Despite the stigmatization of Iranians by the dominant American political and media discourses, Iranians have a visible public presence in Los Angeles (LA) through a range of organized public events. Based on the data collected through one year of ethnographic fieldwork (2017- 2018) including forty interviews and participation in more than one hundred Iranian public events, my paper explores the ways Iranian immigrants of LA respond to the American political and media discourses in the context of events, such as Shia Islamic mourning rituals or the Iranian New Year celebrations, that are practiced on the streets of LA. Drawing on Dell Hymes’s notion of “traditionalization” (Hymes 1975:354), I argue that Iranians create these events mostly by recontextualizing “traditional” behaviors in the context of LA. However, I employ Talal Asad’s concept of “discursive tradition” (Asad 1986: 15-21) to claim that these recontextualizations are discursive and respond to the political and media discourses in the US. My analysis identifies at least two types of responses in Iranian public events. Some events aim to counter the American political and media discourses. An example is giving roses to bystanders during Shia processions in the streets of South Gate, LA—a new and unprecedented practice which, according to organizers of the mourning ceremonies, aims to counter the discourse of Islam as a religion of violence popularized by the U.S. media. However, many Iranian events—such as heritage events—challenge the American imagination of Iranians by conforming to the broader American social and political relations. These events that celebrate “the ancient Iranian traditions” attempt to replace the American perception of Iranians as people of color, “fundamentalist Muslims, hostage-takers, and terrorists” (Malek 2015: 21) with the image of women dancing to Iranian music in colorful costumes, all framed as Iranian “ancient traditions.” They simultaneously mobilize the potent discourse of Iranian “banal nationalism” (Billig 1995: 175) which links Iranians to the Aryan Myth and “claim” a white identity (Maghbouleh 2017: 21), erasing all traces of Islam from the public imagination of Iranian-ness. Thus, many of these events attempt to challenge the American political and media discourses on Iranians through conforming to the broader American ideological and racial discourses that frame Islam as a negative and whiteness as a positive marker of identity.

This project is situated in the recent cultural shift in Iran and the arrests of women who’ve protested various moral laws pertaining to sartorial choice and public behavior, in relationship to the influence of social media communities. As an extension of the vast scholarship on counterpublics by Michael Warner (2002), Charles Hirschkind (2006), and others, this paper argues not only that women’s protests in Iran occupy spaces in opposition to Iranian publics (so-called), but that they are part of a larger international and largely digital community of counterpublics. In this realm of counterpublics and new communities, where geopolitical boundaries recede, I further demonstrate that digital Iranian communities collaborate globally in a digital diaspora. That is to say, by broadening the definition of diaspora I argue that there is a relationship between counterpublics and diasporas in their occupation of certain subversive spaces, physical as well as digital ones. Among many iterations of diaspora, I focus on the Iranian doctoral student community in the US. Interested in how culture (Persian) is preserved while studying abroad, I look at a group of students who read Mowlana’s Masnavi and how it shapes their identities within American educational institutions while at the same time they remain engaged with the broader Iranian international community, through the mechanism of the digital diaspora. In analyzing the Masnavi group, I interview female participants in particular to examine the women’s movement with respect to Iranian-ness, Mowlana, perspectives on women’s social roles, as well as, protests over veiling. Through this paper, by extending the ideas of diaspora and counterpublics, this work may contribute to the broadening of scholarship on communities and speak to gender, ethnic, racial, sexual, socio-cultural elements that are currently shaping ideas about Iran and its identities.

From the summer of 2015 to that of 2016, I interviewed, recorded and wrote concerning the Coptic (Orthodox) Southern Diocese’s congregation in Nashville. One of the largest in North America, many stereotypes cling to the Copts of Nashville from the inside—those Copts which see Nashville’s Copts as backward—and from the outside—those non-Copts who see the community as powerless, patriarchal and isolated. I let the community speak for itself, interviewing over 30 people of various identities, recording how they prescribed and described themselves. The ethnography aims to archive the growth of Nashville from the 1980s, its structure and reasons for its perceived isolation, its shifting arrangement of identifications whether it be “female” or “Egyptian,” its relation to Egypt and to the United States; I conclude that Nashville Coptic experiences actively resist not only assimilation in a racist and racialized country, but also stereotypes of Coptic peoples. For this conference, I want to offer a demographic map of Coptic life—residential, economic and cultural centers that live along the African corridor in East Nashville and Antioch, a Black suburb. I argue that this map, like any map, isn’t natural. Instead, the map is formed by external entities (i.e. federal immigration and citizenship policies, state segregationist infrastructure, and southern overt racism) and also internal entities (i.e. church locations, social ties). Such forces have bounded Coptic actors within a space—Millwood, as it is called. These forces, though, have not deterred Coptic centers from resisting assimilation, nor from developing a community that flows beyond the singularized Coptic identity; thus, in Nashville, Coptic stores sell halal meat and offer Ramadan specials and buy bread from the local Honduran bakery, and the Coptic Orthodox Church becomes a space for sharia-like courts that regulate disputes with Copts and non-Copts. Within these two spaces—Millwood Coptic businesses and the Orthodox Churches—Copts in Nashville have remapped their communities, their identities.

What is going on when Muslim women “do faith” among themselves? Are they, as the Orientalist or neoliberal feminist discourse would claim, victims of patriarchal religion and devoid of agency? Are they asserting their agency by becoming authentic religious subjects and taking control of their ethical lives? (Mahmood 2005), or rather strategically pursuing religion towards other ends? The debate around women’s participation in practices of conservative religions is anything but settled. Regardless of the difference in argument, however, the claim is often built on the premise of participants’ unanimity in terms of their religious beliefs. In this paper, I ask whether sharing a space of religious practice necessarily implies a common purpose or a common interpretive frame. I look at a women’s devotional event in a relatively unstudied setting, among Iranian-American women in Southern California. I use the concept of framing as defined by Goffman (1976) to explain how the event is understood and justified in multiple ways by participants on a public and private level. At the public level, the event is discursively framed as a religious/educational gathering, and certain linguistic and metacommunicative keys are at play to create a certain devotional realm of experience in the space (Young 1987, Hufford 1992). However, the event is a hybrid and fluid blend of various devotional genres with porous boundaries intermixed with sociability, and allows for a multiplicity of framings on a private/personal level. These personal frames may or may not be in line with the official framing of the event, and guide people’s way of being and acting in the space. In addition, I argue that the sensory/material attributes of the physical space create an affective connection that can encourage participation regardless of individuals’ public or private framings, or their degree of religiosity and devotional commitment; i.e. the agency of the space/performance (Rodermacher 2016, Gell 1998) can work in ways not always intended or directly articulated by the participants as a mode of justifying their attendance. In the end, challenge the assumption of female unanimity at the level of ideology/discourse. I rather propose that if we are to look for a shared component, we must expand the emphasis from religiosity and pay attention to the material, affective, and social aspects of the events, and the embodied experiences that allow women to share the space of doing faith regardless of their various discursive framings of it.

In this paper, I describe and explain how three Metro Detroit minority groups (Muslims, Christian Arabs and Chaldeans) followed very different paths towards political integration and representation, reconstructed their collective identities within the American political context, and developed new political attitudes. To do so, I develop a dynamic model that explains how threats, opportunities and reconstruction of political identities in evolving political contexts explain immigrant minority groups’ pathways towards political participation and integration. My model builds on and engages the work of sociologists and political scientists who researched political participation by Latinx, Asian and other US minorities rooted in immigration (inter alia, Barreto, Okamoto, Fraga, Cruz-Nichols). I develop the model based on knowledge acquired from fieldwork in Metro Detroit; the analysis of electoral data, print and electronic text; and semi-structured interviews with candidates, elected officials, activists, community and organization leaders, journalists and academics in both 2008 and 2018. While my research focuses on three small minorities, it is indicative of broader trends of minority and immigrant political integration in the American political context. Muslims, Arab Christians, and Chaldeans in Michigan have followed three very different paths towards political participation and integration. Muslim Michiganders have mostly completed a gradual move away from conservative views to progressive political attitudes over the past two decades. They redefined themselves as a minority in reaction to nativist majority attitudes and Republican Islamophobia, and found a political home in the progressive branch of the Democratic Party. Arab Christians have become White and fully politically integrated for all political purposes, but may still express the occasional pro-immigration or pro-Palestinian position. They are rarely the target of ethnic bullying and their politicians are both Republicans and Democrats. Chaldean Michiganders, a generally conservative community, have become staunch Republicans. Many among them blame Islam for the tragedies that befell Chaldeans in Iraq and were both attracted and welcomed by the Islamophobic and conservative wing of the Republican Party. Chaldeans may, however, move away from the Republican Party as a new generation asserts itself because the Trump administration targeted large numbers of US citizens of Chaldean Iraqi background in its enforcement of ever-stricter immigration laws, an immediate and urgent threat that may outweigh past resentments.