The moving body, specifically the dancing body, can be used to effectively enunciate and navigate the in-betweenness of the Iranian American experience. Using Homi Bhabha’s Third Space as a theoretical basis, I examine the potentials of dance in the third space as a container for embodying and exploring multifaceted aspects of identity which include the personal, ancestral, and historiographical. The liminality of the third space combined with embodied practice allows practitioners to hold many truths at one time, mirroring the lived reality of the Iranian American experience. The third space, which by design rejects cultural normativity and colonial definitions, opens space for rumination on the potential of Iranian futurities and multiple ways of being and belonging. This is of vital importance as Iranian people begin to grapple with moving forward from the impacts of ongoing revolution, war, oppression, economic hardship, and political ostracization. On the other side of the world, Iranian Americans must reckon with their position of privilege, the American government’s role in Iran’s destabilization, and pervasive xenophobia in the US culture sphere. Regardless of location, both the Iranian and the American experience come with varying degrees of corporeal governance which is enabled by the triangulation between government corruption, religious fundamentalism, and patriarchal supremacy, which has become enshrined in the rule of law. Although all bodies are impacted by this, the heaviest litigiousness is aimed at the female-identifying body. It is the shared experience of corporeal restriction that makes dance a particularly salient site for Iranian-American identity conception, as the act of taking space, becoming visible, and moving without restriction is an active, somatic reclamation and integration of Iranian identities from the hands of oppressive forces.

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Examining Dance as a Third Space in the Iranian Diaspora

  • Brittney Banaei

摘要

The moving body, specifically the dancing body, can be used to effectively enunciate and navigate the in-betweenness of the Iranian American experience. Using Homi Bhabha’s Third Space as a theoretical basis, I examine the potentials of dance in the third space as a container for embodying and exploring multifaceted aspects of identity which include the personal, ancestral, and historiographical. The liminality of the third space combined with embodied practice allows practitioners to hold many truths at one time, mirroring the lived reality of the Iranian American experience. The third space, which by design rejects cultural normativity and colonial definitions, opens space for rumination on the potential of Iranian futurities and multiple ways of being and belonging. This is of vital importance as Iranian people begin to grapple with moving forward from the impacts of ongoing revolution, war, oppression, economic hardship, and political ostracization. On the other side of the world, Iranian Americans must reckon with their position of privilege, the American government’s role in Iran’s destabilization, and pervasive xenophobia in the US culture sphere. Regardless of location, both the Iranian and the American experience come with varying degrees of corporeal governance which is enabled by the triangulation between government corruption, religious fundamentalism, and patriarchal supremacy, which has become enshrined in the rule of law. Although all bodies are impacted by this, the heaviest litigiousness is aimed at the female-identifying body. It is the shared experience of corporeal restriction that makes dance a particularly salient site for Iranian-American identity conception, as the act of taking space, becoming visible, and moving without restriction is an active, somatic reclamation and integration of Iranian identities from the hands of oppressive forces.