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Women Write Iran: Nostalgia and Human Rights from the Diaspora

Online ISBN:
9781452954400
Print ISBN:
9780816683826
Publisher:
University of Minnesota Press
Book

Women Write Iran: Nostalgia and Human Rights from the Diaspora

Nima Naghibi
Nima Naghibi
Ryerson University
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Published online:
19 January 2017
Published in print:
1 May 2016
Online ISBN:
9781452954400
Print ISBN:
9780816683826
Publisher:
University of Minnesota Press

Abstract

This monograph examines the popular trend among diasporic Iranian women to produce auto/biographical narratives through a variety of genres: published memoirs, documentary films, comics, and social media. Contemporary diasporic Iranian memoirs, Naghibi claims, are particularly interesting in their mediation of the diasporic experience through the authors' memories of pre-revolutionary 1970s Iran, thus placing the concepts of memory and nostalgia, and questions of testimony and witness, at the heart of these narratives. This monograph explores the phenomenon of diasporic Iranian women’s life narratives in English in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, arguing that what ties these disparate narratives together is the experience of the 1979 revolution as a traumatic event, and the expression of a powerful nostalgia for an idealized past. The title of this book, Righting the Past, invokes a double entendre that draws attention to the important work of setting right historical injustices through the act of writing life narratives. This book posits the importance of writing as an articulation of memory, and as an assertion of human rights. By drawing on the empathy of the reader-spectator-witness, life narratives, argues Naghibi, offer the possibility of extending to their subjects a recognition of their humanity.

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