Iranian Diaspora Studies Seminar: Culture Beyond Country

Whether in Los Angeles, Stockholm, or Toronto, Iranians across the global diaspora increasingly have turned to culture as a strategy of inclusion in their multicultural societies. Aiming to reassert the dignity of Iranian identity in the face of over four decades of geopolitical tensions between governments in Iran and the West that have contributed to their personal experiences of stigmatization, prejudice, and discrimination, Iranian immigrants from diverse political, ethnic, and professional backgrounds have worked to put forward their own cultural representations in mainstream publics. In this talk, I offer a preview of my forthcoming book, Culture Beyond Country (NYU Press), which analyzes the institutional and ideological forces that have come to bear on Iranian cultural organizers in these three diasporic locations. The book draws on transnational and comparative ethnographic fieldwork and over 125 semi-structured interviews conducted over the course of 16 years (2007-2023) to examine Iranian diasporic cultural citizenship in these contexts. In doing so, it demonstrates how the process of representing Iranian culture in the diaspora generates not only competing views on what it means to be Iranian, but also competing modes of belonging that variously subvert and reinforce existing power relations across local, national, and transnational scales.