Performing (Trans)National Iranianness: The Choreographic Cartographies of Diasporic Iranian Dancers and Performance Artists

Since the end of the Cold War, and increasingly since the events of 9/11 and the subsequent global War on Terror, racialized and gendered representations of the Middle East have circulated through Euro-American news channels, political speeches, popular culture, and global art markets. Many of these representations, which typically overemphasize terrorist men and oppressed women, maintain and reconfigure colonial tropes of Middle Eastern subjects as temporally backward and geographically out of step within the forward-moving plot of modernity. For Iranians specifically, Iran’s 1979 Revolution, the Iranian hostage crisis (1979–1981), and the current alleged threat of Iranian nuclear weapons code them within the Euro-American imaginary as belonging to a time prior to and a place outside of Western civilization—an imaginary that is particularly fueled by Iran’s official ban on many forms of dance performance. This dissertation argues that, in the face of hegemonic representations of racial, ethnic, and geo-temporal otherness, performance becomes a powerful mode for diasporic Iranians to reveal and destabilize dominant (trans)national narratives and to map out emergent forms of belonging in diasporic spaces. The dissertation engages in ethnography, oral history, discourse analysis, and performance analysis in order to examine the lives and artistic works of diasporic Iranian dancers and performance artists in North America and France, in particular./nWhile there has been an increase in scholarship on diasporic Arab and South Asian cultural production following 9/11 and the global War on Terror, diasporic Iranian cultural production remains undertheorized. This lack persists despite the fact that contemporary Euro-American geopolitics related to the Middle East and Islam similarly impact the production, circulation, and consumption of diasporic Iranian performance. My dissertation subsequently argues that diasporic Iranians use dance and performance to imagine, contest, and (re)invent “Iranianness,” what it means to be Iranian, through movements that literally and metaphorically negotiate the local and global geopolitics that construct and conflate Middle Eastern and Muslim subjects. Through what I call “choreographic cartographies,” my project develops a framework that theorizes the kinesthetic mapping of diasporic Iranian performers as practices that disrupt and/or sustain state and representational regimes of power. In the corporeal making of space, both on and off stage, diasporic Iranian dancers and performance artists reveal themselves as embodied maps of the racialized, gendered, classed, and aesthetic politics that travel with and (re)shape their performing bodies./nIn performances that range from nationalistic and nostalgic to subcultural and subversive, performers in my study draw from, reconstruct, craft, and/or experiment with a wide range of Iranian movement, aesthetics, and social practices. I argue that, as choreographic cartographies, these performances demonstrate that multiple geo-temporalities emerge through embodied memory and kinesthetic relationality to “home” and displacement. This dissertation reveals how these performances destabilize hegemonic national narratives that determine diaspora as a unidirectional, neoliberal space and time of arrival, contributing instead to scholarship that establishes diaspora as an affective, corporeal, and multi-temporal practice of negotiation and becoming.

Advisor: Kwan, SanSan