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Moving from the Margin toward the Center: Some Thoughts on the Emerging Field of Iranian Diaspora Studies
- Mashriq & Mahjar: Journal of Middle East and North African Migration Studies
- Moise A. Khayrallah Center for Lebanese Diaspora Studies
- Volume 5, Number 2, 2018
- Article
- Additional Information
Mashriq & Mahjar 5, no. 2 (2018), 202–208 ISSN 2169-4435 Persis Karim is Director of the Center for Iranian Diaspora Studies at San Francisco State University. Email: persiskarim@sfsu.edu Persis Karim MOVING FROM THE MARGIN TOWARD THE CENTER: SOME THOUGHTS ON THE EMERGING FIELD OF IRANIAN DIASPORA STUDIES Twenty-five years ago, when I was learning Persian and working toward a master’s degree in Middle East studies at the University of Texas, I wondered how I would ever get to Iran to do any kind of research or field study. Even while Iraqi president Saddam Hussein was becoming the new enemy and Iran seemed to be fading into the background, the ongoing chilly relations which began with the Iranian Revolution in 1979 and the 444-day hostage crisis made traveling to Iran for anyone like me―an American woman born of an Iranian father—a challenge, to say the least. In order to go there, I would have to engage in the arduous process of getting an Iranian birth certificate, then an Iranian passport, and all that would take convincing my father, who left Iran after the Second World War, the most difficult task of all. But as I continued onto a PhD program in comparative literature and studied major works of literature from Iran’s contemporary, pre- and post-revolutionary period, I began to see the importance of another narrative that was not yet documented or understood: the Iranian diaspora. When I began my dissertation toward the end of the 1990s, I understood how intensely I was seeking my own story in the literature of Iran, in the literature of the United States, and the stories of more recent exiles and immigrants who had arrived in significant numbers in the period between 1980 and 1990 when Iran was in a protracted war with Iraq and when many were fleeing the new realities of a country that had been both isolated and challenged because of its new regime. I did not find that story of immigration or diaspora, but the experience of writing about contemporary Iranian literature gave me an important idea that has shaped my academic and personal path in ways I am only beginning to fathom. After meeting many Iranian immigrants and firstgeneration Iranian Americans during my graduate education, I Moving Through the Margin Toward the Center 203 realized that they, too, had a story that needed to be told and shared. My role in editing the first collection of writing (fiction, nonfiction, and poetry) with Dr. Mehdi Khorrami (NYU) during my final year of graduate school taught me an important lesson about the value of human stories in the narration and documentation of larger national histories. When we undertook to collect the material for this first literary anthology, A World Between: Poems, Short Stories, and Essays by Iranian-Americans (George Braziller, 1999), I could not have imagined it would be the beginning of an important and emerging field that has, until recently, been relegated to the margins of Iranian studies and the larger field of Middle Eastern studies. In the past decade alone, I have seen the vocabulary, discourse, and scope of research on the Iranian diaspora grow exponentially. The number of young scholars working on research projects that involve Iranian diaspora topics from literature, to film, to racialization of Iranians in Europe and the United States, as well as sociological and ethnographic studies of communities of Iranians in Western Europe, North America, Australia, and other countries of the Middle East such as Turkey and Dubai, have also expanded. At each Iranian studies or Middle East studies conference I have attended in the past five years, there are many more papers and panels that address the Iranian diaspora. The most recent Association of Iranian Studies conference at the University of California, Irvine, in August 2018, for example, featured ten individual papers on Iranian diaspora topics, and a panel called “Reconceptualizing Race in the Iranian Diaspora.” Among the most recent groundbreaking studies to be published is Neda Maghbouleh’s The Limits of Whiteness: Iranian Americans and the Everyday Politics of Race (Stanford University Press, 2017). Other forthcoming publications include Mohsen Mobasher’s edited volume The...