A diaspora’s flag is the symbolic representation of that community. The Iranian flag, however, is a contested symbol among the Iranian diasporic community. As this research shows, the Iranian diaspora exhibits its cultural, political, and religious identities through three different Iranian flags. Through qualitative research, entailing months of participant observation and a series of semi-structured interviews, I investigate the underlying reasons for this flag disagreement. Through this research, I argue that an Iranian diaspora’s pre-migration communal history and post-migration environmental factors influence its establishment and maintenance in the host nation. In this study, I revisit the diaspora literature to argue for the complexity of the concept of diaspora. I demonstrate how a diaspora assists the community in restructuring its lost cultural identity and establishing a social space to belong, in the time of the spatial and cultural dislocation. The Iranian diaspora’s flag selection is a symbolic representation of communal establishment and identity formation for the community. The Iranian flag debate indicates a communal divide; it is also an instrument to set social boundaries to develop a community under the symbolic representation of the ancestral homeland. Furthermore, this research explores how the Iranian diaspora uses the Iranian flag as a proxy to indicate socio-communal expectations and intersectional social hierarchies that already exist among the Iranian community. When discussing the flag’s symbolic significance, the respondents relate the flag with three recurring themes of religion, gender, and sexuality. The association of the Iranian flag with these three social factors indicates the communal dynamics of the Iranian diaspora. These communal dynamics establish certain norms and values, but they also redefine each flag based on its socio-political history. The attached meaning to each flag consequently causes tension and disagreement among the Iranian community, which is not solely political. / Dissertation / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / The Iranian diaspora is a young and growing community that came into existence after the Islamic revolution of 1979. In this diaspora, there are three different flags on display, and each flag represents a socio-political ideology. The symbolic application of the flag facilitates this research in exploring the social interaction among the Iranian diaspora residing in the Greater Toronto Area and York Region. Through the examination of the flag debates, I investigate the significance of community building in the new host nation. I critically analyze the communal divide existing among the Iranian community and the flag debate that is a symbolic representation of Iranian group dynamics. The discussion of the flag for many starts a conversation about community development and socio-communal hierarchy. While the different versions of the Iranian flags bring the diasporic communities together, they also indicate social segregation caused by religious, gender, and sexual hierarchies existing among the Iranian diaspora.

Since the 1979 revolution the Iranian popular culture, specifically the popular music, has turned into a peculiar landscape complicated by politics, regulations, technology and the border-crossing of resources. The Islamic Republic’s initial ban on popular music caused a massive exodus of artists and producers out of the country and eventually to Los Angeles. There, the popular music industry’s resources and talents reunited and resumed their production. At the same time, inside Iran, the absence of a popular culture (Iranian or otherwise) created a vacuum in the public sphere that the government-endorsed mystic art-house cinema and traditional music could not fill. The Iranian public turned to its now-exiled pop artists and despite the ban, the cassettes and videotapes of the Los Angeles productions flooded the black markets. Thereafter, when describing music, the terms diasporic and popular became synonymous for Iranians. The present study examines the relevance of the Iranian diasporic popular culture to the construction of the Iranian youth identity and identifies global satellite age trends from within the diaspora that subvert or revise the hegemonic order of Tehrangeles popular culture. / text

This study will examine the impact of the hotly-debated sanctions against Iran from the perspective of the civilians who live in a country other than their sanctioned homeland, yet keep ties with their country of origin, specifically Iranians immigrants in Toronto and Halifax. Using transnationalism theory, this study shows that human consequences of the sanctions are not limited to the Iranians who live inside Iran but reach out to immigrants who live across borders. In particular, the more extensive these ties are, the more severe are the effects of the sanctions on all the people involved. Although sanctions are ostensibly to pressure a government, my study demonstrates that the effect of sanctions has transnational consequences beyond that which is desirable or foreseen. This study broadens our understanding of human consequences of economic sanctions. It also has implications for policy-makers to consider their immigration populations before imposing sanctions.

abstract: Shirin Neshat is recognized as the most prominent artist of the Iranian diaspora. Her two photographic series, Women of Allah (1993-97) and The Book of Kings (2012), are both reactions to the socio-political events and the change of female identity in Iran. The search for Iranian identity has a long tradition in Iranian photography. Neshat's figures, with their penetrating gazes, heavy draperies, and body postures, make reference to nineteenth-century Qajar photography. Through various cultural elements in her artworks, Neshat critiques oppression in Iranian society. Neshat employs and inscribes Persian poetry to communicate contradiction within Iranian culture. To read Neshat’s photography, it is crucial to register her use of Persian language and historical poetry. Although the reading and understanding of the Persian texts Neshat inscribes on her photographs plays a fundamental role in the interpretation of her work, Neshat’s artworks are not entirely conceptual. The lack of translation of these included texts in Neshat’s exhibitions indicates a decorative use of Persian calligraphy. The Western eye can aesthetically explore this exotic Eastern decorative calligraphy. The formal qualities of Neshat’s photographs remain, even if the viewer is unable to read or understand the Persian texts. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis Art History 2015

In 1979, the socio-­political landscape of Iran was transformed beyond recognition. After years of conflict between the Shah and a myriad of political opposition groups, it seemed that the people had indeed triumphed over an authoritarian monarch. As is now widely known, their short lived victory transformed into a systematic programme of terror that turned back on and attacked those that the Islamic Republic deemed contrary to its values. The ‘bloody decade' of the 1980s saw thousands of executions and disappearances under the cloak of the war with neighbouring Iraq. The records of these massacres are still largely unreliable and/or incomplete. The programme of terror in question, that ensued and persists up to the present day, has instigated a sprawling transnational Diaspora with a familiar but rarely divulged public secret. My doctoral thesis comprises two main parts in relation to these events. They are connected by the running theme of alternative narratives of past violence, and a post-­traumatic political activism. This is an intimate ethnography that examines global processes (revolution, Diaspora, transnational activism) from the vantage point of local and particular histories of Lur, former Fadaiyan guerilla fighters in Oslo. In the second part of this work, these histories are located within the collective movement of the Iran Tribunal, a literal attempt to make secrets public and to bring together subjective experiences of violence into a truth-‐telling process. Opening up a new space for critical reflection, this study proposes an alternative lens of analysis of tumultuous historical processes. With regards to their actors, efforts are made to better understand how lives and narratives are ordered around the characteristic disorder of violence, fear and Diaspora itself, and how subjective traumas manifest into collective, and in this case transnational, movements. My ethnography of disordered and interrupted lives works to inform studies of such critical contemporary realities as well as to ethnographically introduce the Iranian Diasporas' public secret of violence for wider anthropological enquiry, and to contribute towards its critical analysis.

Onward migration is an understudied process whereby people leave their country of origin, settle in a second country for a period of time, and then migrate on to a third country. This dissertation explores the transnational trajectories of one specific group of onward migrants. These are highly educated people who moved from Iran to Sweden as refugees following the Iranian Revolution in 1979. Then, after settling in Sweden for a period of time they subsequently moved on to London, England. Melissa Kelly explores how people live their lives across places. Using life history interviews conducted with individual onward migrants, Kelly draws out and contex-tualizes the individual and shared experiences of these migrants in specific space-time contexts, and highlights the meaning of both settlement and mobility in their lives. In doing so, she explores the circumstances that underlie the onward migration phenomenon, drawing attention to different geographical levels of scale, and linking social, economic and cultural perspectives. The main argument of the dissertation is that while place continues to be of sig-nificance, a broader understanding of migrant integration processes is required. Onward migration disrupts the categories usually used to comprehend the integration of migrants in narrowly defined nation state contexts, and encourages a more nuanced understanding of how we conceptualize both migration and settlement.

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Ce mémoire porte sur les problématiques de la représentativité, de l’occidentalisation et du discours orientaliste dans les mémoires autobiographiques rédigés par des femmes iraniennes vivant actuellement aux États-Unis. Basant nos arguments sur diverses théories critiques post-colonialistes (portant sur l’identité exilée/immigrante, la tradition orientaliste, la représentativité dans le genre autobiographique, l’occidentalisation, etc.), nous questionnerons l’authenticité narrative (et l’intention) des écrivaines irano-états-uniennes en explorant le processus d’assimilation culturelle (voire d’occidentalisation) qui engendre en elles une auto-perception fondamentalement orientaliste. Une fois internalisée par l’écrivaine, ce regard orientaliste est projeté sur le peuple iranien dont elle prétend être la porte-parole sincère et bien-intentionnée. Par contre, notre analyse déconstructiviste des mémoires irano-états-uniens démontre qu’il existe dans ces récits une tendance à renforcer la dichotomie orientaliste dominante (Occident-moderne-supérieur / Orient-arriéré-inférieur). Bien que les écrivaines prétendent de vouloir dévoiler les réalités du pays aux lecteurs et lectrices occidentaux, elles ne font que réitérer les stéréotypes négatifs sur l’Iran – les même stéréotypes d’ailleurs déjà promus par les médias de masse états-uniens. / This paper focuses on the interconnected issues of representation, Westernization, and Orientalist discourse in autobiographical memoirs written by Iranian female writers presently living in the United States. Founding my arguments on various post-colonialist theories (dealing with exile/immigrant identity, Orientalism, the issue of representation in the autobiographical genre, Westernization discourse, etc.), I question the discursive authenticity (and authorial intent) of Iranian-American female writers by exploring the process of cultural assimilation (i.e. Westernization) that engenders within them a fundamentally Orientalist self-perception. Once internalized by the writer, this Orientalist gaze is projected onto the Iranian people, whom the writer claims to be a credible and well-meaning representative of. However, my deconstructionist analysis of Iranian-American memoirs illustrates that these writers only contribute in reinforcing the dominant Orientalist binary (West-modern-superior / East-backwards-inferior). Although the writers claim to unveil the so-called realities of Iranian society to the Western readers, they merely reiterate the same negative stereotypes on Iran already present in American mainstream media.