Amy Malek, Culture Beyond Country: Strategies of Inclusion in the Global Iranian Diaspora (NYU Press, 2025).
Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?
Amy Malek (AM): Culture Beyond Country emerged out of my long-standing engagement in the Iranian diaspora and interest in the ways members of this global set of communities have engaged in diasporic cultural production. During my fieldwork with Iranians in Los Angeles, Stockholm, and Toronto, I was struck by how deeply people across a wide range of professions, class positions, and immigration statuses were committed to Iranian arts and culture. This commitment was not limited to artists or those working in cultural industries. Real estate agents, attorneys, IT professionals, engineers, entrepreneurs, bankers, and graduate students were devoting substantial time, energy, and resources to organizing large-scale, public cultural events, motivated by a shared sense that Iranian culture could do important social and political work—in part because they felt that culture could transcend politics. Although these individuals were located in different national contexts and dispersed across the diaspora, they shared a belief in culture as a powerful strategy: a way to bridge fragmented diasporic communities, preserve identity in subsequent immigrant generations, and assert a visible, legitimate, and respected presence in their societies. Furthermore, cultural production for many of these diasporic Iranians served as a corrective intervention, putting forward their visions of Iran and Iranian identity in response to what they perceived as persistent misrepresentation and misrecognition in mainstream media—whether in news coverage, film, television, or digital platforms in the United States, Sweden, and Canada. In other words, over the course of two decades, I observed how, for Iranians in diaspora, culture functioned not only as heritage or expression, but as a strategic practice through which belonging could be actively sought and, it was hoped, produced. How they have gone about doing so—and the differences between these strategies in different parts of the diaspora—became a motivating question underpinning the book.
J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?
AM: By focusing on these three important cities in the diaspora, the book offers an up-close ethnographic look at how these different communities approached similar goals in societies with different approaches to multiculturalism: where Sweden and Canada each developed their own official multiculturalism policies at the national level from the late 1970s onward, the United States never did. There are also important distinctions in the migratory pathways and demographic trends in these three diasporic communities that have influenced how Iranians have (or have not) organized themselves. What have been the impacts of these variations within the same global diaspora? And, given the changes I witnessed across sixteen years of intermittent fieldwork, how have political and policy shifts, including neoliberal reforms, across these sites in this period impacted immigrant belonging? Thinking relationally across these three contexts offered the possibility of examining the differing constraints and opportunities Iranians have worked with at multiple scales, including municipal, provincial/state, national, and diasporic. The result—for example, the development of large-scale public festivals of Iranian art and culture in some locations and the emergence of an increasingly dominant argument for inclusion through imperial nostalgia in others—can tell us a lot about cultural citizenship in multicultural societies and in a global diaspora. It also shows how states, institutions, and norms shape the strategies diaspora communities develop as they navigate the tripwires of exclusion and inclusion. The book thus sits at the intersection of sociocultural anthropology, diaspora studies, migration studies, American studies, and Iranian studies and engages scholarship on belonging, multiculturalism, cultural citizenship, and identity.
J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous work?
AM: Through this project, I wanted to understand how Iranians, as diasporic subjects, have navigated multicultural societies not only through building ethnic businesses, accumulating capital, or advocating for rights, but also by producing and negotiating cultural claims that seek to build belonging on their own terms—as Iranian and American, Swedish or Canadian. That interest grows directly out of my long-standing interest in cultural production as central to identity negotiations and contestations. These were questions I was thinking about in earlier work on representation, whether in graphic novels (e.g., Satrapi’s Persepolis), documentary film (e.g., Grass (1925) & People of the Wind(1975)), or documentary photography (e.g., Document exhibition in Los Angeles). Questions about how cultural forms circulate and become key resources for narrating and negotiating Iranian diasporic identity were also a focus of my previous work on the New York Persian Parade, where I analyzed how this public cultural event functioned as a performative claim to visibility, legitimacy, and belonging within a specifically American urban and political landscape. As with so many diasporic public representations, the contestations that emerged there revealed important faultlines within the community that had worked so hard to produce it.
Culture Beyond Country extends these observations and analyses, moving beyond the United States. I felt this was an important analytical step given the breadth of this large global diaspora and the tendency for knowledge production about it to over-emphasize Iranian-American perspectives. I cannot help the fact that I am an Iranian American, nor that I therefore have more experiences and understandings of Iranian communities in the United States than elsewhere, but I can attempt to account for it by widening my own analytical lens. Rather than treat the dynamics I have observed around recognition, representation, and the public performance of culture within US contexts as somehow representative of the entire diaspora, in this book I sought to place Los Angeles (considered by some as the capital of this diaspora) alongside large and growing diaspora centers like Stockholm and Toronto. In doing so, I wanted to show how shared commitments to Iranian arts and culture nevertheless take different shapes and lead to different strategies under distinct hegemonic approaches to immigrant belonging, including regimes of multiculturalism, public funding, and national narratives of inclusion.
In that sense, this relational approach (i.e., not strictly comparative, but considering these communities in relation to one another) allows the book to move from analyzing specific locations, groups, and events in the three case study chapters to tracing broader patterns in Chapter 5, showing how diasporic communities have used culture to navigate power, recognition, and belonging in different contexts.
J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?
AM: The book is grounded in the study of the Iranian diaspora so of course I hope it contributes to Iranian studies and Iranian diaspora studies in its scope, methodology, and empirics. But the book’s arguments are also meant to travel beyond this case and speak to comparative and global approaches to migration and diaspora more broadly. In that sense, I hope it reaches scholars and students in anthropology, migration and diaspora studies, American studies, Middle East studies, and sociology, but also readers interested in questions of belonging, multiculturalism, and cultural politics more broadly.
In terms of impact, I hope the book encourages readers to rethink how we conceptualize inclusion and belonging in multicultural societies, particularly by taking culture seriously as a strategic, contested, and lived practice rather than simply a marker of identity or, worse, rather than dismissing cultural productions like festivals, exhibitions, and public art altogether as a shallow or “easy” form of representation. What work does culture do (or is it intended or believed to do) for immigrant communities? How does culture intersect with other forms of capital, and what is possible within and beyond the constraints of state formations and subjectification? Ultimately, the book aims to open space for more nuanced, culturally grounded accounts of how diasporic lives—and as the Conclusion argues, homes—are built rather than simply inherited, granted, or lost.
J: What other projects are you working on now?
AM: I am currently working on a book project that traces diasporic cultural production from the realm of the community organizations, streets, fairgrounds, and museums studied in this book into digital spaces and circulations. What happens when photographs, home videos, and personal ephemera are digitized and circulated online, moving from private memory objects in the diaspora into public, political, and commercial digital arenas? Building on earlier articles in Memory Studies (on Iranian diasporic subjunctive nostalgia, a mode of longing that dwells on the pre-Revolutionary past while imagining futures that never came to pass) and the International Journal of Cultural Studies (on clickbait orientalism and the digital circulation of family snapshots), the project traces how these materials are remediated and reinterpreted across digital platforms. This circulation can generate forms of collective memory and intergenerational connection; it also can become entangled in geopolitical narratives, racialized representations, and media economies. Further, these same materials are taken up as training data or aesthetic prompts for artificial intelligence, producing synthetic images of a time and place that never existed, yet circulate as plausible, or even documentary, traces of the past. Together, the project seeks to demonstrate how diasporic memory practices go beyond acts of preservation, and form dynamic fields where personal and collective identities, geopolitics, and imaginaries collide.
Excerpt from the book (from Culture Beyond Country, Chapter 2, pages 89 to 96)
Asserting “Freedom, Dignity, and Wealth” in Los Angeles
In a 2013 announcement promoting its new exhibition, The Cyrus Cylinder and Ancient Persia: A New Beginning, the Smithsonian Institute heralded the arrival of the Cyrus Cylinder to the United States for its first national tour: “Making its U.S. debut is a football- sized, barrel- shaped ancient clay cylinder covered with Babylonian cuneiform, one of the earliest written languages, that announced Cyrus’s victory and his intention to allow freedom of worship to communities displaced by the defeated ruler Nabonidus. Under Cyrus (ca. 580– 530 BCE), the king of Persia, the Persian empire became the largest and most diverse the world had known to that point. His declarations of tolerance, justice, and religious freedom inspired generations of Philosophers, policymakers, and leaders, including Alexander the Great and Thomas Jefferson.” Organized through a partnership between the British Museum (which formally acquired the cylinder in 1880) and London-based diasporic nonprofit organization the Iran Heritage Foundation, the tour exhibited the cylinder in the five US cities with the highest number of Iranian American residents. […]
At the Smithsonian stop of the exhibition, thanks to a loan from the Library of Congress, one of Jefferson’s two copies of the Cyropaedia was displayed prominently in a glass case opened to a page Jefferson is said to have annotated. […] The book’s presence in the libraries of US founding fathers such as Jefferson, John Adams, and Benjamin Franklin was used as supporting evidence for “the importance of Cyrus to those who wrote the Constitution of the United States” and thus made the case for why Cyrus the Great should be regarded as important by elite American institutions and their hundreds of thousands of American visitors. British Museum director Neil MacGregor argued as much in an article produced by the US State Department about the Smithsonian stop of the tour: “The story of Persia— Iran— is part of the story of the modern United States. . . . Although 18th-century Europeans read and commented on the tenets of religious freedom and tolerance set down by Cyrus, only the United States’ founders enshrined them in law.”
In concurrent events with the exhibition, British and American scholars and curators described in great detail, with the authority that their credentials provided, assurances of the crucial influence of ancient Persian statesmanship on core American ideals—not only on the notion of human rights, but on the American experiment of democracy itself. […] Cyrus the Great was presented especially by Iranian American cosponsors, donors, and attendees as the source of American values and liberal ideals, and thus a premodern contribution by contemporary Iranians— as “the heirs of Cyrus”— and especially those now resident in the United States. The then-executive director of the Farhang Foundation, the community cosponsor for the cylinder’s Los Angeles stop, made this connection explicitly when she told the Los Angeles Times that the Cyrus Cylinder “is important because of the ideals it represents, that say who we really are. . . . Non-Iranians can get to know the Iranian culture and its people in the correct light, rather than the portrayals in the media that we hear every day.”
Echoing the sentiments of so many Iranian diaspora community organizers seeking to repair the representation of Iranians in the mainstream, the implication of this and similar statements was that this exhibition would not only demonstrate a global acceptance of the ancient Iranian roots of all the abstract notions attributed to the cylinder in the late twentieth century— including human rights, “tolerance, justice, and religious freedom”— but also a specifically American acceptance of the worthiness of Iranians in the present day, especially those who now live in the United States. Through Cyrus the Great, Iranian Americans put forward an argument that they should no longer be rendered as “enemies within” but as the original ideological donors to the very fabric of American identity.
[… T]here can be no doubt that this approach was successful in garnering attention: Over four hundred news outlets reported on the exhibition, helping to draw in the over 315,000 visitors (including 155,000 in DC and 75,000 in LA) who viewed the cylinder while on its nine-month tour. When the cylinder arrived at its final stop at LA’s Getty Villa Museum, Angelenos attended the cylinder exhibition in droves; it was reported at the time as the most well-attended exhibit in the museum’s history. […]
Once inside, many Iranian Americans were moved to tears in front of the small cylinder in its glass case, feeling through it the pride and honor that had been denied them for decades in the United States. Though their scholarly legitimations were important, the curators and directors of these British and American museums did not need to convince older first-generation Iranian immigrant audiences of the cylinder’s relevance; they had been taught about Cyrus the Great through school lessons, media, and official events in prerevolution Iran and had been eager to share them in their diasporic communities. In media interviews reporting on A New Beginning, Iranian Americans expressed that their frustrations about feeling misunderstood in the United States were momentarily released by seeing this ancient object revered in a major American museum. The experience was extremely emotional for many; as one attendee told a reporter: “I cried. I got goosebumps. It means a lot. I’m very happy that it came to [the] US.” Another shared, “I burst into tears. I got so excited, and something inside me just reacted. I don’t know, maybe it’s Iranian blood.”
Iranian Americans with these deeply emotional responses found in the exhibition confirmation of their identifications with Cyrus but also confirmation of the ideas ascribed to the cylinder during childhoods in Iran long before their migration. If Cyrus—an icon representing the essence of Iranian identity—had influenced Jefferson—an icon representing the founders of American democracy, if not American democracy itself—then in this exhibition, Iranian Americans, their American-born children, and their non-Iranian neighbors all were confronted with evidence not only of the importance of Cyrus but of an ancestral Iranian goodness, one that had contributed to America before these immigrants had arrived at its shores.
For many Iranian Americans who felt othered and excluded, this message became a source of redemption and dignity: They described feeling seen, and symbolically included, in a place where otherwise their persistent invisibility in the mainstream had only been temporarily interrupted by hypervisibility in everyday experiences in airports, immigration offices, and difficult encounters with colleagues and neighbors during particularly tense geopolitical moments. […]
History, ancestry, power, and legacy all swam around this small artifact of cracked clay that had been injected with contemporary ideological meanings. In his critical take on the exhibition tour and focus on the Cyrus Cylinder in the United States, scholar Hamid Dabashi called the object a “floating signifier of meaning and meandering.” If its meaning was ever floating, diaspora community leaders and exhibition organizers worked tirelessly to harness it firmly to one set of meanings propagated in twentieth-century Iran and repeated in twenty-first-century American press releases, interviews, public lectures, teacher trainings, school field trips, blog posts, news media, and social media and even in a resolution introduced in Congress (H.Res. 130). This production of meaning has been repeatedly mobilized by scholars, curators, critics, journalists, publicists, artists, donors, organizers, and community members well beyond 2013.
In a phenomenon I call Cyromania, a twenty-first-century diasporic field of cultural production has emerged to give twentieth-century Pahlavi nationalist significations a new utility in diaspora. Part of a larger strategy of employing Iranian American imperial nostalgia—a wistful longing or affection for past empire, in this case, the Achaemenid Empire—Cyromania has become a favored way to introduce “real” Iranian culture and history to American audiences. Along with images of the ruins at Persepolis and Zoroastrian symbols like the faravahar, the Cyrus Cylinder has become especially ubiquitous: on bumper stickers and billboards; as commercial goods such as necklaces, cufflinks, broaches, T-shirts, handbags, pens, and paperweights; on advertisements, posters, and invitations for community events; as replicas decorating restaurants and offices; and as a source of discussion in blogs and social media posts that cite it as a demonstration of “who we really are” to non-Iranians as much as to second- and third-generation children and grandchildren.
Cyromania focuses especially on the life and legacy of Cyrus the Great through the proliferation of artifacts, narratives, and symbols originally made popular during the Revivalist period of the Pahlavi era (1925–79). Though different from the phenomenon of nineteenth-century Egyptomania in important ways, Cyromania nevertheless is similar in its implications for politics, identity, and racial ideas.
What do these nationalist histories, symbols, and ideologies do for Iranians in diaspora? Rather than dismiss imperial nostalgia in diaspora as purely nostalgic or purely ideological, I analyze Cyromania primarily as a strategy in competitions for inclusion, particularly, though certainly not exclusively, in the United States. […] Drawing on notions of nostalgia and on the historical and aesthetic repertoires of twentieth-century Pahlavi nationalism, in their widespread and sometimes larger-than-life invocations of Cyrus II, Iranian Americans have not only or simply parroted nationalist tropes in response to geopolitical events in Iran. They have also responded specifically to American assimilationist trends that require immigrant groups to render their own histories and cultures within an American neoliberal frame of multiculturalism.