In Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, Gloria Anzaldúa remarks: “I am a turtle, wherever I go I carry ‘home’ on my back.” Taking Anzaldúa’s mobile and embodied understanding of home as a point of departure, this seminar revisits home beyond its conventional equation with homeland, return, or territorial belonging. While scholarship on Iranian diasporas has often emphasized nostalgia, exile, and the lost homeland, Iranian literary, artistic, and cultural production also shows that non-homeliness is not only a condition of those who leave. In post-1979 Iran, many Iranians experience estrangement within the borders of the homeland itself through war, censorship, gendered and sexual regulation, ethno-religious minoritization, class precarity, linguistic hierarchy, and political exclusion. 

This seminar asks how Iranian writers, artists, filmmakers, and cultural producers imagine home when the homeland itself becomes unhomely. Building on diaspora and transnational studies, including concepts of transnational culture as a condition of liminal and multiple homes, we approach home as a shifting relation to language, memory, body, archive, family, ritual, community, and aesthetics rather than a fixed geography. We are especially interested in how cultural forms create portable, fractured, improvised, or transnational homes, and how they register alienation, disorientation, loss, resilience, and belonging.

We will address the notion of home that Iranians carry on their backs, both inside and outside Iran; the collective (Iranshahri) cultural identity that have endured historical rupture, erasure, and political oppression; the creative strategies through which artists and writers overcome the limits of representation in Iran; forms of disorientation and alienation experienced both within and beyond the country; and the transnational homes produced by Iranian diasporic communities. 

We invite papers on Iranian literature, culture, visual and performance art, music, memoir, digital culture, and other cultural forms across a wide range of historical periods and genres. Possible topics include internal exile and minoritized belonging; home, gender, sexuality, and embodiment; diaspora and transnational homemaking; memory, objects, and archives; language, translation, and untranslatability; aesthetic strategies under censorship; and the limits and possibilities of representing home after revolution, war, migration, and displacement.