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Shaped by the experiences of the Iranian Revolution, Iranian-American autobiographers use this chaotic past to tell their current stories in the United States. Wagenknecht analyzes a wide range of such writing and draws new conclusions about migration, exile, and life between different and often clashing cultures.

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Introduction PART I: TROUBLED HERITAGE 1. Explaining Departure: Narratives of Victimicy 2. A Usable Past: Construction of Religion and Alternative Identifications PART II: LANGUAGE, BODY, AND THE IRANIAN-AMERICAN SELF 3. The Interplay of Language and Identity Construction 4. The Iranian-American Body In Between PART III: CULTURE INHERITED/IN FLUX 5. Between Fiction and Fact: Telling the Iranian-American Self 6. Relative Identities: The Iranian-American Self in Its Relation to Others 7. Imagining "Home:" Between Persian Paradise and American Arcadia Conclusion

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"Constructing Identity in Iranian-American Self-Narrative is an important work concerned with the ´performance of identity´ ... . It speaks to an increasing appetite for scholarship that captures the parallel growth in minority literature with transnational echoes. Members of the academic community and the public will find it useful in offering an account of an Iranian American complicated sense of agency in a globe fraught with reductions and over-simplifications." (Waleed F. Mahdi, European Journal of American Culture, Vol. 36 (3), September, 2017)

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Maria Wagenknecht is an Independent Researcher, Germany.

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