompson traces a compression of plural premodern rhythms into disciplinary clock time, Koselleck a proliferation of horizons as eschatology dissolves. The divergence is methodological.
18 Sep 2024 7 min read
Recent Work on Colonial Violence in French Algeria
Historiography Featured

Recent Work on Colonial Violence in French Algeria

Surveying four monographs on colonial violence in French Algeria (Brower, Sessions, Surkis, Cole), this essay shows how each abandons the colonizer/colonized binary for a view of violence as plural in logic, and treats metropole and colony as a single analytic field.
18 Jul 2024 28 min read
Exteriorizing Subjectivity: Snapchat and Pharmacopornographic Biocapitalism
Critical theory

Exteriorizing Subjectivity: Snapchat and Pharmacopornographic Biocapitalism

Reading Snapchat through Preciado’s pharmacopornographic regime and Steyerl’s critique of linear perspective, this essay argues that the app’s ephemeral, haptic architecture works as a biopolitical dispositif, exteriorizing subjectivity and folding self-produced erotic imagery into biocapital.
13 Jul 2021 18 min read
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Keanu M. Heydari © 2026
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