“Throughout his job ordeal, my father never complained. He remained an Iranian who loved his country but who also believed in American ideals. He only said how sad it was that people so easily hate an entire population simply because of the actions of a few. And what a waste it is to hate, he always said. What a waste.”
~ Firoozeh Dumas, Funny in Farsi
In other words, knowledge is a product of perspective and "truth," and is limited to the ideological beliefs of the society we reside within. The extent to which we understand reality, then, is dependent on who gets to do the telling; when we change the point of view, it has the power to not only change our knowledge of the world, but invites us to question what counts as knowledge. Across our country's history and contemporary culture, we've seen how much this adage has held true for Iran. From the 1979 Iranian Revolution through the 9/11 attacks, many have come to associate Iranian people with barbarity, extremism, oppression, and even mystery. For many of those same people, however, what they know about Iran primarily comes from print and digital media that is biased by a Western perspective.
What would happen if we removed the filtered lens of the West?
How might our understanding of Iran change if Iranians were able to represent themselves in the stories that were told about them?
By considering theoretical frameworks of postcolonialism and critical media literacy, this curriculum will foster a reimagination of Iran by examining memoirs written by women of the Iranian diaspora.
Following the 1979 Revolution, a large number of Iranians migrated to the West to seek asylum from their repressive regime. Many of these migrants turned to writing as a means of making sense of their cultural hybridity and navigating feelings of placeness and disbelonging. While both men and women have exercised this diasporic agency to tell their stories - especially against the deficit narratives being spread about Iranians in their host countries - the female perspective has been particularly meaningful in light of traditions of strict censorship and tight gender dichotomies in Iran that rendered it nearly impossible for them to participate in modes of self-representation back home. Life in the diaspora has given Iranian women a unique opportunity to take ownership over their identities and offer alternative social narratives to the totalizing discourses that have Othered them. These women are attempting to lift the curtains off a civilization whose truth has often been shrouded by self-serving agendas and political ideologies; their stories not only have the power to reshape oversimplified understandings of Iran and Iranians, but also create humanizing portraits of Middle Eastern civilization at large.
While the forms of criticality practiced across these units of study are in service of disrupting hegemonic discourse around Iran, they also hold greater sociocultural implications in our current post-truth era. Students will be challenged to examine how their positionality has granted them limited access to knowledge, and how this limitation privileges one particular way of knowing and being in the world.
By analyzing the society in which they are positioned and contending with multiple frames of reference, it is the hope that this curriculum serves as praxis for locating and interrogating media bias beyond just the Middle East and building understandings of those who are not like them.