Navid Farnia (hm8518)

African American Studies

5057 Woodward Ave., Room 11002.1

Navid Farnia is an Assistant Professor in the Department of African American Studies. His research broadly explores the relationship between racial oppression in the United States and U.S. imperialism in the context of revolution and counterrevolution. Dr. Farnia’s book manuscript, National Liberation in an Imperialist World: Race, Counterrevolution, and the United States, traces the U.S. national security state’s evolution by examining how U.S. officials responded to national liberation movements at home and abroad from the 1950s to 1980. The book looks at several cases, including the U.S.-orchestrated coups in Iran and Guatemala, the Cuban Revolution, the 1960s Black urban rebellions, the Vietnam War, the Black Panther Party, the siege at Wounded Knee, and Zimbabwe’s independence struggle. In doing so, it highlights the interrelated strategies the United States used to export racial oppression while importing the violent machinations of its global empire. The project makes sense of the national security state’s evolution by showing how the strategies and tactics used against liberation movements triggered modern forms of policing and warfare. These strategies and tactics facilitated the national security state’s globalization, or in other words, the making of a national security empire. The U.S.’s national security empire, Dr. Farnia argues, is a transnational counterrevolutionary apparatus that targets racialized populations at home and abroad.

Dr. Farnia has previously taught courses at Princeton University, Wake Forest University, Eastern Illinois University, Portland State University, and Ohio State University. His courses have covered African American, African, Caribbean, U.S., and Atlantic world history. He has organized events on the Black Panther Party and the fiftieth anniversary of the assassinations of Black Panthers Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, on Iran-U.S. relations in the twenty-first century, and on Black-Palestinian solidarity. 

Dr. Farnia was also on the steering committee for the International People's Tribunal on U.S. Imperialism, which assessed the impact on sanctions, blockades, and economic coercive measures imposed by the United States on Global South countries. He has also written for the African American Intellectual History Society, Picturing Black History, and the Review of African Political Economy. His articles have covered U.S. imperialism in Africa, Chris Hani and struggle against apartheid in South Africa, the 1992 Los Angeles uprising, and the 2020 protests against anti-Black state violence. In his spare time, Dr. Farnia writes about race and current events and enjoys watching sports, particularly basketball, soccer, and baseball.

 Racism; national liberation; revolution; counterrevolution; U.S. imperialism

• On “Looting” in an Apartheid State