The purpose of this presentation will be to examine memoirs written by second-generation Iranian-Americans who travel to Iran, where their preconceived notions of the country collide with social and political realities that shape their daily lives there in unexpected ways. In travel memoirs such as Lipstick Jihad and Honeymoon in Tehran by Azadeh Moaveni, Saffron Sky by Gelareh Asayesh and To See and See Again themes such as self versus other, and the relationship between place, language and identity are complicated by the authors’ hybridized sense of self. These travelers have unique and often uniquely problematic motives for traveling to Iran and chronicling their journeys in the form of travel narratives. The second-generation traveler carries with her expectations of the other which initially seem opposite the expectations held by a travel memoirist whose identity is in no way rooted in the destination(s) of her travels. Often, the second-generation memoirist travels to her “home” country with the expectation that the identity of the other will more closely resemble what she perceives as her authentic cultural identity than that of the inhabitants of her adopted country, the U.S.. Thus, any perceived gaps between the memoirist’s identity and that of the (non) other pose a threat to her sense of self. She must therefore bridge these gaps by either ignoring aspects of the culture which contribute to her feelings of alienation from Iran or by further othering those who do not support a paradigm in which her authentic identity and what she desires to be the cultural identity of her home country are one. Further, the readers’ conscious or unconscious expectations of authenticity in travel narratives written by second-generation memoirists also complicate the depiction of otherness in these memoirs. A tension exists between the readers’ expectations of authenticity from the second-generation memoirist and the writer’s enhanced subjectivity as a result of her hybridized identity. Contrary to the author’s intentions and the readers’ expectations, this subjectivity often hinders the creation of narratives which debunk potentially harmful myths about the character of a place and its people.

Kurds in European Travel Diaries Kurdistan, a region stretched across Mesopotamia and straddling the Ottoman and the Persian territories has been visited by many European travelers and Christian missionaries, some of whom provide us with their travel accounts. Loosely classified, the European travelers to Kurdistan fall into three categories: the Christian missionary, the European adventurer anthropologist, and the modern entrepreneurially or academically motivated traveler. What almost all of these travelers saw and searched for was an ancient barbaric people protected by mountains from exposure to the outside world and therefore a people who belonged to distant past that needed to be discovered and described to the avaricious European readers. The missionaries, restricted in their perception and knowledge of the Kurds due to the concentration of their efforts on the Christian population of the region, tended to write mostly biased commentaries that often presented a hardened misconception of the Kurds as savage bandits in the mountains. Adventurer anthropologists such as Walter B. Harris in his From Batum to Baghdad provide a detailed account of the Kurdish customs, clothing, and various tribes. Even so, his great admiration for the native Arabs and Kurds in their native garb and his mockery of their adopted French or Persian garb reveal the popular Orientalist notion of searching for the noble savage. When he leaves Bana behind for Sakiz, a more urban town farther into the Persian territory, he regretfully says, “Here we found a class of people, debased in life, ideas, morality, aping the Persian in dress and character, and suffering hardships at the hands of the Persian Officialdom.” On the other hand is the entrepreneur or the academic who travels to a politically barricaded Kurdistan in the 20th century. An exemplary account is The Children of the Jinn (1980) by Margaret Kahn who traveled to Kurdistan to write a dissertation on Kurdish grammar. Unlike Harris, she readily admits her Orientalist preconceptions of the Kurds and resonates with Harris when saying she was in search of a people whose race was not tainted by the Persian, Turkish, or Arab blood. The images of the Kurds as wild bandits, noble savages, or the downtrodden are some of the common themes that run through most of the European travel diaries written about the Kurds. The European readership, the political agenda, and the search for the noble savage are among the issues I have explored in this study.

This presentation examines the travel writings of Jalal Al-e-Ahmad (1923-1969), one of the most prominent Iranian writers, thinkers, and social and political critics in the twentieth century. It focuses on the influence his travel writings, especially Khasi dar Miqat [Lost in the Crowd], had on several generations of his readers. Although he was born into a sternly religious family, later in his life, Al-e Ahmad renounced his religious background and beliefs and became heavily involved in politics and political activities, becoming an active member of the communist Tudeh Party. In 1963, he went on a "secular" pilgrimage to Mecca, and Lost in the Crowd is the report of that journey. In this book, Al-e Ahmad records his observations of the Arabs and other Muslims gathered from all over the world, the political ramifications of such a gathering, and his own religious and political views. Among his numerous travel memoirs, Lost in the Crowd should be considered the most significant, especially in terms of Al-e Ahmad's political views, since it is at this point that he comes to the conclusion that religion can be a mobilizing force to put an end to the injustice and oppression that abound, especially in most of the disintegrating Muslim societies, such as Iran. In this paper, I focus my discussion on the extent of influence of Al-e Ahmad’s travelogues, especially Lost in the Crowd, in registering a moment in the Iranian and modern Islamic society when Al-e Ahmad began to return to Islam as a political impulse. The paper also sheds light on the importance of this book in understanding the dilemmas that faced one of the major Iranian writers—as well as many Iranian intellectuals—between World War II and the Islamic Revolution, the reasons underlying making such a pilgrimage, the importance of the act of writing, the sense of Iranian superiority and Al-e Ahmad’s view of the Arabs, and the existential anxiety of the Iranian intellectuals when they are on the verge of becoming an anonymous member of the crowd.

After a brief review of the history of travel literature in Iran, this presentation focuses on the audio-visual narratives of travelers to Iran in recent decades, both Westerners and Iranian Americans, in terms of the travelers’ selected subject of observation, narrative style, intended audience, and cultural or political implications. While the works of professional documentary makers, reporters, and travel adventurers display an attraction to the "otherness" of what they convey to be the exotic social, political, and cultural aspects of Iran under the regime of the Islamic Republic, and its citizens, in a sense, expressing empathy with the subject but actually conveying a sense of superiority, the Iranian-Americans' recorded journeys can be described as "quests" by these individuals in search of a still-undiscovered ancestral "self," as it were. At the same time, while both groups attempt, to various degrees and for different purposes, to reduce the distance between the exotic other and the American (or, in general, the Western) self, the visual often enhances exoticism and the distancing between the subject and the audience. This paper also compares narrative strategies employed in new media travel accounts with those of conventional travelogue writings, such as Colin Thubron' s Shadow of the Silk Road (2007) and Christiane Bird's Neither East Nor West: One Woman's Journey through the Islamic Republic of Iran (2001). Furthermore, the paper scrutinizes the question of the objectivity of the observer, a claim that is made almost universally, whether explicitly or implicitly, in all such travel narratives. Audio-visual travel narratives examined include Rick Steve's Iran (2009), Justin Mashouf's Waring Factions (2008), Jane Kokan's (reporter) Forbidden Iran (2004), Jahangir Golestan’s Iran, A Video Journey (2003), Holly Morris' Adventure Divas: Iran Behind Closed Cha-dors (2002), and Christiane Amanpour's Revolutionary Journey (2000).