期刊名称：Lapis Lazuli : an International Literary Journal
电子版ISSN：2249-4529
出版年度：2017
卷号：7
期号：1
页码：256
出版社：Pinter Society of India
摘要：“Sometimes we feel we straddle between two cultures; at other times that we fall between two stools.” This statement by Salman Rushdie verily portrays the hyphenated Iranian identities that seem to constantly vacillate between the disjunctive and conjunctive continuities. By addressing the ambiguous status of Firoozeh Dumas in Funny in Farsi (2003), and Azadeh Moaveni in Lipstick Jihad (2005) and Honeymoon in Tehran (2013), my argument centers on how the notion of identity is inseparably linked to the authors’ transnational existence and historical exigencies, which takes place in the form of a constant dialogue between the non-linear and disconnected spacio-temporality. I argue that these memoirs represent “contingent individualism”, a term Monica Chiu uses to define the contest between an individual’s yearnings for national belonging and a bitter critique of the country of origin. While Iran was tossing back and forth between two differing ways of temporal experience and historical development—Iranian Revolution, and thereafter, Islamic Fundamentalism on one side, and progressivism and a corresponding leap into the modernity on the other, both Dumas and Moaveni were struggling to synchronize their internal beats with an ever-changing environment. Thus, a product of the polyrhythmic structure of the socio-political change, their development remains eternally contradictory. What could be found between these interstitial space—of diaspora and metropole, exclusion and inclusion, and between the metaphors of space and belonging—is a conspicuous site of resistance.
