On "Persepolis Unbound"
This new venture is titled Persepolis Unbound, with an eye toward Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound. The tyranny of Jupiter is here eclipsed by what I’m calling my “affective exile.” Protesting against the discourse of authenticity (so common in late twentieth-century Iranian intellectual production) I want to bring to light the vagaries of my experience as a desiring being who speaks from the habitus of the Iranian American diaspora.
Iranian Nationalism & Nostalgia: Fragment on a research interest
On 15 October 2021, I delivered a short presentation at the Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies Workshop on “Violence, Witnessing, and Recovering the Archives” entitled, “Nostalgia, Diaspora, and Iranian Neo-Monarchists.” My talk focused on the political and cultural functions of nostalgia by a segment of the contemporary Iranian diaspora, particularly in the United States. In thinking here through nationalism and nostalgia in the American case, I hope to explore in my dissertation the ways in which memory was and is utilized, revised, and weaponized by the Iranian diaspora in France.
Exteriorizing Subjectivity: Snapchat & Pharmacopornographic Biocapitalism
Welcome to the pharmacopornographic regime. Digital screens, monitors, and interfaces of every size buzz, pulsate, and project wave-particles of light into the air, all around us, twenty-four hours a day. For those born after the advent of Web 2.0 (at the new millennium), there has never been a period of non-digitally mediated subjectivity. The entanglements of technology, late-modern capitalism, and our use of technology in the context of late-modern capitalism raise questions of baffling complexity and of intense urgency.