Iranian Diaspora Identities: Stories and Songs combines oral history, storytelling, theories of communication, and performance studies into a unique study of an immigrant community.

This book is the result of collaborative work between two Iranian-American immigrants. Ziba Shirazi is a well-known musician, artist and performer. Kamran Afary is an Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at Cal State Los Angeles and a journalist and author.

Excerpt

Packing Our Suitcases

Whenever we decide to leave our countries of origin to become expatriates elsewhere, whether one calls us legal or illegal immigrants, whether we are poor or rich, educated or uneducated, single, married, divorced or widowed, there is one thing we expatriates pack in our suitcases--our native culture. We take our culture along with our memories after we separate from our loved ones. We leave almost everything else behind in our home countries in the hope of finding a better home and making a better life. Throughout an expatriate's journey from country of origin to country of settlement, the migrant transforms. Moreover, in order to ensure her survival in the country of settlement, a part of her also dies so that she is reborn. As the saying goes, brave ones learn to keep the best of their own culture and mix it with the best of the new culture.

The stories in this collection take up matters such as identity, ethics and morality, relations between parents and children, gender relations, ethnicity, and minority status. The stories explore the cultural shock and very difficult process of acculturation, the rites of passage that Iranian immigrants experience, and finally the fractured process of assimilation that is never the same for two individuals. Unlike many other migrants to the US, Iranians who immigrated to Europe or the US in the 1970s through the 1990s were often educated though many did not speak English. They fled the political persecution of the government of the Islamic Republic in the hopes of achieving greater security, even if it meant a diminution in their standard of living.

Each year a significant number of educated Iranians continue to leave the country. A related study conducted in Iran in 2012 indicates that out of 225 Scientific Olympics winners of Iranian origin, 140 of them emigrated to the West. The IMF has estimated that “Iran topped the list of countries who share the unfortunate task of watching their academic elite [leave], with an annual loss of 150,000 to 180,000 specialists, roughly equivalent to a capital loss of $40 billion a year” (Harrison, Huge Cost of Iranian Brain Drain, BBC January 8 2007).

Crossing cultures can be a most exciting and rewarding experience, but it can also be a stressful and bewildering one. This has certainly been the case for Iranians. The Islamist revolution of 1979 forced many secular urban and educated Iranians to leave the country. Urban educated women were particularly hurt as the new government closed day-care centers, demoted the position of women in the judiciary and in industry, and also reinstated polygamy and easy divorce for men. As a result, a large number of educated middle classes, especially women, left the country. The Revolutionary Guard and its Basij morality police on the streets flogged and imprisoned women for violating modesty codes and persecuted religious minorities (Sunni Muslims, Christians, and Jews, and especially Baha’is), as well as many ethnic minorities (Kurds). These factors also increased emigration rates. Those who fled to the US faced added political difficulties in this country. Since the hostage crisis of 1979-1980, relations between the US and Iran have remained tense. Periodically, Iranian migrants and their children have faced harassment and ostracism from the general population in the US even though they themselves had fled the persecution of the Islamic Republic. Condescending references to Iranians in the US, such as “Camel Jockeys" were common in the 1980s. Yet despite such stereotyping, Iranian immigrants managed to excel in their new homelands and have continued to live peaceful, prosperous, and productive lives as citizens of their host countries. According to a report by the Migration Policy Institute, a majority of expatriate Iranians hold a bachelor's degree or higher and have gained employment in management and professional fields. A high percentage of expatriate Iranians are also self-employed. In the year 2000, the median income among expatriate Iranian men was $52,333, and, among expatriate Iranian women, the median income was $36,422 (Hakimzadeh & Dixon 2006).

Iranian diaspora in Academic Studies

Iranian Diaspora Studies as an interdisciplinary academic field is a relatively new one. As research on Iranians’ experiences of immigration grew in the 1980s, a new generation of researchers and academics also began to examine the formation of Iranian diaspora cultures and identities. Today, several major universities have Iranian Studies programs and departments with partial funding and endowments provided by Iranian-Americans. In 2016, The Center for Iranian Diaspora Studies at San Francisco State University was founded with a $5 million endowment to research and teach about the historical and cultural experiences of the global Iranian diaspora.

Hamid Naficy wrote one of the earliest and most influential academic studies of the Iranian diaspora, The Making of Exile Cultures (1993). This work provides a rigorous theoretical framework and intimate details about personal experiences of the exilic community. In particular, it looks at the ways the Iranian-American popular media in Los Angeles-- television, radio, and magazines--redefined and reconstructed a new sense of identity for Iranians during the first decade in exile when they had lost all hope of returning to their native land yet had not integrated into the new American society. In his introduction, Naficy states,

The exiles as defined here are not ‘native’ to either their home or to the host society. They are no longer legally “foreigner” neither are they bona-fide “citizens”. They are neither openly, nor secretly, nor dually “marginal”. They are not merely “stranger” or “tourists”, and they cannot strictly speaking be considered members of an established “ethnic group”. Finally, they cannot be entirely characterized as “sojourners”, “refugees,” or “homeless”. Exiles, for the purposes of this work, are none of the above entirely but all of them partially. (Naficy 1993: 16)

Naficy’s work is a valuable contribution to the study of how Iranian popular media in exile represented and helped construct a new sense of identity out of this experience of liminality.

Ron Kelly and Jonathan Friedlander wrote one of the first ethnographies of the Iranian-American community, entitled Irangeles: Iranians in Los Angeles (1993). This edited volume is a collection of essays, interviews, and photographs. It documents the life of Iranian-Americans of LA as they recreate their old rituals and festivals in a new environment. In some cases, these are stories of formerly persecuted minorities who could not openly celebrate many of these rituals and practices in Iran, so they found new vitality in recreating them in the US. Irangeles captures the diversity of the Iranian immigrant community in Los Angeles. It introduces the reader to a broad range of occupations and income levels, political tendencies, and religious practices within the exilic community. It contains studies of supporters of the former Pahlavi monarchy and even early followers of the Islamic Republic. It also includes vignettes on Muslims, Jews, Zoroastrians, and Baha'is and women of all faiths. The work highlights how new gender roles in the United States were reshaping Iranian women and men and the institution of marriage. Finally, the volume illuminates changes in relations among Iranian youth and conflicts with their parents.

Zohreh Sullivan’s 2001 book Exiled Memories: Stories of Iranian Diaspora (2001), focuses on narratives and construction of identities through memories. She distinguishes her work from empirical sociological studies of Iranians in America and argues that the reconstruction of memory and identity is an important part of how Iranians in the U.S. experience themselves. Sullivan’s work highlights issues of difference, relationality, and local knowledge that shape a discourse about the transitions experienced as Iranians moved from one culture to another after the revolution.

Babak Elahi and Persis M Karim, devoted a special issue of Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East (2011), to the Iranian Diaspora and titled it Iranian Diaspora. The authors argue that those Iranians who left Iran during 1979-1988 manifest a unique experience that merits the title of “Iranian diaspora.” They point out that there is a critical tension between the use of the term diaspora and exile or immigration, because the former engenders its own unique questions. They have also sought to extend this new study to Iranians living outside of North America to include those living in Asia or Australia. Karim’s work on the Iranian diaspora also includes a focus on the experience of women as in her Let Me Tell You Where I've Been: New Writing by Women of the Iranian Diaspora, (2006 ). Another essay argues for more autobiographical and narrative studies. In her essay, Autobiography and Authority in the Writings of the Iranian Diaspora (Motlagh, 2011) Amy Motlagh suggests that the proliferation of popular memoirs by Iranian-American women is a way in which the Iranian diaspora community produces (and reproduces) itself while examining and expanding the limits of authenticity and authority.

Likewise, Amy Malek, in her Public Performances of Identity Negotiation in the Iranian Diaspora: The New York Persian Day Parade, documents how in the last decade, in the face of hostility by Americans towards Middle Eastern immigrants, Iranian Americans have asserted their cultural and ethnic identity on streets and fairgrounds holding ethnic parades and festivals, just as Irish, German, and Puerto Rican American communities did before them.

Iranian diaspora studies have embraced issues of gender and sexuality both as identity and as practice. In her Diasporic Masculinities (2012), Fataneh Farahani reflects on her ethnographic fieldwork. In her comparative study she examines the lives of Iranian men as they left Iran, arrived, and settled in Sydney, Stockholm and London. Farahani develops a framework to examine the formation and continual negotiation of masculinity among Iranian men, a negotiation that involves not only reexamining gender relations but other issues such as religion, race, age, class, the relationship between individual and community, and politics. Shadee Abdi and Bobbi Van Gilder have focused on cultural invisibility of Iranian-American queer women. In Cultural (in)visibility and identity dissonance: Queer Iranian-American women and their negotiation of existence (2016), they explore the narratives of twelve first-generation, queer, Iranian-American women to understand how Iranian cultural, familial, and relational discourses influence feelings of “belonging,” and how they cope with the challenges of being both LGBTQ and Iranian-American. They further expand this work by exploring modes of the management of sexual identities by Iranian-American queer women.