Iranian Diaspora Research Articles

Telegram and Digital Methods

Telegram and Digital Methods

The Real, the Imaginary, and the Symbolic: A Lacanian Reading of Ramita Navai’s City of Lies

Contemporary life writings of Iranian diaspora are often censured for promoting a universalizing, dehumanizing and hegemonic image of the nation. The common misgiving is that the narratives project Iranian women as archetypal victims and their male counterparts as essentially powerful subjects. The present study aims at problematizing this assumption by arguing that Ramita Navai’s City of Lies (2014) portrays an anti-essentialist character sketch of individuals with diverse identities and complex subjectivities. To pursue this line of argument, this article examines the titular characters’ development in the face of the existing tensions between the different psychic and social realities. Lacan’s triadic model of the Real, the Imaginary, and the Symbolic is used in relation to his notion of the mirror stage to analyze the ways in which the characters traverse between the three orders in the process of forming a sense of selfhood. The notion of selfhood is explored in light of latent desires, anxieties, and the feelings of loss as determining factors behind the psychic development of each character within the prevailing normativities of a heteropatriarchal government. The findings reveal that while Amir, Leyla, Asghar, Bijan, and Farideh find themselves permanently lost in the unconscious tensions between different psychic orders. Dariush, Morteza, and Somayeh break into the Symbolic order and reassert their subjectivity. In this manner, the life writing challenges the grand narratives about Iranians as a homogenous group of people as it offers an equal chance of attaining selfhood and subjectivity to both male and female characters.

Race, Parenting and Identity in the Iranian Diaspora Tracing Intergenerational Dialogues

This paper traces intergenerational learning through a series of dialogues on race, parenting, and identity held with Iranian parents, grandparents and youth at a Persian language school located in the US. Drawing on ethnographic, interactional, and participatory design research methodologies, the analysis focuses on the forms of intergenerational sensemaking and social analysis that emerged over time and what they can teach us about (a) the intersections of parenting and racial identity within Iranian diasporic communities in the United States and (b) the complex forms of personhood (Gordon, 1997; Tuck, 2009), learning and becoming among Iranians raising children and grandchildren outside Iran. Bringing close attention to specific instances of talk as embedded in broader relational temporalities and dialogic arcs, findings illustrate the shifting ways participants articulated the educational needs of Iranian children living outside Iran, the emergence of complex and sometimes contradictory discourses on race and identity, and the ways participants worked together to disentangle self-defense and self-determination from the politics of respectability. The discussion considers the implications of complex personhood for the design, mediation, and interpretation of intergenerational sensemaking regarding race and identity within the Iranian diaspora, with attention to broader processes of community codesign.

Queering Iranian Diasporic Cyberspace, Critiquing the Conditions of Belonging

Queering Iranian Diasporic Cyberspace, Critiquing the Conditions of Belonging

Extraterritoriality, Nationality, and Empire in the Persianate World, 1890-1940

Abstract Extraterritoriality and nationality were crucial to the legal landscape of the Late Persianate world and relations between Iran and British India. Extraterritoriality not only protected British subjects from Persian prosecution but also afforded the British Empire the means to rule Indians in lands beyond the Raj. Iran’s opposition to extraterritoriality led to laws that expanded Iranian nationality to include many Indians living in Iran and the Iranian diaspora living in India—who often navigated these rules as it best suited their interests. These developments reveal the significance of imperialism and state building to the emergence of modern international law and the fate of the Persianate world.

The Politics of Rightful Killing: Civil Society, Gender, and Sexuality in Weblogistan

The Politics of Rightful Killing: Civil Society, Gender, and Sexuality in Weblogistan

Foodways, Iranianness, and national identity habitus: the Iranian diaspora in Aotearoa New Zealand

In this article we ethnographically investigate how diasporic Iranians in Aotearoa/New Zealand deployed a variety of foodways in emphasizing varied identity constructs in different contexts and to different audiences. We argue that Iranian migrants experienced a cleft habitus that prompted hyper-reflexivity and associated strategic identity discourses and performances. Moreover, we analyze their diasporic reflexivity and practices through ‘bottom-up’ national identity constructions and performances and its four modalities of talking, choosing, consuming, and performing the nation. Diasporic Iranians frequently highlighted what they considered to be ideally Iranian-as-Persian in attempts to position themselves as secular Iranians/Muslims and in contradiction to the host society’s prevalent prejudices concerning ‘fundamentalist Arabs’, ‘Middle Easterners’ and ‘Muslims’. In doing this, they strategically consumed foods (most notably pork and red wine) considered to be ‘taboo’ under Islamic religious beliefs and did so especially in contexts dominated by their Pākehā (New Zealand European) hosts; they also invented new food symbolisms and rituals in collective celebrations (such as Yalda) to draw attention to a glorious imagined past – Persian and Iranian – which was often not recognized by their host society and which positioned the diasporic Iranians as secular and cultural. As such we address a marked lacuna in research investigating the food-identity-nationalism nexus among diasporic Iranians in general and in Aotearoa/New Zealand specifically.

Asymmetries of Internationalism: Performing and Remembering Subnational Internationalism in the Age of Developed Socialism

During the twentieth century, the socialist bloc became a second home for socialists from Iran and Afghanistan. Iranian socialists almost certainly constituted the largest foreign diaspora in the USSR at the time of its dissolution, and Soviet entanglements in Afghanistan led to a large flow of Afghan soldiers, students, and socialists to the Soviet Union in the latter half of the twentieth century. The USSR also sponsored Persian socialist internationalism domestically in the form of the Tajik SSR. This paper uses sources from all three sides of the “Persianate triangle” (Tajikistan, Iran, and Afghanistan) to highlight how encounters between socialist groups often highlighted differences between these groups' understanding of socialism despite a shared Persian language. More broadly, it points to the importance of “subnational actors” in the making of Soviet foreign policy. Case studies of a Tajik translator in the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan as well as Iranian socialist exiles in Kabul also show how the memory of socialist internationalism has been processed and narrated very differently within the Iranian diaspora and Tajikistan today. In conclusion, the article shows how the networks forged by Soviet internationalism have often been reworked in the wake of the collapse of the USSR and offers reflections on how scholars can engage further in the study of “subnational internationalism.”

Persian/American Exceptionalism: Post-9/11 Strategies of Belonging in the Iranian Diaspora through Cultural Production

ABSTRACT Since 9/11, Iranian Americans have challenged their racialization as troublesome terrorists through cultural productions that emphasize how they belong in a multicultural America. In this paper, I argue that these Iranian Americans perform “Persian/American exceptionalism,” a representational strategy that embraces capitalist conspicuous consumption and touts universalist notions of freedom. In so doing, they attempt to erase post-revolutionary Iran and its association with political Islam from the U.S. imaginary as part of an effort to distance themselves from two major flashpoints in U.S.-Middle Eastern history – the Iran Hostage Crisis and September 11th.

‘You are Iranian even if you were born on the moon’: family language policies of the Iranian diaspora in the UK

ABSTRACT With a focus on an under-studied group of immigrants in the UK, this paper examines Iranian families’ language ideologies and practices at home in relation to Persian acquisition and maintenance for their children. Working within a family language policy (FLP) framework, we draw on sociolinguistic data from semi-structured interviews with eighteen mothers to understand how parental beliefs, their everyday language practices and the attempts they make to maintain, improve, or alter their language use will lead to their children’s heritage language acquisition and maintenance. The results of the study suggest that the success in heritage language development and maintenance boils down to parental pro heritage language ideologies and their everyday small-scale practices. It was also found that the interrelationship between language and cultural values and a successful FLP was further reinforced by the parents’ migration trajectory and proficiency in English as the societal language. This research also showed that the large size of this diaspora in the UK (particularly in London), their close-knit social network, availability of heritage language weekend schools and the possibility of frequent visits to the home country create a conducive situation for the Iranian diaspora to raise their children bilingually.

Review of Tehrangeles Dreaming: Intimacy and Imagination in Southern California Iranian Pop Music by Farzaneh Hemmasi (Duke Press)

Tehrangeles Dreaming is the first book about the Tehrangeles music industry, that is, the Iranian diaspora music industry brought to life by the expatriate Iranian artists and music producers who settled in Los Angeles and Southern California after the 1979 Iranian revolution. Farzaneh Hemmasi uses an ethnographic approach in combination with an analysis of diaspora media discourse in order to “examine expatriate imaginations of influence on, and intimacy with, their global Iranian audiences” (26). At its core, the book deals with the imagining and reimagining of Iranian identity by the artistic community that creates music and media content for Iranians in Iran and across the world.

MEHRANEH EBRAHIMI, Women, Art, and Literature in the Iranian Diaspora (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2019)

MEHRANEH EBRAHIMI, Women, Art, and Literature in the Iranian Diaspora (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2019)

Farzaneh Hemmasi. Tehrangeles Dreaming: Intimacy and Imagination in Southern California's Iranian Pop Music

This book explores the production of pop music in Tehrangeles, a name given to Los Angeles by the Iranian diaspora, through its impact on Iranian identity. This form of pop music has been circulating widely abroad and in Iran for decades, and it is particularly relevant when considering cultural exchanges between Iran and its diaspora. Hemmasi explores how music producers have positioned themselves to reflect on the question of the Iranian nation. The book is particularly interesting when it ...

The “Brilliant Teaching”: Iranian Christians in Tang China and Their Identity

The last three decades or so have seen an increasing interest in the early history of Christianity in China, particularly in Christian communities in the Tang period. One of the pertinent questions asked—particularly by theologians—is whether the “Brilliant Teaching” (Jingjiao), as the religion called itself in Chinese, had a substantial number of Chinese converts, i.e. whether it was a proselytizing religion or rather an Iranian diaspora religion. While recent documents and new interpretations of existing sources has made it probable that we are indeed dealing with an “expat” religious community, the question of the cultural and religious identity of this community has not really been addressed: they were using Syriac as their liturgical and communal language, but were Persian, Sogdian and maybe even Bactrian in terms of origin and culture. This paper will summarize the data we can get from Chinese sources and discuss them in the light of religious and cultural identity.

Women, Art, and Literature in the Iranian Diaspora

Women, Art, and Literature in the Iranian Diaspora

Traumatisme postrévolutionnaire et romans autobiographiques : La deuxième génération d’exilées iraniennes en France

The Islamic revolution of 1979 and its developments have been the major reasons for the mass migration of Iranian intellectuals to the West and the main topic of the Iranian diaspora’s literary texts. However, since the turn of the twenty-first century, especially in France, a new generation of Iranian women novelists has created a shift in traditional post-revolutionary memoir writing by focusing on more individual themes such as childhood, the body, and trauma. In this article, the author explores the various ways in which two of these novelists, Negar Djavadi and Chahdortt Djavann, have represented levels of trauma in their auto-fictional narratives of the Islamic revolution. In this regard, starting from a conceptual representation of trauma as reliving the historical past by protagonists, it is shown how both psychological and cultural definitions of the trauma are depicted in these novels. The article suggests that this multidirectional approach allows the authors to overcome the alienation caused by the Islamic revolution's contradictory nature in a postcolonial era.

Localizing Iranian diaspora politics: A comparative approach to transnational critique and incorporation

La recherche sur la migration iranienne est en pleine croissance, or elle est limitée de par le focus géographique sur la Californie du Sud et sur les États-Unis, ainsi que par la centralité de l’État-nation comme cadre analytique. Contribuant à la recherche sur les politiques diasporiques iraniennes, le présent article se fonde sur une critique épistémologique afin de proposer une approche comparative centrée sur la relation entre l’intégration locale et l’engagement transnational. S’appuyant sur la recherche quant aux migrations transnationales et aux mouvements sociaux, une ethnographie historique illustrera mon propos portant sur les articulations entre l’engagement politique de trois groupes d’immigrés iraniens basés à Hambourg, à Florence et à Genève, entre 1951 et 2019. Penser l’ancrage territorial de manière comparative représente un effort urgent visant à complexifier les positionnements transnationaux iraniens au-delà du seul paradigme de l’opposition au régime iranien.

Informal Social Networks as Intermediaries in Foreign Markets

ABSTRACTWe investigate how informal social networks can assist multinational firms in their internationalization strategy. We propose a refinement of the Uppsala internalization model (Johanson & Vahne, 2009) grounded in network theory, by developing an intermediate position between an ‘insider’ and an ‘outsider’ for conditions when the transformation of an outsider into an insider is limited by institutional constraints. An intermediary position represents one of the sides of ‘patron-client’ informal networks (Denoeux, 1993) whereby the other side is represented by the ‘insider’. We argue that this setup would help mitigate the Liability of Outsidership (Johanson & Vahne, 2009), a replacement of the Liability of Foreignness (Hymer, 1976; Zaheer, 1995), in the modern networked business world. We contextualize our proposition for the case of Iran, a large rising West-Asian economy with known institutional limitations, and suggest that the informal network of local merchants (bazaaries) could play an important intermediary role in Multinational Enterprises (MNEs) internationalization process. We review the history ofbazaariesand make a series of propositions exemplifying possible ways informal networks could influence the internationalization process. In addition to re-affirming the importance of the MNE country of origin (emerging markets, and low psychic distance with Iran), we propose that an intermediary of the Iranianbazaarieswill have a positive impact on performance and survival of the MNE's subsidiary in Iran, especially in the case of incongruence of MNE's leadership with Shi'a Islam. Additionally, we suggest that employing the Iranian diaspora may also improve subsidiary performance and survival.

The Iranian Diaspora: Its Formation and Transformation

The Iranian Diaspora: Its Formation and Transformation

The Iranian Diaspora: Challenges, Negotiations, and Transformations

The Iranian Diaspora: Challenges, Negotiations, and Transformations