The Soundscape in Diasporic Iranian Cinema

Roshanak Kheshti is Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies and affiliate faculty in the Critical Gender Studies Program at the University of California, San Diego and Associate Editor of the Journal of Popular Music Studies.She is the author of Modernity’s Ear: Listening to Race and Gender in World Music (NYU Press, 2015) and Switched-on Bach (Bloomsbury Academic, 33 1/3, 2019). She is currently completing her third book, tentatively titled “We See with the Skin: Zora Neale Hurston’s Synesthetic Hermeneutics” as well as a performance piece “Veil Manifesto” (with Sara Mameni). Her scholarship has appeared in the Radical History Review, American Quarterly, Current Musicology, Feminist Media Histories, Hypatia, Feminist Studies, GLQ, Theater Survey, and Sounding Out!

This talk explores the question of diegetic film sound in diasporic Iranian cinema. Through Ana Lily Amirpour’s A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, Mitra Tabrizian’s Gholam and Bahman Ghobadi’s No One Knows About Persian Cats, I consider how the commonly held understanding of diegetic sound (or sounds that emanate from the story world of the film) becomes a troubled notion in this genre, challenging how the narrative world of the film is contained.

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