Transcript

[00:00] [AnthroPod theme music, “All the Colors in the World” by Podington Bear]

Sharon Jacobs (SJ) [00:12]: Iran has been in the news—and on the minds of people all over the world—throughout 2026 so far. War, demonstrations, and an Internet blackout have shaken the country. They’ve also thrust a spotlight on communities of Iranians outside Iran, whose complex relationship with their homeland and varied and contradictory perspectives on its politics are often misunderstood, simplified, or ignored.

Amy Malek is an associate professor of Anthropology and American Studies at the College of William & Mary. In October 2025, Malek’s book Culture Beyond Country was published with NYU Press. It’s based on her transnational, long-term ethnographic fieldwork with diasporic Iranian communities in North America and Europe. She’s looking at how cultural organizers, in particular, negotiate identity and inclusion, what it means to be Iranian, and how that interacts with and responds to states and global power relations.

But just four months before Malek’s book was to be released, in June, Iran was subjected to twelve days of strikes from Israel and the U.S. Then, a protest cycle in Iran that started just before New Year's was brutally put down by the regime in January. And the following month saw the start of the U.S.-Israeli war of aggression, on February 28th. The past year has been a time of turmoil and tragedy, not just for people inside Iran, but for anyone who's connected with the country—including Malek herself.

I’m Sharon Jacobs, and you’re listening to AnthroPod, the podcast of the Society for Cultural Anthropology. In this episode, Amy Malek talks with me about her new book, Culture Beyond Country, and its resonances in our current moment. Our conversation took place on Monday, June 8th, as the war passed its 100th day.

Amy Malek (AM) [02:06]: It’s been a really tough year. I’m not gonna lie about that. For most of us who were born in the U.S. who are Iranian Americans, for most of our lives, we’ve kind of been made aware of this deep enmity between the U.S. and the Islamic Republic of Iran. And it has just kind of felt like the specter of war has hovered over our entire lives. So to suddenly find ourselves living it, starting last June, it’s kind of been like a nightmare come true for a lot of us in some ways—not for everyone, right? There’s a lot of different, kind of, feelings that have been brought out in the last year. But I mean, it goes without saying that the last weeks, months, years have been really challenging for our loved ones in Iran. And relatedly, if differently, for those of us in the diaspora. So we have this kind of mix of emotional turmoil, grief and anxiety, worry, despair, isolation, that’s been really hard on its own.

But because I’m also a member of the Iranian diaspora, and a scholar of the Iranian diaspora, the last year felt like particularly disorienting for me, I think because those emotions that I just talked about were also in parallel with a really compelling sense of ethical and professional responsibility to keep paying attention, to observe, to witness, to document, and to really try to understand these changes that are happening in real time. And that has been kind of relentless over the last year. It’s been a really hard balance, and talking about a book that, yes, I worked really hard on, and that, you know, it has important things to say, but largely focuses on the diaspora in the 2010s, has been kind of something I haven’t really felt like I’m able to do in the middle of, you know, war and extreme violence and executions and ongoing persecutions and, and internet blackout and so on.

[03:53] So, I kind of paused all book talks as of January of 2026. It’s not that I don’t think that the book is relevant. I actually think it has a lot to say about what’s happening in the diaspora right now. But—and you know, as an anthropologist, I kind of know that we have a lot we can contribute to public discourse, not just about things we care about, but that our interlocutors care about. That’s kind of our obligation to do so, I think. But because what we study and what we live are often really deeply entangled, that means that as a person, not just as a scholar, I really needed time to absorb and reflect and think, during what has felt like a sea change in my own life.

The other thing I would say is that, as anthropologists, we also know that it’s really hard to determine where and when fieldwork begins and ends, and when writing begins and ends. So like, once we publish a book or an article, we know that our communities are going to continue to change and grow in different ways—sometimes really small, continuous ways over time, and then in other cases, like I would argue the last year, really dramatically and rapidly. I could already tell about a year before the book was coming out that the priorities and, kind of, activities in the Iranian diaspora were shifting in ways that made like the period that I really focused on in this book feel almost historical—which has been a really weird thing as a new book coming out, to be like, by the way, this is about just yesterday, but it feels like, you know, ages ago.

So the last six months really deepened that feeling for me. And I kind of feel like now, a lot of the observations and analyses in this book are now going to be seen as precursors that set the stage for the deepened divisions and the heightened nostalgias and the troubling political conflicts that have erupted in our diaspora over the last year.

So it’s been an interesting thing to have to think about in the middle of all of these events.

SJ [05:39]: Yeah, absolutely. I think you were writing history without really realizing that’s what you’re doing. Right? Like, you’re writing about a particular moment, which now feels like it’s very different from the moment that we’re living in, but an incredibly important lead-up to it. And a moment in which some of your interlocutors in Iranian diasporic communities were themselves dealing with really drastic changes, which we’re going to be talking about as well later in this interview—because of course, it didn't start in 2025. The Iranian diaspora has always been really intimately connected with ongoing political, historical events inside Iran.

I mean, another thing that comes up in your book is sort of the ongoing influx of Iranians into these communities—that you, I think you prefer “cohorts” to “generations” in your book to talk about how to distinguish the Iranian diaspora because it’s not—there are so many other factors beyond just where were you born, but also what was the Iran that you left?

So to that end, in your book, you focus on three distinct Iranian diasporic communities. One in California, Los Angeles, nicknamed “Tehrangeles,” by some of the members of the Iranian community there. And then Toronto, in Canada, which I did not know before reading the book, also has a nickname…

AM [06:53]: “Tehronto.”

SJ [06:54]: “Tehronto,” okay. And Stockholm in Sweden, which does not seem to have a nickname yet.

AM [06:59]: Not that I know of.

SJ [07:00]: So, can you tell me a little bit about, why did you choose these three communities, and what do they tell us characteristically about the diversity of the Iranian diaspora globally?

AM [07:08]: Absolutely. Yeah. So I’ve always been kind of academically interested in diasporic cultural production. So I wanted to develop a relational comparison between communities in the diaspora that had large populations of Iranians, an active cultural scene, and, so that I could see the impacts of, kind of, local systems and politics, different state approaches to migration and culture. And that was really important because I wanted to kind of work against assumptions that people in diaspora are the same across diasporic locations, culturally.

Instead, I really wanted to take seriously the ways that different periods of migration, as you mentioned, different migration pathways, different policies towards immigrants in these different societies, are impacting Iranian communities and their sense of identity and diaspora as Iranians.

So the three countries that I chose fit that tall order. For example, Sweden and Canada, both were experimenting with official multiculturalism as a national policy and had revised their immigration systems right around the same time as the ’79 Iranian revolution. So the Iranian communities who would arrive to those locations had a very different set of experiences—in Iran, and post-migration—with regard to state support and social expectations than did the large numbers of Iranians who arrived to, say, the United States. Because here, in the U.S., we’ve never really had a federal policy of multiculturalism. In its place we have this kind of unofficial neoliberal form of multiculturalism that, among many other things, has required immigrants to really take personal responsibility for their own inclusion or exclusion. And that’s a fundamentally different orientation to social life, to national identity, to cultural belonging than in Canada and Sweden in that same period.

So, in terms of diversity, our diaspora communities obviously reflect the diversity of Iran. That’s a place that is linguistically and ethnically and religiously and politically really diverse. By paying attention to different migration pathways that were available or accessed at different periods, I could try to trace how these kind of major cities in the diaspora were not necessarily similarly populated.

[09:14] For example, the United States had already become a choice destination for Iranian university students in the 1960s and 1970s, where, by 1975, Iranians had become the largest foreign student population in our universities and colleges. In the really politically turbulent years surrounding, so, before and after the ’79 revolution, the U.S. also then became a key site of refuge—both for political refugees and religious refugees. So, that would be, let’s say, Pahlavi elites, who may have brought quite a large amount of resources with them—though not all did—[and] that could be ethnic and religious minorities like Jews, Armenian Christians, Bahá'ís.

SJ [09:52]: A quick note of explanation: The Pahlavi dynasty—that’s Reza Shah Pahlavi, followed by his son, Mohammad Reza—ruled Iran from 1925 until 1979, when a broad-based revolution resulted in the establishment of the Islamic Republic state that controls Iran today. The Bahá'í faith is one of a variety of minority religions inside Iran, and one whose adherents have faced particular persecution from Iran’s Islamic Republic.

AM [10:19]: And they were all kind of joining students whose plans had been interrupted by this political turmoil. So we see a kind of stronger representation of these different ethnic, religious, and other minority groups in LA than, say, in Stockholm.

And that early enclave in LA, that “Tehrangeles” or “Irangeles” you just described, would soon become the largest community of Iranians outside of Iran in the world. And so, because a lot of that community also included cultural workers, a lot of the cultural production that was consumed across the diaspora—so, books, music, TV, film—were all produced in LA. And so it became an obvious choice for this kind of a study.

Meanwhile, as the Islamic Republic was consolidating its power, largely through repression, during the Iran-Iraq war—that’s 1980 to ’88—Iranians were experiencing or fearing persecution, and had to take really treacherous pathways across borders into neighboring countries like Pakistan or Turkey to find protection.

And so they were seeking third country resettlement at exactly the same time as Sweden’s migration priorities were changing. They had had kind of a labor recruitment strategy, like much of Europe, in the sixties and seventies, and that shifted right around the eighties into humanitarian protection. As a result, a lot of those folks who had entered into that system as political refugees ended up being resettled into Sweden in the 1980s. And they would eventually congregate in the immigrant suburbs of its largest cities—particularly, but not only, Stockholm. So those communities include former and current political activists, cultural workers, other educated and kind of largely middle class Iranians who arrived with a lot of cultural capital, but very little else. That’s a kind of distinction, I would say, from, say LA.

[12:00] But in the 1990s, Iran was experiencing both an economic stagnation, high unemployment, and, especially in scientific fields, kind of a ceiling on where a lot of newly educated young people could find work. And so that led to a common kind of migration desire among educated Iranians. At the same time, those who know about Canada know that it was around the 1990s that there was an increase in the number of student permits that the country was offering. Its point system was favoring skilled migration. And later investor categories were created that offered eventually permanent residency. And so for those who were seeking postgraduate education and employment opportunities, they found that in Canada.

And it would be a mix of students, of highly educated job seekers, of investors, but also refugees and family members that started to create these really large and vibrant communities in Canada, and especially in Toronto, also in Vancouver and Montreal. So that kind of speaks to the different migration flows and pathways that had existed until the 2010s.

But I would say that the repression of the Green Movement in 2009, the difficult economic conditions that became worse by renewed sanctions after the withdrawal of the U.S. from the 2015 nuclear deal—these kind of all led to continued migration from Iran.

SJ [13:12]: Iran’s Green Movement was a massive and consequential response to the 2009 national elections, widely seen as rigged. Protestors demanded democratic reforms, and were met with a brutal crackdown. The nuclear deal, signed in 2015, provided Iran with relief from economic sanctions imposed by the European Union, United Nations, and United States—but the U.S. re-imposed its sanctions on Iran after Donald Trump withdrew from the deal in 2018, with devastating effects for the Iranian people.

AM [13:44]: It’s not a done story, right? Even though we have migration bans, and even though we have certain conditions that have made it harder to migrate, it’s not that Iranians have stopped migrating. And so that’s true for these three diaspora locations as well—so that the “first generation” now includes folks who arrived in the 1950s, but also those who may have arrived last week. So, that’s a really broad set of experiences and identities, and that’s why I kind of argue that we might need to think more carefully about immigration “cohorts” and ways of trying to understand those experiences and the differences between them, because it leads to the kind of fragmentations that we see today in these communities.

SJ [14:22]: Yeah. Thank you. And I hadn’t realized until reading your book, especially in Canada, how recently arrived many of these cultural organizers were. And I think that brings us also to my next question for you. So Culture Beyond Country shows the connections between identity, culture, and politics emerging around the global Iranian diaspora in different ways. So, as people are putting on different kinds of cultural events and performances in these different communities in different diasporic contexts, how do they kind of mobilize their ideas about Iran itself, about how Iran quote-unquote “should” be?

AM [15:02]: Yeah, I mean, this is a really good question because when I set out to work with cultural organizers in the diaspora in kind of the late 2000s and early 2010s, I kept hearing over and over that their motivation for working was a response or reaction to misrepresentations and misrecognition they’d experienced as Iranians in their diaspora homes. So they were really frustrated by this kind of consistent post 9/11 mainstream view in news and media that only relegated Iranians to the categories of fundamentalist Muslims, terrorists, or, like President George Bush at the time claimed, part of this “Axis of Evil.” And so these folks were really turning to public displays of Iranian arts and culture as a strategy for asserting their view of a more authentic Iran-ness into public spheres and their societies. And that motivation, I think, was largely a diasporic one. It was really about where they are, rather than only where they’re from. They were very much wanting to make clear, where they’re from is not what you think, right—American public or Canadian public or Swedish public.

But I would say that that kind of motivation was joined in the 2010s by this post Green Movement surge of diasporic participation that also started to view diasporic cultural organizing, not only as a strategy of inclusion, but also as an opportunity to build democratic practices—both in their diasporic homes, and in an imagined future democratic Iran. So you can recall that the Green Movement was sparked by an election scandal, right? Democracy is what was being, kind of, defended in these movements. And so it was really top of mind. So the result was this proliferation of large parades and festivals and exhibitions and public art in the 2010s that were each kind of inflected with the ideals, priorities and the norms of their societies.

So for example, in chapter three, I kind of give a really close-up ethnographic view of a planning of a large public festival related to the Iranian New Year in the center of Stockholm, called Eldfesten. It’s a celebration of Chaharshanbe Suri—or like, a fire festival.

SJ [17:08]: Chaharshanbe Suri, the last Wednesday of the Iranian calendar, harkens to Iran’s ancient Zoroastrian heritage. It’s centered around fire, and among its traditions, people jump over a bonfire—moving from darkness to light, or winter to spring, and into the new year.

AM [17:25]: So this event was professionally produced and funded almost entirely by the National Theater of Sweden, and thus funded by the Swedish state. And so the organizers described to me their initial motivations as kind of a really direct response to attempts to repress the celebration of that holiday in Iran, right? So this is coming off the heels of the Green Movement, and that was a real strong motivator for the young people who were involved. But then they also paired with other Iranian, say, theater professionals or community leaders within Stockholm, to try to build an opportunity where leaders in their diasporic communities, who maybe didn’t all get along with each other, could then practice, like, rehearse democratic engagement with each other.

So here was an attempt in Stockholm to kind of bring people together under the banner of a cultural festival where these political, ethnic, and other differences should not be a barrier to participation or cooperation. And so [in] their planning meetings, they were really careful about framing them through democratic processes. They created pre-circulated agendas, they democratized the speaking order and speaking time. They would publish their meeting minutes for everyone to see on their website in an effort to kind of promote transparency.

And in those meetings, the leaders of this group would repeatedly articulate why these kinds of strategies were important. They would—if a disagreement came up around the table, which they did, they would directly invoke the teachings of Olof Palme and of other Swedish leaders—kind of putting forward these democratic practices and Swedish norms of behavior, like transparency and timeliness and “cool comportment” as really important for their inclusion within Sweden, but also for a future Iran.

And so I really can’t overstate enough the fact that for most of my interlocutors, they were motivated to commit all this time and energy and resources to these kinds of activities, because they really love Iran. They really love Iranian culture. And it was never only about just here-and-now diaspora. There was always also this very, you know, deeply hoped-for, imagined future for Iran and how we could possibly contribute to that, from diaspora.

SJ [19:33]: Yeah. Thank you. And this idea of this deeply hoped-for future democratic Iran is something that I’m also going to ask you more about a little bit later in our conversation. But before we get there, I want to start turning towards how the Iranian diaspora has responded to recent past events inside Iran. So in autumn 2022, the Woman Life Freedom movement broke out following the killing of a Kurdish Iranian woman, Jina Mahsa Amini, while in police custody in Tehran. In your book, you discuss this moment as a kind of turning point—and really, like, a public reckoning for some of the cultural organizers that you’re working with. So, can you tell me a little bit more about how diaspora groups dealt with internal Iranian affairs then? And then, if we can turn to the present moment a little bit, how are cultural performances—if they are indeed—addressing what’s happening in Iran now?

AM [20:29]: Yeah. Woman Life Freedom was such an important movement in so many ways—to say nothing of its important impacts in Iran—which of course should have its own podcast. But there was an incredible turning point, in my view, within our diaspora communities worldwide.

In its early days, it managed to galvanize a really dispersed and divided diaspora to show up in huge public demonstrations in solidarity with protesters in Iran. So some 20,000 in LA, then 50,000 in Toronto, and then later some 100,000 converge in Berlin to yell zen zendegi azadi, “woman life freedom.”

And so there’s this real, kind of, excited proclamations online about, you know, this newly formed unity, we’re all together in this, in our diaspora communities.

Unfortunately, in the kind of weeks and months that followed, that unity, the shallowness of that unity, really became exposed. We saw the formation of really new and troubling fragmentations. In the kind of same moments some people were feeling these new solidarities and unity with Iranians, online and in person, others were experiencing an emerging, highly toxic culture of targeting and harassing, and ultimately attempting to silence those who either didn’t speak out or didn’t speak out loudly enough, or didn’t speak out in the right ways. So, labels like a “reformist” were becoming weaponized, as did this term NIAC-i.

SJ [21:45]: NIAC is the acronym for the National Iranian American Council, a Washington, D.C.-based political organization.

AM [21:52]: And that organization had been accused of serving as a lobby for the Islamic Republic. And so it was this kind of epithet that could be tossed at someone who you felt, you know, was either a reformist or had not yelled loudly enough, or was simply not willing to call for regime change, full stop—whether they had actually worked with that organization or not.

So we saw, you know, this kind of, like, deep set of resentments and angers and frustrations just being lobbed at one another at some point.

By early 2023, these diaspora cultural organizations were at a crossroads. Almost all of them established themselves as non-religious, non-partisan, nonprofit in order to appeal to these diverse communities that they were trying to serve and represent. But as of Woman Life Freedom, as of 2023, it became clear that a nonpolitical stance was no longer going to be acceptable—these organizational silences were taken, themselves, as a problematic set of stances by a lot of the communities that they represented.

So that all comes to a head, I would argue, kind of in the lead-up to Nowruz of 2023. Nowruz is the new year that’s celebrated on the vernal equinox, usually around March 20th. And so each of these organizations that I had studied—but many others as well—were kind of known for holding large public Nowruz festivities. So what should we do for Nowruz in 2023 amid all of this, right? People were not in the mood for celebrating. There was not this kind of, like, excitement for being around one another, even—you know, it was kind of like turning away from each other because we don’t know where you stand, kind of thing. A lot of mistrust.

So a lot of these organizations kind of replaced those usual festivities with really somber events. Either they canceled altogether, or they had these somber concerts where maybe performances by musicians with lyrics about the protests, or memorials for the slain protestors, or putting forward a vision of a free Iran. And so, that was the strategy of Eldfesten in Sweden, that was the strategy of the LA organization that I studied, Farhang Foundation—they have an annual huge Iranian festival in Los Angeles that they’d organized for some fifteen years prior. They had to cancel.

[23:55] But one organization in Toronto, named Tirgan, kind of went even further. In chapter four, I get into this example. Tirgan had managed to kind of weather these, what I call “stress tests,” over, say, 2019 to 2022. There had been a global pandemic. They had to pivot away from these kind of in-person events. There had been a #metoo movement that they had to contend with in certain ways. Then, of course, this devastating loss of Iranian Canadians on Flight 752 that was shot down by the IRGC in 2020.

SJ [24:24]: Flight 752 was a Ukraine International Airlines plane that was shot down by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps shortly after taking off from Tehran’s airport in January 2020, during an environment of tension and back-and-forth attacks following the U.S. assassination of Iranian military commander Qasem Soleimani. According to Malek, the majority of the 176 passengers and crew killed on Flight 752 were Iranians living in Canada.

AM [24:52]: And they kind of managed to weather these crises largely by staying in their arts and culture lane. They conformed to the kind of expectations of Canadian nonprofit organizations to maintain a non-political stance.

But Woman Life Freedom threw all of that into question. After having built this really successful brand that could draw out enormous crowds, raise a lot of funding from granting organizations both federal and local, but also, it was able to kind of bring local, provincial, and national politicians to these events and to kind of recognize their growing power in the diaspora community. Now the community was calling on them to be more than just an arts and cultural organization, and to kind of demand why the organization had not mobilized this accumulated social capital that they’d built over several years in solidarity with the Iranians in Iran.

Under severe pressure, the organization had to make a decision, right? And they decided to do that. So they not only issued statements in support of Woman Life Freedom, they also became a source of information about upcoming protests in Toronto and beyond. And it kind of pivoted its entire Nowruz programming to a concert format. And they went really big. So they rented out the Scotiabank Arena—that’s where the Toronto Raptors NBA team plays. A big place. They invited local and national politicians from all the political parties in Canada, but also elected Iranians from other diaspora locations, like Sweden and Germany. They also invited a group of unelected opposition figures in the diaspora, who during the course of Woman Life Freedom would try to organize an opposition coalition. And that includes Reza Pahlavi.

SJ [26:27]: Reza Pahlavi is the son of the exiled former shah of Iran, and a figure who continues to galvanize support among some Iranians as a possible leader of a post-Islamic Republic Iran.

AM [26:38]: And so the event, which they called “For Iran,” essentially kind of became this four-hour political rally, complete with these fiery speeches and really moving video montages about people who’ve lost their lives in this movement, and musical performances. They also in conjunction held a political summit for all those invited politicians to kind of network and, theoretically, to strategize, to organize the opposition. So in our interviews, they kind of described this event to me as festival eterazi, a “protest festival.”

As one leader put it, a number of those at the top of the leadership structure had kind of felt this duty and obligation, as Iranians, to go all in on solidarity, to kind of abandon this nonpolitical veneer, right? They said they felt ashamed about what was happening in Iran, to their fellow Iranians, if they didn’t do anything. And so “For Iran” became, like, the least they could do, right?

But it wasn’t small. This was a huge financial lift for an organization that is nonprofit. And so the cost—both financially and reputationally—for having put on this kind of protest festival at that particular moment has been really hard for their organization to recover from. After organizing this successful event since 2008, they have not held a summer festival in Toronto since 2023. That could be for many reasons. But, the fact is that the strategy of organizing through arts and culture, while really fervently adhering to Canadian norms of appearing nonpolitical, had kind of worked for most of the 2010s in Toronto, but ultimately had to be abandoned when political forces and events in Iran, and in the diaspora, meant that those kinds of Canadian norms pressed against these emotional and ethical and quite personal commitments to Iranians in Iran.

So I think this kind of speaks to how these organizations recognize that their ability to survive in these communities means that they can’t separate politics from art in these kinds of, maybe, ways that they had tried to do for quite a long time. And that they can't operate business as usual in the midst of these massive global political shifts.

[28:38] And so, this year, as you can imagine, with the war beginning on February 28th, Nowruz was again right around the corner, and it was a very muted affair this year, everywhere. I mean, even in our homes. Nobody was in the mood for a celebration. If anything, we kind of would use this idea of Nowruz and rebirth and renewal to hope for something better. But, you know, this couldn’t be a celebration time.

And so, again, Eldfesten was canceled in Stockholm, Tirgan didn’t hold an event, Farhang Foundation in LA canceled the Nowruz Festival again, in solidarity with Iranians in Iran. Its executive director said, quote, “There’s no culturally appropriate way to hold an in-person gathering in celebration of this scale or nature,” unquote, in light of what was going on in Iran. And so instead, they did what they did in 2023, right—they held these concerts. One was called “Light Always Prevails,” the other one called “Echoes of Freedom: Nowruz concert to honor the enduring voices of Iranians.” So they’re kind of threading this needle of, we can still use arts and culture to feel and to express emotions about what's going on, to kind of honor people who are going through this terrible set of circumstances. But, you know, how to operate in this time when your mission is one that is much more celebratory and was kind of established in a 2010s environment that’s quite different than now has left us a little bit scrambling.

SJ [30:01]: Yeah. One thing that I’m thinking of, looking back at the experience you described of Tirgan during the Woman Life Freedom movement, is, they had to kind of balance, it seems like, in between feeling the necessity to take a political stance, on the one hand, and then on the other hand, when you take a political stance, it is by necessity specific, because—perhaps even more so in Toronto than some of the other communities you described, it’s a super politically divisive community, and I can imagine if you have Pahlavi speaking at an event, that’s going to alienate a lot of people.

AM [30:35]: Sure. Which is why they had avoided it to begin with, right? Like, we don’t take political stances so that we can actually, like, cater to a wider swath of the community and kind of bring everyone together for at least four days in the summer, to celebrate being Iranian without all the other stuff. But there are moments where that’s just not gonna fly.

I will say that the presence of Pahlavi led to some people—this was a ticketed event, right? And so, the rumors that he would be there was enough for some people to just not show up. But for others, I mean, I went to kind of observe. And I will say there were people there who, at his presence, had tears in their eyes. They were so excited. So I don’t want to make it sound like his presence was isolating everyone. But to your point, it kind of made a line in the sand, a little bit, for folks, right? Either you’re for that or you’re against that. And that had not been the way that that organization had been perceived, at least publicly, in that community.

SJ [31:27]: Yeah, that makes sense. So I want to zoom in for a moment on the experiences of monarchists, people who support the son of the former Shah. We’ve seen a lot of high-profile demonstrations in recent months in the diaspora that have flown the lion and sun flag, which was the state flag before the 1979 revolution, which means that it has a really strong association with the Pahlavi monarchy. We’ve seen people magnifying the voice of Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of the former Shah, some people who have even gone further, calling for Trump to “Make Iran Great Again,” or publicly celebrating the U.S.-Israeli invasion. In your book, you discuss a sensibility you call “imperial nostalgia.” And I want to ask, how does that framing kind of help us understand what’s happening now?

AM [32:15]: Yeah. In chapter two, you know, it’s a chapter that focuses on the United States, and Los Angeles more specifically. And I look at the emergence of a field of cultural production, in the kind of Bourdieu sense, that I call “Cyromania.” And so Cyromania is just one form of imperial nostalgia, a wistful longing for former empire, and in this case with a focus on ancient Persia, the Achaemenid empire.

SJ [32:40]: Founded by Cyrus the Great, the Achaemenid Empire governed from 559–330 B.C., and reached from modern-day Egypt to India to Armenia to Greece.

AM [32:52]: I think Cyromania is most identifiable through the figure of Cyrus the Great, images of his tomb and the Cyrus cylinder. And this is a barrel-shaped clay artifact, kind of the size of a football, that announced in Babylonian the victory of Cyrus, to the people of Babylon. It was a kind of a foundational document meant to kind of preserve what Cyrus said to the people. And one of those things was that various religious practitioners could practice their religion freely.

In the mid-2000s and throughout the 2010s, we started to see this incredible surge of cultural production referring to or reproducing images of Cyrus and his cylinder. We’re talking bumper stickers, T-shirts, necklaces, cufflinks, billboards, concert posters, the naming of children, and of small businesses and restaurants, paperweights and replicas and home decor. And of course, these kind of enormous larger-than-life representations of the cylinder at parades and festivals.

I think one explanation for this kind of incredible surge of popularity, in the diaspora, at least—we also see some of this happening in Iran, but since I’m focusing on the diaspora here—one explanation for that surge is as a strategy of inclusion in the United States. So that’s one of the arguments of the chapter.

So the cylinder has been promoted for a long time, and I would say first by Pahlavi elites in the 1960s, and then later gets picked up through Pahlavi nationalism as this kind of first declaration of human rights. But scholars of course have shown that to be quite the exaggeration.

Beyond that, Cyrus the Great has been put forward as a source of inspiration for U.S. founding fathers. This kind of line of argumentation develops in the early 2010s, that is then put forward by museum curators during a tour of the cylinder across five different cities in the U.S. in 2013, and again in 2017 by community organizers for different purposes. But Iranian Americans here are arguing that they should be accepted in the U.S. because the very foundations of American democracy, multiculturalism, and human rights, quote, “came from us.” So—far from being the kind of “evil” that the labels had placed Iranians under—that Iranians not only had shared values with Americans, they were the source of those very values.

[35:00] And so “imperial nostalgia” for, kind of, ancient Persia is connected really closely to Pahlavi nationalism. So, diaspora media organizations, including satellite and digital television stations like Manoto and Iran International, have kind of long contributed to spreading nostalgic views of both, let’s call it the “pre-Islamic” Iranian period, but also of Pahlavi Iran, right? So that would be, like, 1925 to 1979.

And, in recent years, that kind of imperial nostalgia has taken new, and I would argue digital, forms. So for example, in January of this year, we saw an absolute deluge of AI-produced videos and images of Cyrus, the Cyrus cylinder, and similar symbols of empire kind of flood social media. It’s really unclear who produced them. But in them, Cyrus is kind of reanimated and called upon to take back Iran from the grips of the Islamic Republic. And the Islamic Republic in these kinds of narratives are always referred to as “invaders” or “occupiers.”

And those clips kind of draw implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, on anti-Muslim racism and related ideas of Aryanism that are part and parcel of this kind of Pahlavi nationalism that puts forward Cyrus the Great as this kind of national hero and does so to say that, you know, Iranians are the original Aryans, and that’s distinct from their Arab or Afghan neighbors. So there’s some racial hegemonies that are being spoken to, present-day racial hegemonies that claim a proximity to whiteness. But also, by framing this as an Arab invasion, it kind of simultaneously distances Iranian Americans from both Arabs and from Islam.

I would say, relatedly, Cyromania has not only been bolstered by Iranians of this persuasion, but also by Christian evangelicals and by Zionists, who celebrate Cyrus for having allowed the Jews of Babylon to return from exile. And those groups also have worked to try to connect Donald Trump to Cyrus the Great. Since 2018, you could buy commemorative coins connecting Trump to Cyrus, kind of celebrating his having moved the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, for example. In October 2025, just as my book was coming out, remarkably, these digital billboards were going up around Israeli cities showing American and Israeli flags behind a clapping Donald Trump with the all-caps caption of “Cyrus the Great is alive.” And this was kind of commemorating or encouraging the final Israeli hostages that were being negotiated for release.

[37:15] So imperial nostalgia for ancient Persia is very alive and well. It’s also very connected to contemporary politics, and a lot of the political messaging and far-right positions that we’ve seen in the last year.

But I would also say that in January 2026, and in February as well, we kind of see a different deluge of social media posts that are about this nostalgic view of the Pahlavi period. So not only ancient empire and imperial nostalgia, but also kind of more recent Iranian monarchy. These kinds of Instagram posts and tweets that purport to show life in Iran in the seventies and the kind of utopic view of it have been really circulating for years now. This is not a new phenomenon. Every time there’s any kind of geopolitical, um, let’s say “flare up,” these kinds of views get circulated on social media.

So I’ve written an article about this kind of nostalgia, and how that view gets positioned in a kind of before-and-after mode that juxtaposes often, you know, selected images of celebrities and pretty women in the 1970s and their miniskirts and their bathing suits with present-day images of women in Iran, that are represented in this very sullen or angry kinds of dispositions and wearing, you know, long black chadors, that head-to-toe covering.

But the reels and TikToks that went viral earlier this year in 2026, in kind of the lead-up to war, also included AI hallucinations of what Iran purportedly looked like prior to the revolution, as well as what it could have looked like had the revolution never happened. Those kinds of, like, very selective, nostalgic, and speculative posts were not always marked as AI and were kind of taken in as kind of a hopeful, future nostalgia, I argue. But they were very popular and they kind of worked to encourage diasporic Iranians to really support regime change, right? Like, there’s no reason Iran shouldn’t look like this rose-colored view of the past. And, importantly, to promote Reza Pahlavi. Because a lot of these reels were of the Pahlavi family, were of the former shah and his wife looking very stylish, looking regal, and put forward as this Westernized, fair, infallible family that—shouldn’t we want this again. This kind of “Make Iran Great Again” being very much connected to this nostalgic view of pre-’79 Iran that was quite selective in its representations and sometimes fully hallucinated.

SJ [39:30]: Yeah. Yeah. The monarchist symbolism and imperialist nostalgia that we’ve seen in recent protests are coming from this really high-profile, I would say, much-covered in global media, segment of the Iranian diaspora that has been vocally supportive of the U.S. and Israeli attacks. Whereas, on the other hand, of course, many diasporic Iranians firmly reject that view and have stood very strongly against the war. So, what kinds of opinions and positionalities might be overshadowed by this very binary framing of “pro-war Iranians versus anti-war Iranians”?

AM [40:06]: You know, the fact that we have this kind of pro- and anti-war position that is assumed to come with a certain set of other related positions, has really kind of, I think, flattened or hidden a diversity, both within them and between them. For example, in the kind of groups that you’re describing here, there are those that celebrated the start of the war indeed, and they did so because of their anti-Islamic Republic stance, alongside these deeply ideological commitments to things like monarchy and to Pahlavism and to Trumpism and maybe to Zionism. And so that was a position. And that was quite a loud position, I would say, to your point, high profile, that claim to speak for a very large population that certainly is a diverse one.

Others in the kind of, let’s call it “pro-war” position supported the war, maybe less out of ideological commitments to monarchy or to any of these other “isms,” but more for kind of this desperation for regime change, for reasons that had to do with themselves or their family in Iran expressing these very personal experiences of oppression and economic distress—a sense that they had no other options. They would say things like, we’ve tried everything else. These protest movements and other efforts haven’t worked. Anything, they would argue, including war, would be worth it if the outcome was a free Iran. And so, if Reza Pahlavi could make that happen, they would support Reza Pahlavi.

On the other, kind of, side, if we’re going to go with this dual-side idea, the anti-war position also has not been a united front, right? So there are some who are genuinely pro-Islamic Republic, full stop. But there are many who are anti-war and anti-Islamic Republic and kind of insist that U.S. intervention has never brought about the promised democracy to Iran’s neighbors.

They also pointed to the hard work of activists and labor organizers and other organizations in Iran, many of whom are sitting in prison—they’re doing the hard work. It takes time. It’s slow, it’s difficult, it’s progressive in its nature of building the kind of pathways for true democracy to emerge. So if you actually want democracy in Iran, they would argue, it has to come from within. It can never come from foreign intervention.

[42:15] There are some who have been outspoken against the war, who have been staunchly anti-imperialist—another ideological set of positions. Some among them see the waving of these Israeli flags that these pro-war protests as evidence of a need for powerful countervailing force in the region to kind of respond to ongoing Israeli genocide in Gaza, to aggression in Lebanon, et cetera.

There’s a lot of different positions within these two “sides,” so to speak. I’m using heavy air quotes because, within them, they are also arguing. And that’s also causing more, I would say, tensions—both across these two positions, and within them. But I think especially because the high cost of war would be paid often in blood by family and loved ones in any kind of a military campaign in Iran, not by those in diaspora, a lot of the anti-war diaspora positions, that maybe haven’t been as loud, have viewed calling on their governments to support, pay for, undertake foreign interventions as kind of this ultimate betrayal. And so there’s a lot of mixed emotions that are involved in these positions and mixed ideological concerns and differences of opinion, obviously, but they’re not uniform positions. And the framing of them as uniform, by media, by politicians, by some activists themselves, by state actors, has been really kind of frustrating to watch, because no one individual obviously can speak for ninety-three million Iranians in Iran, nor for the five to eight million Iranians outside of Iran.

And I think, as anthropologists, we know it’s really important not to flatten categories of human experience, not to over-sharpen these blurry categorizations. And we also know the importance of trying to understand people, their statements, their actions, on their own terms. But we’ve seen very little room for that in our diaspora of late. And I think without it, I really worry that there’s also little opportunity and actually little appetite for dialogue, for finding the common ground. And I think the diaspora desperately needs both, right now. But, you know, with things being so uncertain as they are, um, is kind of a tall order.

SJ [44:19]: Mm-hmm. There’s these divisions within the diaspora, but then also of course, the division between the diaspora and the experience of Iranians inside Iran, which you mentioned.

Again, one of the things that really comes through in your book is how much the Iranian diaspora is constantly in production—there are communities that have been longstanding, but there are constantly new people joining these diaspora communities, because there are constantly people leaving Iran.

So to that end, I want to look a little bit towards the future, because return—the idea of personally, quote unquote, “going back,” to either the place that you were born or the place that your ancestry hearkens to—is a really important kind of concept in marking experiences of immigration, exile, diaspora. What is the role of “return” as a horizon for your diasporic Iranian interlocutors when they’re talking about Iran? And then I want to kind of add, have you seen that role change in recent months?

AM [45:20]: Mm-hmm. Yeah, I think exactly, the question we talked about earlier about “cohorts” really gets highlighted in this question. And then in this bigger-picture idea of who’s paying the costs of war? Who’s actually going to, like, do the work on the ground to rebuild after such a war? And what kind of return is actually likely, right? In the literature, scholars have kind of pointed to a desire for return as really key to the exile condition. Whereas, for diasporas, there’s this kind of dual orientation to here and there, what Paul Gilroy called, “where you’re from and where you’re at.” Homeland is still a very key feature of your identity, but actual return is no longer a primary goal, as it would be for, say, exiles.

And so, for some folks who left Iran in the last year, two, three, five years, you know, return still feels very much as an ideal, right? Under certain conditions, of course. And of course we’ve seen, in recent literature, recent scholarship, kind of trends of Iranians who have indeed returned, right? So people who came to, say, Canada and found that, you know, finding steady work and permanent residency status and paying high rent and, kind of, the possibilities of a stable life were not actually feasible for them. And so they’ve gone back.

But I would say that others, people who arrived decades ago or were born in diaspora, the second and emerging third generations, don’t really see return necessarily as the ultimate goal, right? They built their lives here, their networks are here, their homes are here, their jobs are here, their careers are here. They may feel deeply about Iran, they may be very active in advocating for a free Iran. They may wish to have regained access to family and places that they hold dear. They may even wish to have a second home in Iran. But it’s kind of an open question, I would say, as to how many who have lived in diaspora for so long would actually pick up and move everything back.

[47:16] In the kind of heightened emotions of February and March of this year, I saw some folks in diaspora, mostly men I would say, on social media posting things like, “send me,” “I’ll fight to free Iran,” like, “put me in coach,” you know? And then again, we saw these AI-produced videos showing a plane landing and a newly freed Iran with captions like, “me soon,” you know, like, “I’m on my way.” Other AI-produced videos show really triumphant Reza Pahlavi disembarking from a plane in Tehran, kind of coming to retake his “rightful position,” in that narrative.

But it’s actually even questionable whether Reza Pahlavi wants to return. So he’s kind of, leaves Iran as a teenager, lives most of his life in the United States, and in some older interviews even had stated quite plainly that he didn’t desire to live in Iran. Now he, like many others, may have changed their minds, or may change their minds in a future set of circumstances, but I’d still see it as kind of unlikely that this huge wave of diasporic migration would occur immediately after a revolution or regime change takes place. But I think we hear a lot about return these days because of these, again, deeply held sets of beliefs and love for Iran, that creates imaginations about, oh, what would it be like to go back? What would it be like to go and to kind of like, in these heightened emotional states to make claims that maybe they would or would not actually, like, act on in the near future.

SJ [48:37]: Yeah, yeah. I mean, it seems like so much of this conversation really comes down to love for Iran and connection with this place as a homeland. So, as we’ve mentioned, it's now been more than 100 days since the war started, and I just, to kind of bring our conversation to a close, I want to ask more generally, what sorts of changes have you observed or are you seeing within diasporic Iranian communities during this really fraught, really difficult period?

AM [49:09]: Yeah, I mean, look, some of the folks that we were just talking about who were kind of willing to go along with the idea of war in exchange for a quick, targeted regime change that would lead to a free Iran right away kind of have been, understandably, disappointed by what has actually transpired. I think a kind of key turning point for a lot of them was the, uh, “bridge and power plant” day.

SJ [49:30]: On Sunday, April 5, Donald Trump tweeted, quote “Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran.” Two days later, he tweeted an incitement to genocide—quote, “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.”

AM [49:48]: I think that really alarmed some of those folks who had been willing to be persuaded by the language of regime change until that point.

So some have actually expressed regret for their former positions, that they had been kind of duped into believing, or, you know, were so desperate for a change that they were willing to go along. But others, I think including many of those who had kind of thanked Trump and Bibi, as they put it, for invading, still kind of argue they should, quote, “finish the job” and maintain that assessment that this is the best path, if not the only path, to overthrow the current government.

And so, those disagreements about the past, the present, the future of Iran have been so heightened, and the discourse has been so toxic. There’s so much distrust and mistrust, so much accusations being lobbed at each other. And I think a lot of people in the course of the last six months have had to rethink their positions, and if not once, maybe twice, from their diasporic homes—maybe influenced by folks in Iran, right? Like, let the people in Iran decide. If they’re telling me they want invasion, then I want invasion. Or, if they’re telling me they don't want invasion, I don’t want invasion. Right?

[50:57] Having to think and rethink how to process what’s going on in a very quickly changing set of circumstances has meant that at some times, you know, friends and family members are finding themselves in surprising opposition to each other. People that you’ve known for a long time, you assume you know their politics or you know where they might stand about something, come out and say something completely different, right? And like, it almost shocks the system. And when that’s your parent, or when that’s your brother, or when that’s your child, that can really lead to some very difficult conversations, some very ugly fights, some falling-outs, and kind of these very painful silences.

And those painful silences were then kind of joined by the painful silence of having an internet blackout for most of the last 100 days. From the diaspora, you couldn’t really call your aunt or your mom in Iran, they had to call you—and only sometimes would it go through. You know, they didn’t have access to the global internet until very recently, and even then, it’s kind of this new tiered system of access that is very troubling to see as a development. The divides have deepened, the mistrust has blossomed within and between our community organizations, our cultural institutions, media spaces, or even our families and our friendships.

As an anthropologist, I know, I see certain questions here, but also as like an individual, as a member of the community, there’s some real questions about how we move forward. Like, how do we attend to the emotional fallouts that these ruptures have created, and how do the kind of histories of imprisonment and revolution and exile and betrayal kind of shape what people are able to say and hear from each other right now? So what’s kind of top of my mind is thinking about how these new fractures are going to affect, you know, efforts to build, or in many cases rebuild, these kinds of community organizations and solidarities and collaborative projects that are really needed in a diaspora.

[52:47] There’s a lot of really unanswered questions. The kind of tenuous ceasefire that is and is not real. It’s, like, part of these kinds of, um, this feeling of constantly feeling the floor is unstable beneath you, right? That you can’t really, like, count on anything anymore. And that unsteadiness is really hard to navigate, especially when, I suspect, we’re just in the middle of it. This is not the end, this is not the beginning. This is, there’s more to come, unfortunately. And I’m not sure how our communities will navigate that, as we move forward.

SJ [53:20]: Yeah, I mean, I think it’s impossible to overstate what a difficult and uncertain time we are living in. I don’t want to try and end this interview on a positive note because I think that that would be really disingenuous. But I do think that one of the most important things that you’ve referenced a couple of times is how these, I mean, political stances, but also of course, artistic and cultural productions, that everything goes back to love, to connection, to the desire for community—as hard, or even nearly impossible, as it seems to be to come together around that idea right now—that that is something, that desire, that hope, that love, is something that continues to exist in spite of everything.

AM [54:04]: I think that’s right. I will say that, about a year and a half ago, colleagues and I started to organize for a conference on global Iranian diaspora studies—so, like, a kind of field-defining conference. As these events started to transpire, as an organizing committee, we were like, so we’re canceling, right? And then it became clear that no, actually, maybe this is a time when we really do need to come together, and there is value in thinking alongside, and not in our isolated, depressive places, wherever we may be dispersed in the world.

And it was indeed a really good experience to be around colleagues who were also grappling with a lot of these questions. We did find that we had a lot of similar, you know, experiences or takes and so that, that kind of gives energy for getting through, you know, the next whatever may come. So there is—I think, for me, it kind of confirmed the importance of community when it has felt that the community has really crumbled. There are still pockets, there are still spaces where people are coming together to try to kind of work together and kind of build from and during a really difficult set of circumstances.

SJ [55:14]: Mmm. Yeah. Yeah. Well, thank you again, Amy, for taking the time to sit and talk through some of these things with me.

AM [55:23]: Thank you for the opportunity to kind of think through this together because as I said, it’s been something that I’ve been kind of thinking a lot about, but haven’t been able to really speak into the world in, in many cases. So I appreciate the opportunity here.

[55:36] [AnthroPod theme music, “All the Colors in the World” by Podington Bear]

SJ [55:42]: You’ve been listening to AnthroPod, the podcast of the Society for Cultural Anthropology. AnthroPod is the work of a collaborative and nonhierarchical collective of Contributing Editors. I’ve been the producer and host of this episode, Sharon Jacobs. Special thanks to Deborah Philip and Hae-Seo Kim for review. You can find a full transcript of this episode in the show notes at culanth.org—that’s c-u-l-a-n-t-h-dot-org. Thanks for listening.