Donor Capital and the Institutionalization of Model Minority Politics

In this article, the donor-sponsored neoliberal university is centered as the foundation of contemporary identity-based work in the developing field of Iranian diaspora studies instead of the Iranian revolution. The Iranian revolution remains a constant specter in the explosion of scholarly and popular work on Iranians in the United States, inadvertently sanctioning an assimilationist model minority narrative that is tacitly opposed to radical frameworks. Shifting to a focus on the neoliberal university crystallizes how historical, radical, identity-based organizing and the resulting institutionalization of them as Ethnic Studies enables the contemporary capture of an already disciplined Iranian diaspora studies (IDS). Through sustained attention to political economy, the article shows how such scholarship’s racial anxiety around whiteness obscures the material reality of minoritized communities and their anti-assimilationist orientations. For Ethnic Studies and university studies scholars, the article articulates the political urgency of tracing university donor power in a national moment of right-wing social and legal terrorism. For cross-disciplinary scholars working in Iranian diaspora studies, this article reveals the function of the neoliberal university in establishing the field. By challenging the field’s imagined genealogy, Iranian diaspora studies scholars are invited to reconcile whose interests such a narrative serve, while Ethnic Studies scholars can track how institutionalization continues to shift from a repressive to a more productive force.