Constructing Identity in Iranian-American Self-Narrative

"Defined by the Iranian Revolution, forced migration and diaspora, Iranian-American autobiographies center in the experience of rupture and discontinuity. Taking autobiographical writing as performance of identity, this study identifies their narrative patterns and communicative functions in the interaction of author, diaspora and American market. Especially authors' disidentification with traditionalism and politicized Islam and their construction of a 'Persian' instead of Iranian identity speaks not only to the diaspora, but is also geared towards greater acceptance in American society. What is more, self-orientalization aims to satisfy the expectations of American readers. However, this seems to be the price that Iranian-American autobiographers need to pay if they want to work as cultural brokers on behalf of a country that has become largely demonized. Tracing these dynamics of individual and collective identity construction within one of the youngest minorities in the USA, this study offers insights that are not only of scholarly but also of political importance"--

List of contents

Introduction PART I: TROUBLED HERITAGE 1. Explaining Departure: Narratives of Victimicy 2. A Usable Past: Construction of Religion and Alternative Identifications PART II: LANGUAGE, BODY, AND THE IRANIAN-AMERICAN SELF 3. The Interplay of Language and Identity Construction 4. The Iranian-American Body In Between PART III: CULTURE INHERITED/IN FLUX 5. Between Fiction and Fact: Telling the Iranian-American Self 6. Relative Identities: The Iranian-American Self in Its Relation to Others 7. Imagining "Home:" Between Persian Paradise and American Arcadia Conclusion

Report

"Constructing Identity in Iranian-American Self-Narrative is an important work concerned with the 'performance of identity' ... . It speaks to an increasing appetite for scholarship that captures the parallel growth in minority literature with transnational echoes. Members of the academic community and the public will find it useful in offering an account of an Iranian American complicated sense of agency in a globe fraught with reductions and over-simplifications." (Waleed F. Mahdi, European Journal of American Culture, Vol. 36 (3), September, 2017)

Product details

• Authors: Blaim, M Blaim, M. Blaim, M. Sella Blaim, Kenneth A Loparo, Kenneth A. Loparo, Amnon Sella, Maria D. Wagenknecht
• Publisher: Palgrave UK
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 11.02.2015
• EAN: 9781137479617
• ISBN: 978-1-137-47961-7
• No. of pages: 230
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > General and comparative literary studies; B, Ethnic Studies, Cultural Studies, Ethnicity, Literature: history & criticism, Ethnic groups and multicultural studies, North America (USA and Canada), Ethnicity Studies, Race and Ethnicity Studies, Literature, Modern—20th century, Twentieth-Century Literature, Literary studies: c 1900 to c 2000, Ethnology—Middle East, Middle Eastern Culture, Palgrave Literature Collection, America—Literatures, North American Literature, Middle Eastern Literature, Literature: history and criticism, America;culture;fiction;identity;migration;USA