Iranian-Americans

Based on eighteen months of ethnographic fieldwork from 2004 to 2006 among a range of Iranian organizations in Washington, D.C., this article argues that the studied organizations were engaged, without being always necessarily aware of it or formulating it as such, in what we may call an “ethos transplant:” a transformation of “Iranian character” and political culture to make it more susceptible to “democracy;”a subject-making project in the Foucauldian sense.  We trace this medicalized discourse about “national traits” and “political culture” to the 19th century and review several outbursts of this approach in the Iranian and international scene thenceforth.  Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel, Dracula, is discussed at length as the epitome of this kind of approach

Since the Islamic Revolution of 1979 and the deposition of the pro-American Pahlavi regime in Iran, an interest in the country as a mythical, complex, and conflict-ridden place has magnified among the American public. Exilic Iranian memoirs began to emerge after the 1979 Iranian Revolution and surged after September 11, 2001, claiming to provide an authentic depiction and explanation of the  Iranian society and politics and the ways in which it relates to the West and Western interests. The present article aims to analyze the ways in which post-Revolutionary Iran has been framed through memoirs written by Iranian-Americans. Through a framing analysis of fifteen selected memoirs on Iran,  the article identifies and presents six main frames in the analyzed texts based on Edward Said’s Orientalism. The paper concludes that instead of providing a more or less objective depiction that acknowledges the diversity and heterogeneity of the Iranian society and politics, the selected texts reflect the existence of an industry of memoirists that produce content depicting Iran in an orientalist way. Such an approach further inhibits any meaningful understanding and rectification of the existing misconceptions.