The Resonance of the Hostage Crisis in Funny in Farsi: A Memoir of Growing up Iranian in America (2004) by Firoozeh Dumas and the Limits of American Hospitality

Over the four decades that have passed since the mass migration of Iranians to the United States, various episodes of hostility between Iran and America have influenced and shaped policies and discourses, afflicting many Iranian migrants in the process. The American Embassy hostage crisis of 1979, 9/11, and the recent Muslim travel ban instituted by Trump’s administration in 2017 are milestones in the forging of a nationalist discourse that has been inflicted on the Iranian migrant community. But the increasing concerns regarding nationalist discourses in the United States are damaging to many other immigrants and directly impact the functioning of the country, as evinced by the 2017 storming of the Capitol to reclaim America as a white and Christian country (Alexander 2022, 337). It is with regard to such discourses that draw dividing lines between America and its Others that this chapter revisits the American Embassy hostage crisis and the limits of hospitality in Firoozeh Dumas’s Funny in Farsi: A Memoir of Growing up Iranian in America (2004).