Document Type : Research Paper

Author

Instructor of Cultural Studies, Allameh Tabataba’ i University

Abstract

Drawing on the palimpsest metaphor, the present paper explores the practice of fiction writing by the Iranian diasporic writers to show the way they translate the process of their translation into diasporic subjects and the way this translation results in cultural palimpsests and accented literature. To this end, two Iranian diasporic writers belonging to per-revolutionary and post-revolutionary diaspora have been selected and their self-expression has been scrutinized from the perspective of identity politics by a close reading. They include Fereidoun Esfandiary and Firoozeh Dumas. An attempt has been made to show these diasporic writers translate the Iranian universe into a Kafkaesque universe and the American dream. Moreover, it has been shown that how the cultural palimpsests from these translations can be read to make visible the identity dialectics of the diasporic writers. This analysis indicates that the identity politics of the post-revolutionary Iranian diaspora the continuation of that of the pre-revolutionary diaspora.

Keywords

-      Adams, J. T. (2012). The Epic of America. Transaction Publishers.
-      Asad, T. (1985). Europe and Its Others: Proceedings of the Essex Conference on the Sociology of Literature, July 1984 (Vol. 2). University Of Essex..
-      Asad, T. (1986). The Concept of Cultural Translation in British Social Anthropology. Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, 1, 141-164.
-      Bhabha, H. (2004). The Location of Culture. 1994. London and New York: Routledge.
-      Bhabha, H. K. (1990). The Third Space: Interview with Homi Bhabha.” Identity: Community, Culture, Difference. Ed. Jonathan Rutherford.
-      Callahan, J. F. (1996). F. Scott Fitzgerald's Evolving American Dream: The" Pursuit Of Happiness" In Gatsby, Tender Is the Night, And the Last Tycoon. Twentieth Century Literature, 42(3), 374-395.
-      Clifford, J. (1994). Diasporas. Cultural Anthropology, 9(3), 302-338.
-      Cohen, R. (2008). Global Diasporas: An Introduction. Routledge.
-      Corbella, W. (2007). Panopticism and the Construction of Power in Franz Kafka's the Castle. Papers on Language & Literature, 43(1), 68.
-      Cuddon, J. A. (1998). The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory.
-      Cullen, J. (2004). The American Dream: A Short History of an Idea That Shaped A Nation. Oxford University Press, USA.
-      Dillon, S. (2005). Reinscribing De Quincey's Palimpsest: The Significance of The Palimpsest in Contemporary Literary and Cultural Studies. Textual Practice, 19(3), 243-263.
-      Dillon, S. (2007). The Palimpsest: Literature, Criticism, Theory. Bloomsbury Academic.
-      Dumas, F. (2004). Funny in Farsi: A Memoir of Growing Up Iranian in America. Random House Incorporated. Esfandiary.
-      Esfandiary, F. M. (1968). Identity Card: A Novel. Grove Press.
-      Genette, G. (1997). Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree (Vol. 8). U Of Nebraska Press.
-      Hochschild, J. L. (1996). Facing Up to the American Dream: Race, Class, and the Soul of the Nation (Vol. 51). Princeton University Press.
-      Kundera, M. (1988). Kafka's World. The Wilson Quarterly (1976-), 12(5), 88-99.
-      Safran, W. (1991). Diasporas in Modern Societies: Myths of Homeland and Return. Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies, 1(1), 83-99.
-      Steiner, C. (2007). Translated People, Translated Texts: Language and Migration in Some Contemporary African Fiction (Doctoral Dissertation, University of Cape Town).
-      Ştiuliuc, D. (2011). The American Dream as the Cultural Expression of North American Identity. Philologica Jassyensia, 7(2 (14)), 363-370.
-      Turner, M. (2008, March). Unveiling the Secrets of Archimedes. In AIP Conference Proceedings (Vol. 991, No. 1, Pp. 163-170). American Institute of Physics.
-      Tyson, L. (1994). Psychological Politics of the American Dream: The Commodification of Subjectivity in Twentieth-Century American Literature. Ohio State University Press.
-      Vander Hook, S. (2011). Kindred and a Canticle for Leibowitz as Palimpsestic Novels. Minnesota State University, Mankato.