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Iranian Diaspora

16 posts

Neda Maghbouleh on “The Limits of Whiteness, Iranian-Americans and the Everyday Politics of Race”

Ajam’s first podcast features Dr. Neda Maghbouleh, author of The Limits of Whiteness: Iranian-Americans and the Everyday Politics of Race. Her research examines the production of racial categories and identities through macro-level policy and micro-level interaction, with a special emphasis on Iranians and other “liminal whites” in North America.
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Curtains of Iron or Curtains of Silk? Soviet Artwork in Conversation with West and South Asia

The post-Soviet art of Central Asia and the Caucasus comes out of a Soviet-era conversation of artistic styles that looks not just to Moscow but also to Mecca. An understanding of the high and low registers of this Soviet cultural heritage allows the humor and self-confidence of the work to be appreciated — aesthetically as well as financially — by audiences.
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From Tehran to Newcastle: “I Am Nasrine” and the Politics of Telling Migrant Narratives

I am Nasrine is the tale of two Iranian siblings who migrate to England and find a world of rampant discrimination that looks little like what they expected. The tragedy of the film is not one that can be easily limited to English housing estates or the plight of Iranian emigres. Indeed, this tale of migrant survival and struggle is far more universal, a searing indictment of the limits of liberalism and the failure of international and local humanitarian bureaucracies — as well as receiving societies as a whole — to effectively understand migrants as complex human beings.
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Filming America 1979: Iranian-American Memories of the Year Our Lives Turned Upside Down

For those of us who did not experience the trauma of 1979 and the years that followed, our parents’ memories and stories have been largely inaccessible to us. The era’s legacy is primarily one of silence; Iranian-Americans have largely ignored their personal traumas and tried to move on with their lives, throwing themselves completely into the American dream and struggling to put the years of alienation behind them. Lila Yomtoob is an Iranian-American filmmaker whose latest project is entitled America 1979 and explores the experiences of an American family of Iranian heritage during the Iran Hostage Crisis.
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Ask Iran: Independent Cartoons and Graphic Novels Highlight A Nation Beyond Stereotypes

By showcasing Iran’s culture, history, and supposed ‘personality,’ Ask Iran is adding to the conversation by giving the Iranian people a voice needed during a time when sanctions are exacting a heavy price on Iranians and there is an ever-present fear of war. Her discourse is an extremely important contribution to the dialogue on Iran in the face of ‘othering,’ which is in line with Orientalist stereotypes of the Iranian people as being angry, backwards, and terrorists.
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“This Place Should Have Been Iran”: Iranian Imaginings in/of Dubai

It is precisely the position between an Iran back home and an Iran abroad, or Iran’s present circumstances and possible future, which informs the sense of displacement so widely shared among Iranian expatriates here. For many Iranians, Dubai’s emergence as a global metropolis is imagined to have resulted, more specifically, from the displacement of Iranian modernity.
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