Transnational Culture in the Iranian Armenian Diaspora

Abstract:

Transnational Culture studies the ways that diasporic Iranian Armenian authors and artists negotiate their identities as minoritized population within a liminal space that includes religious, ethnic, national, racial, cultural, gender, and sexual factors. Yaghoobi argues that this liminal state of fluidity helps them to develop resilience towards ambiguity and handling ambivalence in dealing with various cultures as well as resisting dualistic thinking.

This in turn allows them to move beyond national boundaries to transnationalism, yet simultaneously display the collective Armenian identity characterized by flexibility, adaptability, and continuity as a result of both multiple uprooting and a Genocide that continues to this day.

Bio:

Claudia Yaghoobi is a Roshan Institute Professor and the director of the Center for the Middle East and Islamic Studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Yaghoobi is a scholar of Iranian cultural studies and gender and sexuality studies focusing on the members of sexual, ethnic, and religious minoritized populations. She is the author of Transnational Culture in the Iranian Armenian Diaspora (Edinburgh UP 2023), Temporary Marriage in Iran: Gender and Body Politics in Modern Persian Literature and Film (Cambridge UP 2020), and Subjectivity in ‘Attar, Persian Sufism, and European Mysticism (Purdue UP 2017).