Full Description
Using Iranian TV as a case study, Hamid Naficy demonstrates that exile is a special case of transcultural and postcolonial discourse. Exile is viewed as a tripartite process: separation from home, a period of liminality that can be temporary or permanent, and finally, incorporation into the host country. The result is not unified or stable, however, it is an evolving and syncretic exile of culture and community. Exile media can tell us much about the realities of displaced cultures and communities. Such communities attempt to reconcile, through TV programs, an idealized vision of the homeland replete with concepts such as "home", "past", and "nostalgia", and simultaneously to get on with the business of functioning within a new country by developing an ethnic economy marked by the production of advertising-driven television that promotes the consumer life-style as ideal. Naficy combines ethnographic description of a 10-year study of Iranian TV programs with interviews with Iranian producers, and theorizes about concepts of exile discourse, hybridization, resistance, subjectivity, and identity that are applicable to other immigrants and their lives in this country.
He identifies exile TV as its own genre, and by examining its structures of production and theorizing its systematic patterns of narration, formation, signification, subjectivity, and consumption, he breaks new ground in media studies. In a wide-ranging application of contemporary cultural and media theories, undergirded by rich ethnographic details drawn from the popular culture of Iranians in southern California, "The Making of Exile Cultures" explores the seemingly contradictory way in which immigrant media and cultural productions serve as the source both of resistance and opposition to the domination by host and home country's social values while simultaneously serving as vehicles for personal and cultural transformation and assimilation of those values. Hamid Naficy is the author of various publications on film and television, including Iranian, and is on the editorial board of Quarterly Review of Film and Television and Public Culture. He received an MFA in film and TV production and a PhD in film and television studies from UCLA.
Contents
Exile discourse; Iranian exilic popular culture; Structure and political economy of exilic television; The exilic television genre and its textual politics and signifying practices; Fetishization, nostalgic longing, and the exilic national imaginary; The cultural politics of hybridity
