Suchergebnisse

All Cultures are Located in Place and Time. Exile culture is located at the intersection and in the interstices of other cultures. Physically placed outside its original homeland, it is mentally and emotionally both here and there, and, as a result, it is both local and global. Exile culture is not just physically, mentally, and emotionally [dis]located; it is also discursively and sociopolitically situated in a foreign land. Exile discourse, therefore, must be able to deal not only with the problem of location but also with the continuing problematic of multiple locations. Traditionally, mass media are considered as homogenizing agents that inculcate the dominant values. One of the key themes of my work in recent years, however, has been to describe and theorize about the manner in which these very media may also serve the opposite purpose by consolidating alternative values–which may be driven by differences in ethnicity, race, gender, class, nationality, religion, or politics.

This essay is in two parts. Part I examines the dynamism and the political economy of the popular culture in Iran by focusing on the developments in the publication of film periodicals since the revolution of 1979. Part II provides a list of periodicals since the revolution that have dealt with cinema and the film industry.Periodicals specializing in film and cinema as well as those which devote only a section of each issue to the motion-picture industry are all part of the larger cultural dynamics of what we might call the Iranian post-revolutionary popular culture. These specialized and allied periodicals cannot be considered in a vacuum since, as part of the dynamics of this popular culture, they are involved in a host of negotiations and conflicting relations with the clerical state, official censorship boards, advertisers, film producers, the publishing industry, and finally their own readers.

In this article, I will focus on the poetics and practice of nostalgia in exilic popular culture, drawing primarily on examples from some 10 years of Iranian television programs and music videos produced in Los Angeles. Nostalgia, a feature of exile, has in recent years become a "cultural practice" and a "mode of representation" (K. Stewart 227, 238) as postmodernity, neocolonialism, communism, totalitarianism, imperialism, and transnational capital have displaced peoples and cultures the world over. Fredric Jameson tells us that this fragmentation and deterritorialization forces us to experience time differently; that is, we experience the present as a loss or, as Baudrillard would have it, as a phenomenon that has no origin or reality, a "hyperreality" (2). For the exiles who have emigrated from Third World countries, life in the United States, especially in the quintessentially postmodern city of Los Angeles, is doubly unreal, and it is because of this double loss—of origin and of reality—that nostalgia becomes a major cultural and representational practice among the exiles. In addition, nostalgia for one's homeland has a fundamentally interpsychic source expressed in the trope of an eternal desire for return—a return that is structurally unrealizable.

Iran has often been the subject of many nonfiction films and television programs produced by Western countries, particularly Britain and the United States. Although these films about Iran were made by a diverse group of private and governmental agencies, overall they have tended both to emphasize the supremacy of West over the ancient, backward East and to support the evolving policies and ideologies toward Iran held by the Western governments and their multi-national corporations.Western audiences who viewed these films and programs as enployees of corporations, members of armed forces units, students in schools or the general public, must have experienced a certain self-congratulatory gratification with their own ideological and material conditions and a confidence in the policies espoused by their governments toward underdeveloped countries such as Iran. From the scant information available, it seems that the responses of the Iranian audiences (especially of those educated in the West and whose views of Iran, as we shall see later, partially coincided with those of Westerners) to these films were composed of a mixture of shame for their failure to modernize, and exasperation at being incorrectly or insufficiently represented.