Peyman Vahabzadeh
University of Victoria , Canada

By offering a comprehensive survey of the theories pertaining to Iranian emigration literature, this paper presents a sociological analysis of how divergent modes of living shapes up different communities in the Iranian diaspora. It is argued that the many faces of emigration literature indeed reflect the immigrants' experiences of their host societies. Furthermore, the paper pursues the points of divergence of this genus of literature in order to show how, ironically, various strands and different works in Iranian emigration literature contribute to the diversity of literature in their host societies. This “dual function” characterizes emigration literature: on the one hand, as a literature of departure from a homeland that vanishes in memory, this strand of literature narrates the existential dilemmas of the loss of a past in homeland, on the other hand, the existential settlement in the hostland drifts such narrative into an ever receding future that is not necessarily bound by a place. Emigration literature dwells in this terra nulleum .

More specifically, the paper examines five approaches to the emigration literature. The first approach, emerging in the late 1980s, holds that the literature of emigrants should mainly be regarded as a generational—and thus ephemeral—phenomenon. It will either return to its vernacular origins or will be absorbed by the literature of its hostland. The second approach, around the same time, privileged exile literature over other forms of literature produced by exiles or emigrants. This school held that since the leaving Iran is in fact a consequence of political violence, forms of literary expressions, other than exile literature, represent some kind of escapism. With the significant demographic changes in the Iranian expatriate communities during the 1990s, new voices emerged by the new century. The third approach, in the year 2000, advanced the argument that the emigrants' literature reflects social and psychological processes that start off from a “transitional society” to an “immigrant society” to “free society” where a cultural specific literature joins world literature. A fourth approach, proposed in the same year, finds the terms such as “emigration literature” or “exile literature” inadequate and therefore subsumes them under the comprehensive category of “unofficial literature,” which stands outside the literary establishment. The “unofficial literature” may one day grow into the literary establishment, in which case, new modes of “unofficial literature” will emerge to contest the rules of establishment. Last approach, published in the late 1990s, makes a distinction between “exile literature,” “immigrants' literature,” and “emigration literature,” privileging the latter over the other terms. It holds that the very possibility of “out-migration” is at the heart of exilic or immigrant experiences and literary expressions.

The paper concludes that emigration is a singularizing experience, and while we are subjects of out-migration in collective forms, the way we experience and express the loss of homeland and the arrival in Outlandia is individual and singular. Whence arise the expansive horizons of literary works amongst the immigrants.