Culture Beyond Country - by Amy Malek

Book Synopsis

Offers an in-depth exploration of the Iranian diaspora and the negotiation of belonging

With an estimated 5 to 8 million people spread across the globe, the Iranian diaspora has become a visible and dynamic cultural presence--especially in North America and Europe. Faced with shallow or distorted portrayals, diasporic Iranians have responded to persistent misrepresentations and marginalization by turning to culture as a deliberate strategy of inclusion. Reshaping how their stories are told, community organizers, artists, and entrepreneurs are actively challenging public narratives, asserting new cultural imaginaries, and navigating the terms of inclusion and exclusion, putting new visions of Iranian identity into the public eye.

Drawing on transnational ethnographic fieldwork and over 125 semi-structured interviews conducted over the course of 16 years, Culture Beyond Country offers the first comparative ethnography of these cultural strategies of inclusion, examining the distinct practices and experiences of Iranians in three key cities of the diaspora, Los Angeles, Stockholm, and Toronto. Attending to the institutional and ideological forces that come to bear on Iranian cultural organizers in these three diasporic locations, Amy Malek examines how immigrants and their descendants negotiate belonging in response to various and shifting state approaches to cultural citizenship. The volume examines how state multicultural policy influences who is empowered to represent Iranian culture, how local factors shape expressions of Iranian identity across the diaspora, and how these representations are contested within Iranian communities.

Providing a compelling transnational study of immigrant multiculturalism, cultural citizenship, and inclusion across the global Iranian diaspora, Culture Beyond Country showcases not only how the process of representing Iranian culture in the diaspora generates competing views on what it means to be Iranian, but also how competing modes of belonging subvert and reinforce existing power relations across local, national, and transnational scales.

Review Quotes

"Culture Beyond Country establishes Malek as a leading scholarly voice on Iranian diasporic culture and an expert contributor to debates on multiculturalism, migration, race and ethnicity. Meticulously researched and engagingly written, this book centers the labor of Iranian culture workers - festival volunteers, creatives and activists - to chart new paradigms for understanding citizenship and belonging."--Sarah Gualtieri, author of Between Arab and White: Race and Ethnicity in the Early Syrian American Diaspora.

"Through this rich ethnography transcending multiple cities and countries, Malek beautifully illustrates how Iranians across the diaspora enact and make claims to cultural citizenship, and in challenging negative representations, resist their exclusion and assert their belonging. She therefore provides important evidence of how cultural citizenship matters in a smart analysis useful to scholars across many disciplines."--Jean Beaman, author of Citizen Outsider: Children of North African Immigrants in France

"Amy Malek's Culture Beyond Country is an essential contribution to the growing field of Iranian Diaspora Studies. Her insightful and comparative study gives us the longer view of Iranian diaspora communities and the unique and specific ways that cultures evolve and are shaped by the forces of nation, politics, and circuitous navigations of belonging . Her work illuminates how Iranians reinvent and redeploy some of their most cherished symbols, rituals, and myths to feel at home in diasporic spaces."--Persis M. Karim, Neda Nobari Chair in Iranian Diaspora Studies, San Francisco State University

About the Author

Amy Malek is Associate Professor of Anthropology and American Studies at William & Mary.