Revolution, Trauma, and Nostalgia in Diasporic Iranian Women's Autobiographies

This essay argues that the 1979 Iranian Revolution constituted a traumatic break in the national imagination, a break that has paradoxically engendered productive possibilities for women's subjectivities, which manifest themselves through the explosion of diasporic Iranian women's autobiographies since 1999. These autobiographies tend to portray the revolution as an individual and collective trauma colored by a powerful nostalgia for the prerevolutionary era. In this article, I propose that the twinning of private, familial memory with public memory through revolutionary rupture and trauma frames these writers' nostalgic recollections of Iran.