Mass Mediating Diaspora
Iranian Exile Culture in Los Angeles
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 3891897 |
|---|---|
| Authors | David Kazanjian (University of California, Berkeley, corresponding author), Anahid Kassabian (Fordham University) |
| Year | 1996 |
| Volume | 5 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 317-331 |
| Publication date | 1996-09-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Diaspora A Journal of Transnational Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1044-2057 • E-ISSN: 1911-1568 |
| Publisher | Project MUSE (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1353/dsp.1996.0009 |
| OpenAlex | W2095321581 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 2 |
| References cited | 3 |
Diaspora 5:2 1996 Mass Mediating Diaspora: Iranian Exile Culture in Los Angeles David Kazanjian University of California, Berkeley Anahid Kassabian Fordham University The Making of Exile Cultures—Iranian Television in Los Angeles. Hamid Naficy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. In this most recent era oftransnational movements oflabor, commodity , capital, and information, distinctions among cultures and conditions of exile, diaspora, nationality, ethnicity, and race are both elusive and in need of elucidation. That need is particularly strong when such cultures and conditions are articulated in and through mass media. Studies of globalization and transnational media corporations in communications and media studies have rarely examined the continuing legacies ofcolonialism and imperialism. In turn, studies of postcoloniality, whose strongest disciplinary connections have been to literature, history, and anthropology, have been noticeably reluctant to address the realm of mass-mediated culture.1 Yet postcoloniality is routinely animated by the political economy and representational practices ofmass-media technologies. Consider how the following mass mediated representations weave a tangled web of postcolonial relations. On the one hand, the nuclear bomb-toting terrorists ofthe "Crimson Jihad" in the recent blockbuster movie True Lies represent "peoples ofthe 'Middle East' " by violently condensing Armenians, Turks, Lebanese, and Azéris along with, for example, Palestinians, Libyans, and Iranians. On the other hand, Armenian and Azeri war tactics in Karabakh are partly driven by international media coverage while that same war is consumed through mass media in Long Island and Los Angeles. To complicate the picture even further, Los Angeles-based institutions of mass media are driven by that city's surplus labor pool of working-class immigrants from the "South." Hamid Naficy's The MakingofExile Cultures—Iranian Television in Los Angeles considers mass mediated postcoloniality in new and 317 Diaspora 5:2 1996 compelling ways by looking at contemporary Iranian mass media in Los Angeles—not just television, despite the title—and its role in the constitution of Iranian exile communities and subjectivities.2 Naficy makes impressive use ofmany disciplinary methods, ranging from postcolonial theory, psychoanalytic film studies, popular culture studies, and television studies to empirically-based institutional media studies. The latter generates twenty-seven pages of raw data organized into twenty-one tables covering Iranian TV and radio program profiles, revenues, financing, and scheduling, as well as viewer/listener demographics and film and periodical profiles— data that many researchers will no doubt find generative in its own right. This interdisciplinary practice suits well Naficy's dynamic and complex project of investigating "how exiles process, through the popular culture and television programs they produce and consume , their own experiences of separation, liminality, and incorporation , as well as their resistance to incorporation and their efforts at differentiation and dissimulation" (xvi). Throughout his study, Naficy maintains a productive tension between what one could call hegemonic and counter-hegemonic cultural currents within the Iranian community. His emphasis on the "liminality" of exile culture allows him to consider not simply the opposition, but also the interdependence between diverse cultural practices: those that represent the homeland as a unified nation to which exiles belong and others that remain open to "various strategies of exilic deterritorialization and syncretic reterritorialization" (188). In addition, Naficy does not lose sight of the normative pressures exerted by mainstream US mass media on Iranian media. We have Naficy to thank for opening up a new set of questions and, we may hope, debates within fields thathave become increasingly compartmentalized as they have been institutionalized in the US academe.3 Naficy devotes the introduction and first chapter of The Making of Exile Cultures to a theoretically sophisticated definition of the object and terms of his study and then to a sketch of the task he has set out for himself—"to locate, albeit provisionally, and to theorize as a dynamic social and cultural force, the liminality ofthe exile universe and the syncretic space it inhabits" (8). He then offers five chapters, each of which addresses a different aspect of his object of study and, to a certain extent, offers a different theoretical emphasis. In addition, Naficy begins each chapter with "a short sketch . . . introducing in a personal voice one ofthe themes of that chapter" in order to, in his own
Ancient history · Armenian · Diaspora · Globalization · Immigration · Mass media · Media studies · Nationality · Political science · Politics · Popular culture · Sociology · Anthropology · Asian American and Pacific Histories · Gender Studies · History · Latin American and Latino Studies · Law · Race, History, and American Society
| Unique citing works | 2 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,1 |
| Citation span | 2006 - 2010 (5) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 2 |