Iranian Diaspora Literature of Women

Some years before and after the Islamic revolution in Iran in 1979, a huge number of Iranians migrated to western countries due to social and political problems. There is a significant body of literary and autobiographical works by Iranian writers in the diaspora during the last 50 years. The early works are mostly social and political, as writing about the private lives has been taboo, even in the diaspora. These literary writings has been analysed in Western academia to get a closer view of the political and social conditions in Iran before and after the Islamic revolution. However, in the last two decades, more literary and autobiographical works have been concerned with the private aspect of the lives of the characters in the diaspora and the (trans)formation of their identity and the linguistic and cultural hybridity. This hybridity and the identity issues become more significant in the works of women writers, as they are doubly marginalised as immigrants in the host land and second sex within patriarchy. There have been only a few critical works on the recent literary and autobiographical works of Iranian female writers in the diaspora. This work examines the relationship between space, bilingualism, and writing, and female characters’ identity formation in the late literary productions of Iranian women in the diaspora, using post-colonial and post-modern theories of bilingualism, space, autobiography and gender.