Farzaneh Hemmasi & Hannah Darabi: Sounds, Images and Archives of Tehrangeles

The 67th episode of Parse is an excerpt of a multimedia presentation, panel discussion and double book launch focused on the post-revolutionary Iranian popular culture in “Tehrangeles” (a portmanteau deriving from a combination of Tehran and Los Angeles) — a geographic area in Southern California between Los Angeles and Orange Country which is home to the largest concentration of Iranians outside of Iran. This event features the book Tehrangeles Dreaming: Intimacy and Imagination in Southern California’s Iranian Pop Music (published in 2020) by Dr. Farzaneh Hemmasi and Soleil of Persian Square (published in 2021) by Hannah Darabi. Hemmasi is an Associate Professor of Ethnomusicology at the University of Toronto. Her interests concern popular music, celebrity, transnational media publics, and the politics of popular culture. Darabi is an Iranian artist and photographer. She studied at Tehran’s College of Fine Arts and then at the University of Paris Saint-Denis. Although she now lives in Paris, her country of origin remains the main subject of most of her photographic series, in which her photographs interact with other materials, such as text, archival images, and objects, so as to show the unique political situation and economic conditions of Iran. 
 
To watch the full talk, click here: ⁠https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EFs6fMxiWl8&t=483s⁠