Transnational Culture in the Iranian Armenian Diaspora by Claudia Yaghoobi (review)

Reviewed by: Transnational Culture in the Iranian Armenian Diaspora by Claudia Yaghoobi Marzia Milazzo (bio) Claudia Yaghoobi. Transnational Culture in the Iranian Armenian Diaspora. Edinburgh UP, 2023. Pp 288. £85.00. In Transnational Culture in the Iranian Armenian Diaspora, Claudia Yaghoobi traces a rich archive of diasporic Iranian Armenian cultural productions and personal stories to unearth understudied histories of Armenian resilience and [End Page 141] resistance. Anchoring her study to two key moments in Iranian history—the 1979 Islamic Revolution and the 1980s Iran-Iraq war—Yaghoobi deploys the tools of literary and cultural analysis alongside autoethnography to examine an impressive array of works produced since the 1980s, and to a lesser extent their precursors from the 1960s, including literary texts across multiple genres; films; music in Armenian, Persian, and English; and paintings and sculptures. Yaghoobi argues that the identity of diasporic Iranian Armenian artists and authors is crafted as they struggle with the conflicting desire to be integrated into their host countries while maintaining ties to Armenia and Iran. While these artists display a common Armenian cultural identity, Yaghoobi contends, they also produce transformative works that transcend national boundaries and embrace multiplicity. A product of the Iranian Armenian diaspora, Yaghoobi in the prologue reveals her own traumatic experiences of war and discrimination in Iran, which led to her family's decision to leave the country and eventually move to the United States in 2006. Like the artists whose works she examines, Yaghoobi is "a hybrid individual of a diaspora, with multiple consciousnesses" (xvii). To illuminate the experiences of diasporic Iranian Armenians Yaghoobi uses the work of Chicana writer Gloria Anzaldúa and other cultural theorists such as Stuart Hall. While Yaghoobi recognizes that "the condition of Iranian Armenians in Iran and in the US differs from that of the Chicanx community" (8), it would have been beneficial to more fully contextualize Anzaldúa's ideas and discuss the embeddedness of her theoretical insights within the specific Chicanx experience. Doing so might have prevented the idealization of hybridity that pervades Transnational Culture. Still, Yaghoobi productively builds on Anzaldúa's Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987) to theorize the concept of verants'ughi, an Armenian term that denotes a transformational passageway that leads to shifting consciousness and growth. Yaghoobi uses the term to capture how Iranian Armenians retain parts of their Armenian identity as a survival strategy while also moving beyond nationalism and being flexible or open to change. In the text's first chapter, "Diaspora, Nostos and Longing," Yaghoobi explores the Armenian presence in Iran by discussing how Iranian Armenian cultural productions grapple with the loss of a homeland and the ensuing trauma and nostalgia that the loss elicits. Moving deftly between multiple mediums and literary genres—from paintings by artists Marcos Grigorian and Sato A. to short stories, poems, and songs—Yaghoobi shows that the longing for "an inaccessible homeland" (64) permeates Iranian Armenian cultural productions. While some Iranian Armenian artists and authors express a [End Page 142] deep sense of isolation and loss, Yaghoobi contends, others choose to inhabit the liminal and hybrid space of verants'ughi. The pressure to assimilate into Iranian culture while maintaining an Armenian cultural heritage through tradition, language, and religion is the focus of Chapter Two, "Maintaining Heritage and Assimilation," in which Yaghoobi delves into the crucial significance of the Armenian language and the Armenian Church for Armenian cultural identity. Yaghoobi shows, for example, how Arby Ovanessian's film Ghara Kelisa (1967), which documents Armenians' yearly pilgrimage to the monastery of St. Thaddeus, embodies a hybrid cultural consciousness through the use of code-switching between Armenian and Persian. The chapter provides a more critical view of Iranian Armenian communities than is common throughout the book by addressing some Armenian families' rejection of interreligious (Muslim-Christian) marriage, "rais[ing] the possibility of othering as a reciprocal practice" (96). This possibility, however, remains underexplored as Yaghoobi misses an opportunity to cast a more critical eye on Iranian Armenian culture in favor of an idealized and somewhat monolithic depiction of Iranian Armenians as a resilient community that resists oppression. While the book's introduction raises the question of whether Iranian Armenians view themselves as...