MESA Banner
Aryan Muslims: Iranian Angelinos Conformation to the American Politics of Race
Abstract
My presentation claims that many Iranian Angelinos counter the dominant American imaginations of Iranians as people of color by conforming to, adopting, and internalizing the politics of race in the US that privilege whiteness. This paper is based on the ethnographic data collected during my dissertation fieldwork in 2017-19. I focus on public events such as celebrations of Nowruz, Quranic sessions, and political meetings of Iranian Angelinos as sites that “consolidate” individual agencies and engage with American relations of public domination that define Muslimness and Iranian-ness (Sharpe 2008: 218). The current paper relies on several examples from my larger fieldwork project entailing participant observation of more than a hundred public events and forty in-depth interviews with Iranian Angelinos. I look at these events as texts (Feighery 2016: 81) and study verbal and performative discourses produced in the context of Iranian Angelino public events to inquire about the ways the issue of race is addressed in the community. I argue that many Iranian Angelinos’ public events that celebrate the “Iranian heritage” in the streets of Los Angeles counter the American imagination of Iranians as people of color by mobilizing the potent discourse of Iranian nationalism which links Iranians to the Aryan Myth and “claim” a white identity for Iranians (Maghbouleh 2017: 21). These public events in which organizers usually refer to Iranians and their celebrations such as Nowruz by words “Persian,” “Zoroastrian,” and “Aryan,” challenge the negative American political and media imaginations that frame Iranians as people of color. However, they do not do so by critiquing the politics of suspicion and exclusion perpetuated in these American public discourses, but by questioning the assumption of these discourses that consider Iranians non-white. My research validates that not only do relations of racial domination devour resistive forces and exclude “others,” but individuals excluded by dominant discourses may also desire to be “incorporated” into the broader dominant relations. What the excluded race does is not always to outcry the logic of suspicion and exclusion maintained by the dominant racial discourses and ideologies, but to argue that their racial identity has been misunderstood. In other words, the excluded do not always resist racial domination; they may protest not being part of it.
Discipline
Anthropology
Geographic Area
Iran
North America
Sub Area
None