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Crossing Boundaries: Comparative Iranian Diaspora Literature from Europe and Beyond

This panel considers the Iranian diaspora and its cultural production among contemporary European writers and intellectuals. Drawing upon literature from the French, German, and British contexts, both prose and poetry, the panel considers the unique interventions that Iranian-European writers are contributing to a corpus of expression and thinking that expands the Iranian diaspora beyond geographic or singular cultural mappings.. Panelists will explore comparative approaches to transatlantic as well as intra-European writers and poets to articulate some of the ways that European writers both play with and undermine the expectations of their hyphenated Iranian identities.

Presentations

The “eye” and “being rooted in the absence of place”: on the Relation of Exile, Diaspora, Language and Bodily Being in Madjidi’s "Marx et la poupée" and Farhad Showghi’s "Wolkenflug spielt Zerreissprobe"
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The presentation will deal with two of the more recent books of the European-Iranian Diaspora Literature that got both published in 2017, one in France, the other one in Germany: On the one hand, we have Maryam Madjidi’s "Marx et la poupée" ("Marx and the Doll"), on the other hand, Farhad Showghi’s "Wolkenflug spielt Zerreissprobe" ("Flight of Clouds plays Endurance Test"). The first one is called a novel, the second one a book of poetry. Despite the great differences between these two books, they seem to have one thing in common: they kind of closely turn around and/or directly work with certain quotes at the head of passages, especially with two quotes that each stem from a French philosopher: one from Simone Weil and the other one from Maurice Merleau-Ponty. And again, despite the big differences between these two thinkers in general (one – to put it roughly – being metaphysical, the other phenomenological) and despite the big differences between the two quotes in question in particular, what in a certain way unites these two quotes is the fact that they both distinctively act out the fundamental questions of the relationship of perception, places, bodies and migratory moves and that they then become in return true power or impulse units for each of the above mentioned books.
So, the presentation will deal with exactly these questions and with problems and aspects of exile and bodily being and of how our two authors Madjidi and Showghi make literary use of the chosen philosophical lines. In the course of a deeper reflection on the interacting of memory and actualisation, ‘seeing’ (in a broader sense) and conceiving space and nature(s) through words and body alike I will, in this talk, elaborate a possible reading of these two texts that are part of the wider array of what I call the “Poetics of Migration”.
By doing this, my presentation actively contributes to the focus of the panel it is part of: the consideration and discussion of the Iranian diasporic cultural production among contemporary European writers. As pointed out, it hereby uses a at once comparative and interdisciplinary approach.

A Transatlantic Study of Iranian Diasporic Intellectualism
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In this paper, through a comparative study of the thought and political views of two prolific Iranian diasporic intellectuals from two different geographies and generations, namely Hamid Dabashi, a first-generation Iranian immigrant to the U.S., and Navid Kermani, who was born to an Iranian family in Germany, I will argue that the political discourse in the land of residence around the land of origin (in this case, Iran) plays a distinctive role in the formation of the political views and ‘cultural imaginaries’ of diasporic communities. These views and imaginaries are mutually reflected in and reproduced by the diasporic intellectuals' cultural and academic productions which deal with the homeland.
Hamid Dabashi, a distinguished professor at Columbia University, situates his intellectual project within the postcolonial critique of Western Orientalism, U.S. imperialism and Israel’s settler colonialism. Accordingly, he responds to the U.S. media’s misrepresentations of Iran and the Middle East more generally through formulating an Iranian cosmopolitanism by referring to the history of Persian literature and Iranian Shiism.
Navid Kermani, an acclaimed author of many novels and scholarly works on Islam, advocates tolerance and an interfaith dialogue among different religions, including Islam, Christianity and Judaism, to rectify the European manichean image of Islam and the conflicts between the above-mentioned religions. Thanks to the romanticizing image Germans and other Europeans hold of Persia and the “Orientˮ at large, Iran has not been the focus of Kermani’s postcolonial project. Instead, his primary focus is on European Islamophobia, to which he responds by portraying Islam and Muslim communities in Europe in a more differentiated and colorful light.
In this paper, I argue that besides many personal concerns and interests that each author may or may not have, it is the diverging dominant political discourses in the U.S. and Germany that have contributed greatly to the emergence of dissimilar concerns in the literature and scholarship by Iranian American and Iranian German authors.

Unmooring Iranian Diaspora Literature: The Postnational Poetry of Mimi Khalvati and Roger Sedarat
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Peyman Vahabzadeh, in ‘Where Will I Dwell?: A Sociology of Literary Identity within the Iranian Diaspora’ (2008) mapped out the movement of Iranian diaspora literature from “exile literature” to “expatriate literature”. He explains that “exile literature” ‘mentally resided in Iran’, whereas “expatriate literature’ moves away from the paralysis of exile and works towards an assimilation into the American literary stream. This paper pushes Vahabzadeh’s trajectory further and argues for traces of the “postnational” in Iranian diaspora poetry, which in turn, puts pressure on the demarcations of national borders that fortify “exile literature” and “expatriate literature”. The way in which two poets in the Iranian diaspora - Mimi Khalvati (British) and Roger Sedarat (American) - interact with the traditions of both British and Iranian literatures destabilises strict international borders and undermine binary “Iran and the West” discourses by playing on and subtly shedding light on the ways in which Iranian literature and European literatures have always been in exchange and interfusion. The paper argues that Khalvati and Sedarat do not do away with notions of nation, border and inherited tradition but re-orient their signifiers to understand concepts of diaspora, hybridity, and nationality that make up the Iranian diaspora in alternative ways. While recognising the difficulty of labelling any poetry with such a weighted word the purpose of this paper is to introduce the questions that are triggered by looking at Iranian diaspora literature through a postnational paradigm. Such a study is arguably overdue in a category of literature that has been so focussed on the border between Iran and the West, and, in opening up such an enquiry, unsettles and encourages important questions about American literature and British literature as well.