ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I will be analyzing recent Iranian diasporic literature, using an interdisciplinary approach, drawing upon theories from cultural studies, education, sociology, literature, and diaspora studies. I argue that this literature has gone through three distinct waves, mirroring the changes that the community (especially those in the United States) has experienced over the last forty years. The first wave constitutes the literature produced from the 1980s to 2001, the second wave from 2001 to 2007, and the third wave from 2007 until the present. My focus will be on the third wave of the literature. In this period, the literature has begun to explore the impacts of discrimination and racialization on Iranian diasporic subjects and follow their effects on Iranian-hyphenated families. Using Alejandro Portes and Rubén Rumbaut’s theory of the five different types of acculturation, I argue that first-generation Iranian diasporans who migrated in the 1970s to the late 1980s adopted a “consonant resistance to acculturation” and remained loyal to their heritage and culture and mostly socialized with their co-ethnics, while their children, the 1.5- and second-generation diasporans (whose novels I will be analyzing), embodied “dissonant acculturation,” brought about due to the discrimination and racialization they faced in society, and particularly in school. In other words, because of being “Othered,” the 1.5- and second-generation diasporans wish to disassociate themselves from their heritage, which in turn brings tension and conflict into their families. These conflicts manifest in the literature in the shape of miscommunications, familial estrangement, and intentional creation of physical space between family members. What these novels suggest is that a resolution to such conflicts may be found by spending time with co-ethnics of one’s own ages and backgrounds.
