Anthropology Events
Cyromania: Imperial Nostalgia and Iranian-American Strategies of Inclusion in Los Angeles
Brown Bag Lecture:
“Cyromania: Imperial Nostalgia and Iranian-American Strategies of Inclusion in Los Angeles”
Over four decades of animus between the governments of the United States and the Islamic Republic of Iran, Iranian Americans have battled discriminations, misrecognitions, and exclusions in their everyday lives. As part of this struggle, and like other immigrants in the United States, many Iranian Americans have sought to take back the reins of representation and to navigate neoliberal multiculturalism as an alternative pathway to power, centering notions of immigrant success and contribution to demonstrate “good citizenship” – and thus deservingness for belonging. To do so, they have drawn on cultural, historic, and symbolic resources, especially ancient Persian figures and artifacts like Cyrus the Great and the Cyrus Cylinder, to assert their ideological contributions and alignment with dominant American narratives of empire, freedom, and democracy. In this talk, I reflect on over a decade of ethnographic fieldwork in Los Angeles to better understand why certain forms of imperial nostalgia – a wistful longing or affection for past empire – permeate so much of these Iranian-American representations. In diasporic festivals, exhibitions, and public art, the pervasive repetition of these narratives and symbols through imperial nostalgia reveals how powerful 20th century nationalist symbolism has remained, and how these significations have been made useful in new contexts.
Bio:
Amy Malek is a sociocultural anthropologist specializing in the intersections of migration, citizenship, memory, and culture. She is Associate Professor of Global Studies at Oklahoma State University where she holds the Endowed Chair and serves as the director of the Iranian and Persian Gulf Studies program. Her research on memory and nostalgia has been published in Memory Studies and the International Journal of Cultural Studies. Her forthcoming book, Culture Beyond Country: Strategies of Inclusion in the Global Iranian Diaspora (NYU Press, Autumn 2025), offers a transnational ethnography examining the impacts of cultural policies on Iranian diasporic communities in Sweden, Canada, and the United States.
Sponsored by: Anthropology