Masters Thesis

Nostalgic nationalism online: constructing the Iranian diaspora through visual texts and affect

Through tracing the relationships between gender, sexuality, and race I interrogate the ways in which diasporic Iranian subjects negotiate the conditions that circumscribe their legibility as neoliberal citizen subjects. The ability to present and disburse information on the Internet has shaped the Iranian diaspora’s collective identity, thus, I interrogate these relationships through the close readings of visual texts circulated on social media created by diasporic Iranians in protest of the Trump administration’s Executive order 13769 and Executive order 13773. I argue that these visual texts, which deploy Qajar and Pre- Islamic images in tandem with model minority politics and the rhetoric of settler colonialism, are informed by Persian-centric readings of Iranian culture and history that in turn construct a seemingly monolithic and homogenous Iranian diaspora.

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