Iran and the United States: Literary and Cinematic Migrations, 5 cr

This course explores the long and complicated relationship between Iran and the United States through literature and film. In many ways, the turbulent and tragic events that have recently shaken Iran are tied to the political and economic links between the two countries, from American oil imperialism and the CIA-backed coup d’état of 1953 to the hostage crisis in the context of the Iranian Revolution of 1979 and Donald Trump’s withdrawal from the ‘Iran Deal’ in 2018. Yet US-Iran relations also have an imaginative dimension that has profoundly impacted the lives of Iranians at home and in the (American) diaspora. Thus, American culture was highly desired in post-revolutionary Iran, where it functioned as an escapist fantasy and shorthand for a different life. Conversely, American representations demonised Iranians as a ‘savage’ and ‘uncivilised’ threat to the Western world, an orientalism in which Iranian-American writers sometimes (unwittingly) participated. For Iranian-Americans separated from Iran, furthermore, literature became a way of connecting with and reinventing a homeland that seemed irretrievably lost. Focusing on the period between the 1979 revolution and the present, the course will engage with a number of ways in which the relationship between Iran and the United States has been imagined by (mostly Iranian-American) writers and filmmakers. We will thereby pay attention to the fantasies and ideologies negotiated in these works, but also to the narrative and poetic traditions that were transformed in the migration of people and stories from Tehran to Los Angeles.