With the immigration of a relatively large number of Iranians in the past three decades to various parts of the world, notably to Europe and especially to the United States, while the first generation immigrants have been trying to assimilate in their new societies and environments, their children have been facing the dilemma of national and cultural identity and have tried to answer questions pertaining to their own place in these societies. In regards to Iranian Americans of the second generation, the dilemma of Iranian-Americanness has been frustrating and at the same time enlightening for many members of this generation. Although in some respects it is a unique dilemma, the hybrid identity of the children of first-generation Iranian immigrants in different parts of the world, particularly North America and Europe, is not dissimilar to the hybrid identity of other immigrants when it is viewed the context of the "global village" in which we live. By examining the published writing of a number of Iranian-American university students, this paper examines the phenomenon of hybrid identities in the so-called "globalized world."

A review of Iran and America: Rekindling a Love Lost by Badi Badiozamani and Ghazal Badiozamani (Center for East-West, 2006 caused me to revisit the question of how Iranians living in the United States, non-specialists in the fields of archaeology, linguistics, history, etc. represent the heritage of their native land. A pattern illustrating the use of scholarship on Iran emerges that many people would call reductive and many would call chauvinist. The presentation analyzes the reasons behind such motivated uses of scholarship. Are they a salve for a sense of inferiority in an Iranophobic America?

Information and Communication Technologies and the Changing Identities of Iranians in the 21st Century The distinctly different and seemingly disconnected private and public identities of many Iranians have been a prominent result of the imposition of strict Islamic rules of public conduct on the Iranian population. Now, with the global reach of the information and communication technologies (ICTs) such as the internet facilitating the emergence of virtual communities and cyber identities, the Iranians at home and abroad have had the opportunity to assume yet a new identity while traversing the global internet community. This paper is an attempt to empirically study the nature and the effects of the cyber networking communities in Iran; and to investigate the effects of newly-found online hybrid identities in shaping the views and outlooks of the Iranians. The extent to which such altered and newly-found identities help to accelerate the pace of social change in Iran is of particular concern in this study. The selected research methodologies for this study are survey research and participant observation.

The arts of the broadly constructed Iranian world--literature, music, visual arts and performance--have long been the civilizational glue that has held members of the Persian speaking world together. In a real sense the arts have transcended religion, ethnicity, political differences and national boundaries to create a common Persian heritage. In this paper I will examine the core strengths of Persian arts, showing how they are rooted in a common ideology of contrast between the spiritual "inside" and the secular "outside." Both must be present for art to exist, and a core of cultural understanding must be shared by members of society in order for these expressions of the human spirit to form a common Iranian identity.

This paper explores the contested meanings of the 2009 post-election protests in Iran among different generations of diasporic Iranians online and in North America, as they articulate their Iranian identities. Ethnographic material discussed include interviews with Iranians about their response to the protests in Iran and their decisions on whether or not to participate in diasporic post-election related events and participant observation at various demonstrations. The Iranians interviewed in this study felt a large discrepancy between how they were being represented as Iranians, and their own lived experience of "being Iranian." Related to this, I found that struggles over representing "Iran," or speaking on behalf of/for Iranians, are not struggles within communities or between communities, but a struggle to define community itself--a position from which to make political claims. In my interviews with these actors, it became clear to me that what "Iran" represented on a global scale mattered immensely to their own sense of being Iranian, and related to this, the question of who has the authority to represent Iran globally was a central concern. The history of Iran-U.S. relations was always in the background of these encounters, as was the awareness of Iran as always already globally signified. Actors who are attempting to define a political ground from which to speak always find that pre-existing claims community efface rather than augment their subject position. Therefore, they are constantly engaged in an attempt to define community "on their own terms." But this process always involves responding to existing representations. In this essay I argue that the struggle over representation is not simply a question of contesting pre-existing global images of "Iran," or already-constituted subjects to whom they matter, but is itself implicated in claims to community. In forging communities that refuse the pre-existing subject positions, participants stake a space from which they can make political claims.