سیروس امیری

Faced with a number of new political and cultural prospects and unable to relocate to a newly-born Iran after the 1979 Islamic Revolution, many Iranians migrated from their homeland and resettled in Western countries, in the hope of reconciling the two distinct cultures with each other, each crying out their merits and demerits loudly to make them a follower of their own. Resulting from this dislocation or relocation, the process of identity recognition entered into the consciousness of Iranian diasporic writers. This thesis selected Yasmin Crowther's Saffron Kitchen (2006) and Tara Bahrampour's To See And See Again (2000) as two particular instances of autobiographies written under the shadow of diasporic lives suffering from the lack of a stable land to root in. In the light of Bhabha's post-colonial and cultural theories expressed in his books Nation and Narration (1990) and The Location of Culture (1994), the present thesis discusses how various concepts such as "liminality", "ambivalence", "hybrid identity" of an Iranian diasporic subject as a metamorphosed one, are constructed in a space that is called "third space of enunciation". To that end, the versatile nature of Iranian identity, the problematization of notions such as "home", "exile", and "belonging", the way the realities of language are incorporated into their self-narratives, and ultimately molding their culture into a new shape, persisting and transforming in diaspora simultaneously are emphasized. In conclusion, it is proposed that identity is not a given reality but rather a product of a lived one and therefore a social construct which is always in process.