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Iranian Jews produced roughly 15 periodicals during the twentieth century, on which some initial work has been undertaken. These periodicals, newspapers, and pamphlets gave a voice to the community and served to foster the consolidation of political subjectivity and syncretic national ideologies within the public sphere. With that, scholarship still lacks any significant exploration of the publications produced by those Iranian Jews who emigrated to Israel after it declared independence in 1948. In an initial step towards illuminating these fruitful historical resources, this article views in parallel two publications produced by the community during the first years of Israeli statehood: Kurosh and Setareh-ye Sharq. Following a short background on the arrival of Iranian Jews in the country and the conditions they faced, the article analyses the publications as manifestations of two distinct approaches to adaptation to the new environment. In Kurosh, there is evidence of an anti-establishment spirit of independence, facilitating an activistic and assertive Iranian Jewish consciousness in the land that was anchored in connection to Iranianness. In Setareh-ye Sharq, meanwhile, we find top-down discursive and social pressures on the community to accept a normative vision of Iranian identity in Israel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses Christian missionaries working on converting Muslim Iranians to Christianity. Their methods are based on a logic of rupture and discontinuity with Islam, presenting Christianity as the solution to a moral-political crisis of Iranians in the Islamic Republic. Anti-Islam is the focus of this conversion discourse. In a transnational Christian network formed by Iranians and non-Iranians, the evangelical missionaries work with methodology that breaks and dialogues with society and the local culture of their target audience, presenting evangelical Christianity as an alternative for Iranians. This research was carried out based on participant observation in missionary groups and Christian churches for Iranians, via digital media and face-to-face, contributing to the understanding of the conversion of Muslims to evangelical Christianity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do women in the Iranian diaspora contribute to change in their homeland? Drawing on narrative accounts from activists and advocates, this paper offers insight into whether and how change occurs in relation to diasporic initiatives. The results highlight women's perceived success in public education and awareness-raising activities that focus on procedural, discursive and legislative change. At the same time, despite enjoying freedom in the diaspora, diasporic women continue to face operational constraints like those in the homeland and must minimise risk. The findings are timely given the feminist uprisings that have engulfed Iran in 2022–2023, the coherence of which rests upon the patient and persistent work of those that have come before. This research holds significance for practitioners in diasporic communities, and researchers interested in agents and drivers of change in repressive operating environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With a focus on an under-studied group of immigrants in the UK, this paper examines Iranian families' language ideologies and practices at home in relation to Persian acquisition and maintenance for their children. Working within a family language policy (FLP) framework, we draw on sociolinguistic data from semi-structured interviews with eighteen mothers to understand how parental beliefs, their everyday language practices and the attempts they make to maintain, improve, or alter their language use will lead to their children's heritage language acquisition and maintenance. The results of the study suggest that the success in heritage language development and maintenance boils down to parental pro heritage language ideologies and their everyday small-scale practices. It was also found that the interrelationship between language and cultural values and a successful FLP was further reinforced by the parents' migration trajectory and proficiency in English as the societal language. This research also showed that the large size of this diaspora in the UK (particularly in London), their close-knit social network, availability of heritage language weekend schools and the possibility of frequent visits to the home country create a conducive situation for the Iranian diaspora to raise their children bilingually. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mobilizing Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's concept of "becoming-revolutionary," this article aims to address the relative absence of film studies scholarship on Iranian diasporic women's cinema and transnational Iranian poetics of resistance. More specifically, it examines the role of female agency during Iran's 2009 Green Movement in Sepideh Farsi's, arguing that Farsi's portrayal of a young Iranian woman's progressive politics and sexual emancipation foregrounds connections between Iranian national and diasporic politics and poetics of female resistance. Formally, the film interweaves videos of the Green Movement made by anonymous protesters with intimate fictional narrative, allowing the two modes of storytelling to coalesce in their use of politicized bodies resisting the hegemonic ideological discourses of the state. I argue that the film's textual hybridity emphasizes the role of "raw" protesters' footage as an example of "minor" video, in the Deleuzian-Guattarian sense, in an effort to encompass and preserve the fragmented yet assertive voices of the Iranian civil rights movement and struggle for democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this article is to examine the relationship between diaspora and identity with reference to the Iranian diaspora as a case study. Although there has been a recent growth in the study of ideational factors and their effects on sociopolitical issues, identity remains understudied within the mainstream literature on diaspora studies, international relations (IR) and foreign policy analysis (FPA). The aim is to challenge the purely realist and power-based explanations that have dominated the discourse by introducing the notion of identity and exploring it in relation to the Iranian diaspora. The paper's novel approach lies in its categorisation of Iranian diaspora identity into three main components: nationalist (ancient Iran) tendencies, religious (Islamic-Shiite) tendencies and secular (Western) tendencies. The identity components of Iranians abroad and their interaction with the homeland are relatively comparable to those of their compatriots at home, showing intersecting areas of commonality and difference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines evolutions of domestic foodwork and associated status among diasporic Iranian women in contemporary Aotearoa/New Zealand. Drawing on feminist food studies, as well as on Bourdieu's notion of cultural and symbolic capitals, we examine the two-fold, oppression-empowerment aspects of domestic foodwork, specifically its transformation from a socio-cultural obligation in the origin home to a means of agentic liberation and social empowerment in diaspora. Furthermore, we explore how this transformation is strategically negotiated by some women to successfully generate positions of enhanced respect, status, and private influence both within the domestic sphere and the wider diasporic Iranian community in Aotearoa/New Zealand. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that post-9/11 narratives by writers of the Iranian diaspora assign a new meaning to 9/11 and reconstitute the identity of their ethnic collectivity around this event. We contend that Jeffrey C. Alexander's theory of cultural trauma provides us with a practical framework for analyzing post-9/11 diasporic identities because Alexander views trauma as a social construct and posits that events cannot be considered traumatic regardless of the social sphere in which they unfold. Accordingly, cultural trauma occurs when members of a collectivity genuinely believe that their identity has changed in fundamental and irreversible ways, and they decide to express this change in their narratives. This paper posits that applying Alexander's theory to post-9/11 novels by Iranian expatriates enables us to account for the marginalized identity of Iranians after the 9/11 attacks. Ultimately, this study will highlight the ways through which novels like Siamack Baniameri's The Iranican Dream (2004), Marsha Mehran's Pomegranate Soup (2005), and Porochista Khakpour's Sons and Other Flammable Objects (2007) capture the communal grief and predicament of most Iranians as well as their bewildering limbo state of between and betwixt after migration, which can reveal the perennial troubles of immigration and integration in diasporic communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reveals how engagements with the photographic archives of premodern Iran and the Persian carpet break open transtemporal, affective, and queer interplays in diaspora. Examining a digital remix of a photograph of a Qajar princess, 'Ismat al-Dowlah, from the archives of nineteenth-century Iran, the article argues that the digital (mis)use of archives exposes what forms such as the Persian carpet and photography erase: each medium's close ties with power, labor, gender, and sexuality. It develops a relational approach to understandings of photography that highlights the performative registers for a diasporic gaze while also troubling the imperial investment in understanding photography's history and its practices as a new technology that developed in the nineteenth century. This work considers how unlearning the history of Qajar photography entails deemphasizing the Qajar's king Naser Al Din Shah's fascination with photography's technological newness and instead exposes what desires his fascination was tethered to. This piece brings into conversation techno-historical overlaps between carpet weaving, the Jacquard machine, and computational arts, opening up critical questions about gender vis-à-vis production, labor, and computation within both carpets and computers as media interface. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Approximately four million Iranians live outside their home country today. As a proportion of the local population, Sweden is home to the largest Iranian expatriate community in the world - some 121,000 strong. Its members are diverse in all respects and have achieved remarkable success in their new country. This article examines attitudes held by Swedes of Iranian origin about Israel, as well as the factors that influence these attitudes. Data were gathered by means of a Swedish-language questionnaire distributed to members of the local Iranian community via social networks. Their answers suggest that most of the Iranian diaspora holds a conciliatory attitude towards the Iranian-Israeli conflict and may have the potential to effect a rapprochement between the two countries. However, many members of the community are passive or silent, clearly exposed to the threat of their home country's regime. Hence, it may not be possible for them to realize their peace-making potential. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores domestic religious practices of Iranian Muslim women in Los Angeles. In the diasporic context, Iranian women's voluntary engagement in vernacular Islamic practices is often associated with an unreflexive pursuit of religion and lack of agency or with complicity with the Islamic Republic's conservative brand of Shiism. To examine the complexities of such practices in the United States, this research relies on the ethnography of a monthly domestic gathering in LA that offers a hybrid blend of multiple devotional and social genres. The article demonstrates that the event's performative and affective characteristics cater to a range of individual framings of the shared ritual and allow for complex and multilayered modes of engaging with the practice of faith. Further, it argues that vernacular Islamic practices in the diaspora are not always tied to individuals' expression of religious conviction and pursuit of piety. By depicting the material and sensory aspects of the space, the article suggests that such rituals can serve as sites for engaging in a mode of diasporic nostalgia that does not commonly have a place in Iranian communities' nostalgic narratives of the homeland. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since 9/11, Iranian Americans have challenged their racialization as troublesome terrorists through cultural productions that emphasize how they belong in a multicultural America. In this paper, I argue that these Iranian Americans perform "Persian/American exceptionalism," a representational strategy that embraces capitalist conspicuous consumption and touts universalist notions of freedom. In so doing, they attempt to erase post-revolutionary Iran and its association with political Islam from the U.S. imaginary as part of an effort to distance themselves from two major flashpoints in U.S.-Middle Eastern history – the Iran Hostage Crisis and September 11th. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article we ethnographically investigate how diasporic Iranians in Aotearoa/New Zealand deployed a variety of foodways in emphasizing varied identity constructs in different contexts and to different audiences. We argue that Iranian migrants experienced a cleft habitus that prompted hyper-reflexivity and associated strategic identity discourses and performances. Moreover, we analyze their diasporic reflexivity and practices through 'bottom-up' national identity constructions and performances and its four modalities of talking, choosing, consuming, and performing the nation. Diasporic Iranians frequently highlighted what they considered to be ideally Iranian-as-Persian in attempts to position themselves as secular Iranians/Muslims and in contradiction to the host society's prevalent prejudices concerning 'fundamentalist Arabs', 'Middle Easterners' and 'Muslims'. In doing this, they strategically consumed foods (most notably pork and red wine) considered to be 'taboo' under Islamic religious beliefs and did so especially in contexts dominated by their Pākehā (New Zealand European) hosts; they also invented new food symbolisms and rituals in collective celebrations (such as Yalda) to draw attention to a glorious imagined past – Persian and Iranian – which was often not recognized by their host society and which positioned the diasporic Iranians as secular and cultural. As such we address a marked lacuna in research investigating the food-identity-nationalism nexus among diasporic Iranians in general and in Aotearoa/New Zealand specifically. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article seeks to demonstrate that there is a particular quality of the writings of Iranian Diaspora authors. Women who were forced to leave their homeland chose the language of the host country to express the traumatic experience of the (self-)exile, the process of assimilation to the foreign land and their gradual integration into it. Autobiographical texts ranging from pure autobiography to autobiographical novels form a species of female writing that simultaneously traces the literary production of an entire generation of exiles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the diasporic subjectivities of Iranians in Malaysia, specifically how homeland and host country's national domestic policies and bilateral state relations, in addition to international politics, mold Iranians' diasporic discourses, organizations, and economics. Positioned within the broader scholarship, my ethnography in Kuala Lumpur identifies the specificity and diversity of Iranian diasporic subjects that embed three accompanying processes of (1) fragmentation along the overlapping lines of the socioeconomic, the political, the ethnic, and the gendered; (2) polarization denoting open opposition of political ideologies and allegiances, religious interpretations, as well as ethnic and gender identities; (3) and pluralization as consciousness accommodating free and equal interaction and communication among diverse groups. Exploring these processes, I argue that the Iranians who observed, discussed, and imagined their own fragmentation and polarization, also developed a pluralist consciousness informed by the host country's diverse backdrop. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran is a diasporic memoir that simultaneously challenges Roland Barthes' Death of the Author and benefits from the said vacant position Barthes bid farewell. The vacated authorial seat, previously occupied by a majority of eastern and western male authors by tradition, is an invitation for diasporic female authors. Azar Nafisi and other Iranian female memoirists like Marina Nemat, Masih Alinejad, Shirin Ebadi, and others have long had their voices, fantasies, and beings conventionally constrained by the banality of their day-to-day lives, not necessarily by the male figures in their lives, but under the strict patriarchal watch that speculates every dim corner of their private lives. The exilic life in diaspora is a condition of liminality that thrusts the individual into an in-between state of constant becoming. In diaspora, the selective nature of memory, as an elusive and illusive faculty, contributes to the author's process of identity-making. The homeless author cuts off her roots from homeland, so that she may float on the tides with no solid destination; but the uncertainty, also, presents authorship as a liminal initiatiary step for the author to construct her identity where belonging seems to be a bygone tale. As such, Nafisi, the previous reader of Nabokov's Lolita in Tehran, occupies the vacated seat of the dead author as a diasporic author and pens her worldview from the position of an exile in form of a memoir, Reading Lolita in Tehran, a mouthpiece for the hitherto silent reader. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Family archives have become the source of nostalgic 1.5 and second-generation diasporic cultural work as artists seeking to understand their family histories and to negotiate liminal identities remediate private home movies, photos, and postmemorial narratives. The liminal position of these artists leads to imaginative remediations that dwell in what could have been, prompting a subjunctive nostalgia for a future past cut short by revolution and war. By focusing on the online circulation of remediated pre-Revolutionary Iranian family photos and home movies, I demonstrate that digitized images of this particular time-space (the chronotope of pre-Revolution Iran) have become an evocative site of memory for the Iranian diasporic postgeneration. When these images are remediated through art and circulated digitally online, they move horizontally across the postgeneration along with the subjunctive nostalgia they prompt, creating opportunities for affiliation and recognition that contribute to diasporic collective memory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the concept of consciousness and liminality in the Iranian Diaspora and the way Iranians create digital diasporas where they can practise cultural identities outside the homeland. The discussion elaborates on the concept of traditional dowreh (family/social circle) in the fibre of Persian culture and then illustrates the creation of a virtual dowreh among Persian bloggers in the diaspora and the reasons that might contribute to the formation of such a digital dowreh in the diaspora. By exploring a section of a weblog called “Friday for Living” it demonstrates that weblogs provide a unique opportunity for the Persian diasporic bloggers to revive a dowreh in a virtual way where they can get together and practise cultural identities in the diaspora while living between two cultures. The examination of “Friday for Living” also reveals that the virtual dowreh for this group of Iranian diasporic bloggers acts as a community of practice that assigns the members a domain, membership, and commitment, and members took part in joint activities by sharing their stories and experiences.

Befarmaeed Sham, an Iranian diasporic media production adapted from the original UK reality show “Come Dine with me” features Iranian diaspora of diverse backgrounds as contestants in a cooking reality show. The success of the show has been unprecedented among audiences back home in Iran, reaching millions of households. Using discourse analysis this article examines the potential of reality TV in widening the scope of public sphere and in providing a space for participation and representation. The key practices to illustrate this are ways diaspora position themselves as subjects through discursive practices to express agency in generating, participating and sharing opinions. Casual talk and the entertaining attribute of reality TV focused on the everyday life of ordinary people, constructs a space to normalize audience engagement with what is otherwise, restrictive taboo topics embedded in themes around belonging, homeland, gender, and identity. The article concludes that the broad system of discourse used by diaspora as participants in the reality show constructs a space for representation. It can be considered as a contribution to enhancing the public sphere to not only communicate and connect with their homeland but to express opinions on broader social issues as a practice of civic engagement. This unique adaptation of reality TV is an important aspect of globalization and in using new media to mobilize diaspora in connecting to homeland.

The Islamic revolution of 1979 and its developments have been the major reasons for the mass migration of Iranian intellectuals to the West and the main topic of the Iranian diaspora's literary texts. However, since the turn of the twenty-first century, especially in France, a new generation of Iranian women novelists has created a shift in traditional post-revolutionary memoir writing by focusing on more individual themes such as childhood, the body, and trauma. In this article, the author explores the various ways in which two of these novelists, Negar Djavadi and Chahdortt Djavann, have represented levels of trauma in their auto-fictional narratives of the Islamic revolution. In this regard, starting from a conceptual representation of trauma as reliving the historical past by protagonists, it is shown how both psychological and cultural definitions of the trauma are depicted in these novels. The article suggests that this multidirectional approach allows the authors to overcome the alienation caused by the Islamic revolution's contradictory nature in a postcolonial era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study investigates immigrant parents' family language policies in regards to their children's heritage language development and maintenance by utilizing Spolsky's theoretical model on which research on family language policy (FLP) considerably draw. Following the three core components of the FLP model, Iranian parents' beliefs, practices and efforts in relation to their children's home language (i.e. Persian/Farsi) acquisition and maintenance are investigated. The data were collected through semi-structured interviews with twenty-five parents of Persian-English bilinguals (6–18 year old) in New Zealand. The findings reveal that although the parents hold positive beliefs towards the family language acquisition and maintenance, there are discrepancies between their language ideologies and family language practices. In light of these inconsistencies between parents' beliefs and their actual family language practices and efforts to preserve the heritage language, we argue that to raise their children bilingually, immigrant parents should not only have strong beliefs towards family language acquisition and maintenance, but also their everyday practices and efforts should be in line with their beliefs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We are living among a global transformation in which neoliberal policies have created a precarious existence for various individuals and groups, including migrants around the globe. Precarity as a concept has become progressively widespread for making sense of the insecurities stemming from neoliberal policies, especially, flexible employment, ongoing decrease of welfare protection, and finding market solutions to social problems. Using an ethnographic approach, this paper aims to explore how Iranians in the UK overcome precarity. We found that precarity forces Iranians to confront their situation by considering their specific social experiences. Joining various transnational activities and networks, using transnational communication media, migrants convert their self-awareness into a strategy in order to overcome marginality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent years have seen a growing number of studies on onward migration and specifically the motivations international migrants may have for leaving their first country of settlement. Many of these studies argue that onward migration occurs as migrants pursue opportunities to study, work and reunite with family members in different places. So far little research has been undertaken to understand how affect, emotion and imaginings of home also contribute to onward migration decision-making. This study aims to fill this lacuna in the research by focusing on the case of diasporic Iranians who initially moved to Sweden as refugees in the 1980s and 1990s, stayed for at least five years and then subsequently made the decision to move on to other parts of the Iranian diaspora. The findings of the study illustrate that the participants' onward migration decisions may be related to their emotional encounters with places over time, and their evolving imaginings of what constitutes ideal homes in diasporic space. The study draws on rich material collected through multiple life history narrative interviews conducted with Swedish-Iranian migrants currently living in London, UK and Toronto, Canada. • Affect, emotion and imaginings of home may influence where migrants prefer to settle and build their lives. • Some migrants make multiple migrations in search of their 'ideal' homes in diasporic space. • Further research is needed to better understand how the processes of homemaking and onward migration are interlinked. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite suggestions that multiple citizenships offer enhanced access to security, mobility, and rights, dual nationals of countries like Iran may instead experience greater insecurity, immobility, and disruption of rights. This article offers a brief overview of recent literature and controversies surrounding dual citizenship and then focuses on the Iranian case, demonstrating the limits of dual citizenship as felt by diasporic Iranians. The winds of geopolitical change may affect which nation's dual citizens will be targeted in a given time period, but the impact of geopolitical constraints must be considered in any explanations of the costs and benefits of dual citizenship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]