Iranian popular music in Los Angeles: Mobilizing media, nation, and politics

This dissertation is an ethnographic and historical study of Iranian exiles in Los Angeles who, for the past thirty years, have created popular music and media that both directly criticizes the state and realizes secular, sensual, and cosmopolitan iterations of Iranian-ness that are outside of official state culture. I argue that popular music has assumed these roles for exiles because of its fraught history: promoted initially by the pre-revolutionary Pahlavi government as a symbol of modernization, popular music was banned for eighteen years following the establishment of the Islamic Republic for engendering immorality and "Westoxification." While exiles have preserved and innovated new forms of Iranian popular music since the ban took effect, today they circulate their musics via satellite broadcasts and the internet throughout the world and into Iran itself, where such music is illegal. The result is that exile-produced popular musics circumvent Iranian state restrictions on expression and create multiple alternative forms of Iranian popular culture for a globally dispersed Iranian audience. These musics also contribute to a mediated transnational public in which new identifications and platforms for political participation emerge. The dissertation investigates exiles' current musical activities, the reception of their music in Tehran, and the history of Iranian state and non-state actors' investments in music. Some of the main questions addressed in this dissertation are: How have popular musics come to serve as cultural vectors that relate subjects to multiple, contested, and dialectically constituted Iranian identities? What are the means, motivations and outcomes of exile musicians' involvement in producing culture, and what emotional and sonic terrains do their musics bring into being? And how have media and diaspora combined to create practices and identifications that engage with the category of nation but are not circumscribed by the nation-state?...