Q&A with Mohsen Mobasher about the Iranian Diaspora

Written by leading scholars of the Iranian diaspora, the original essays in Mohsen Mostafavi Mobasher's new book The Iranian Diaspora: Challenges, Negotiations, and Transformations seek to understand and describe how Iranians in diaspora (re)define and maintain their ethno-national identity and (re)construct and preserve Iranian culture. They also explore the integration challenges the Iranian immigrants experience in a very negative

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context of reception. 

Combining theory and case studies, as well as a variety of methodological strategies and disciplinary perspectives, the essays offer needed insights into some of the most urgent and consequential issues and problem areas of immigration studies, including national, ethnic, and racial identity construction; dual citizenship and dual nationality maintenance; familial and religious transformation; politics of citizenship; integration; ethnic and cultural maintenance in diaspora; and the link between politics and the integration of immigrants, particularly Muslim immigrants.

We talked to Professor Mohsen Mobasher about the new book and how Islamophobia in the United States impacts Iranian Americans.

How does your new book, The Iranian Diaspora, expand or update the research you published in your 2012 book, Iranians in Texas? 

The Iranian Diaspora goes beyond the United States to look at eight other countries with a relatively large Iranian population and examines some of the same theoretical arguments that were developed in Iranians in Texas. Much like Iranians in Texas, The Iranian Diaspora suggests that Iranian immigrants in other coutries are not only demonized, stigmatized, and politicized but also are victims of discrimination, prejudice, exclusion, social isolation, and restrictions because of the actions of their national government. The Iranian Diaspora demonstrates that Iranophobia and small- and large-scale discriminatory practices against Iranian immigrants are not limited to the United States. However, as indicated in The Iranian Diaspora, Iranians in different countries not only mobilize different resources for coping with the onging Iranophobia and Islamophobia in the West, but also find novel ways of negotiating and redefining their ethno-religious, as well as their national Iranian, identity.

What do you wish your average Anglo Texan understood about Iranian migration and identity? 

First, I hope the average Anglo Texan realizes that Iranian immigrants are a diverse group religiously, politically, ethnically, and economically; and, much like most other immigrant populations, they continue leaving their country for educational, political, economic, social, and familial reasons. Second, I wish the average Anglo Texas or American to understand the devastating impact of large structural political forces and narratives on the lives of millions of Iranians who live outside of their country, and the ways in which these individuals are victims of political tensions between the Iranian government and the Western powers. I wish for an average Anglo Texas to understand that Iranian people and Iranian immigrants are not what the media depicts, and that these media stereotypes have major social and psychological consequences for Iranians and their foreign-born children, many of whom see themselves as belonging in their new host country.

How have the current debates over the Iranian nuclear deal and Trump-era Islamophobia impacted the diaspora in Texas?

The current debates over the Iran nuclear deal and the Muslim ban have had a huge negative impact on Iranians in the United States. This is particularly the case for thousands of Iranian students who receive funds from their parents in Iran to support their education, as well as Iranians who are seeking medical treatment in the United States. The current debate over the Iranian nuclear deal has made it almost impossible to obtain a non-immigrant US visa or to return home for a visit if you hold a temporary visa.

In your courses, how have students engaged with your research? What surprising perspectives have you gained from teaching your material? 

Students in my upper-level world migration course have engaged with my research in many different ways in their own research projects. Some use the same framework that I employed in my book, applying it to other Middle Eastern immigrants and examining the interrelations between political discourse, media images, and ethnic relations. Others are more interested in examining the nature of ethic identity and the ways in which Muslim and Middle Eastern immigrants maintain and (re)define their ethnic, national, and religious identies in light of the ongoing Islamophobia.

The surprising perspective that I have gained from teaching my material has been how little students know about immigration dynamics in general, and Middle Eastern immigrants in the United States in particular. Given the persistence of immigration to the US throughout history and the prevailing immigration debate in the United States, it is surprising to see how ill-informed students are about the social, political, cultural, and economic aspects of immigration, and how strongly they believe in inaccurate facts and myths about immigrants.

Mohsen Mostafavi Mobasher is an associate professor of anthropology and sociology at the University of Houston–Downtown. He is the author of Iranians in Texas: Migration, Politics, and Ethnic Identity and coeditor of Migration, Globalization, and Ethnic Relations: An Interdisciplinary Approach.

www.utexaspress.com

Making America Confederate Again

Mississippi and Alabama officially observe Confederate Memorial Day. Recently, a candidate for Virginia governor was endorsed by a prominent neo-Confederate at the 'Old South Ball'. Accounting for the rise in hate crimes and racially-motivated incidents since Trump's election, we're looking back at a piece of scholarship with alarming relevance today. 

In 2008, Euan Hague, Edward H. Sebesta, and Heidi Beirich, published a groundbreaking book, Neo-Confederacy: A Critical Introduction, that described a fringe movement of political activists who promoted an ideology of Confederate nationalism. Advocating for the secession of fifteen states to form a new Confederation of Southern States, neo-Confederates advanced a politics that was at its core anti-democratic (and anti-Democratic). Of course, almost ten years later secession has not happened, but as many scholars have long suggested about political movements, what purports to be new can

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often be found by taking a deeper look at the recent past. Indeed, as President Abraham Lincoln is reported to have said, “Every effect must have its cause. The past is the cause of the present, and the present will be the cause of the future.” It is this understanding that makes Neo-Confederacy a prescient guide to what was to come. As Hague, Sebesta, and Beirich noted, neo-Confederate activists at the end of the twentieth century wanted nothing less than “to change the [U.S.] social order,” arguing for a need to transform “American cultural, educational, political and religious practices.”

As Neo-Confederacy: A Critical Introduction describes, this meant valorizing whiteness and “Anglo-Celtic” culture, praising violence and masculinity, while simultaneously rejecting “political correctness” and international governmental collaborations, vilifying ethnic and sexual minorities, vociferously opposing non-European immigrants, and questioning American democratic processes of both the electoral system and the franchise. Neo-Confederacy wrapped these positions up in an appeal to Constitutional orginialism, “orthodox” Christianity, and a demand for national self-determination for the US South. Revisiting the book almost a decade after its original publication, one cannot but think that the collection’s assessment of this political fringe describes a phenomenon that, albeit perhaps now ostensibly detached from its forthright advocacy of a new Confederate nation-state, has moved powerfully into the mainstream of American politics. As esteemed historian James Loewen noted in the foreword, in examining neo-Confederacy, “Hague, Sebesta, and Beirich have done the heavy lifting... they have created an essential tool for those who work to bring justice and healing across racial and sectional divides in America.” Given the current state of US politics, Neo-Confederacy is an urgent primer for our new reality.

Dr. Euan Hague is a Professor of Geography at DePaul University, and Edward H. Sebesta is an independent researcher. We asked them to comment on how this 2008 collection, Neo-Confederacy: A Critical Introduction, resonates with the rhetoric and policies advanced by the new Trump administration.

Dr. Michael Hill speaking at a Confederate Memorial Day Parade, Northport, Alabama, 26 April 1997. (Photograph by Gerald R. Webster)

A Nationalist Call to Arms

Euan Hague and Edward H. Sebesta

Like many American magazines in January 2017, Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture had on its cover a photograph of Donald Trump: “Time to Begin” read the caption. This was not the first time that we had encountered Chronicles or its publisher, the Illinois-based Rockford Institute. In the 1990s, Chronicles had led an ideological charge that rejected much of US domestic policy as unconstitutional, lamented US foreign policy and transnational organizations, decried ‘activist judges,’ and railed against multiculturalism. Its editor, and lead contributor at the time, was Thomas Fleming. Fleming had also been a cofounder of Southern Partisan magazine in 1979, an imprint of the Foundation for American Education, which regularly published interviews with leading figures of the Republican right such as Trent Lott. At the Rockford Institute, Fleming invited colleagues from his Southern Partisan days to write for Chronicles and, in June 1994 alongside twenty-six others, he helped establish a new political party: the Southern League (which was renamed as the League of the South in 1997). Influenced by growing right-wing ethnic nationalism and nationalist leaders in Europe, such as those contributing to the collapse of Yugoslavia and Umberto Bossi in Italy, a year later Fleming and Southern League President James Michael Hill issued their nationalist call to arms in The Washington Post. On 29 October 1995, “The New Dixie Manifesto” set forth a Confederate nationalist agenda that argued for devolution of federal power to the states, local control over schools and education policy, and for the right of peoples to pursue and preserve their “authentic cultural traditions.” The Manifesto questioned the very concept of “America” as a united country of states and lamented that “national uniformity is being imposed by the political class that runs Washington, the economic class that owns Wall Street and the cultural class in charge of Hollywood and the Ivy League.” What was needed to challenge this US “multicultural, continental empire, ruled from Washington by federal agencies and under the thumb of the federal judiciary,” was an emboldened populace that would reject both the Democratic Party and craven establishment Republicans, and instead elect bold representatives that would reject federal regulations and interventions in state and local affairs. Those leading this charge would “insist upon a strict construction of the Constitution” and be “real people” from “the provinces, the sticks, the boondocks,” in particular the former states of the Confederacy. The manifesto envisioned a nationalist party, the Southern League, to advance these aims. This nascent right wing ideology gained supporters as Southern League members contributed essays and political analyses to websites, newsletters, and conservative talk radio stations. Advocates outlined their ideas in numerous books, often published in their tens of thousands by small, specialized presses that could maximize sales online to a dedicated audience of enthusiastic supporters. Some contributors were faculty members at prominent institutions in Georgia and Alabama; others, as Neo-Confederacy:A Critical Introduction documented, were white nationalists, such as Jared Taylor of American Renaissance and members of the Council of Conservative Citizens. Neo-Confederacy aligned with ideological positions, such as those proposed by Samuel Huntington, that understood the United States (and the Western world more generally) to be engaged in a ‘clash of civilizations’ with Islam and the Islamic world. Within such a conceptualization of global geopolitics, neo-Confederate organizations like the League of the South demanded that a person’s ethno-religious identity is their primary basis for belief, and echoed this perspective in the United States by valorizing a “white, Anglo-Celtic” ethnic group and its “orthodox Christianity.”