| Culturally hybrid persons are often caught in the crossfire of prejudices. For Iranians living in the West, the demonization of the Other becomes a daily negation of the Self. How do they find agency between hegemonic representational systems that seek to dichotomize and essentialize East and West? The purpose of this study was to investigate ways of re-presenting and critiquing self and culture through camera-based art, using a comparative analysis of four culturally hybrid Iranian artists: Antoin Sevruguin (ca. 1838--1933), Shirin Neshat (b. 1957), Ghazel (b. 1966), and Aphrodite Desiree Navab (b. 1971). Several research questions were addressed, navigating five major issues: Orientalism, cultural recall, cultural identity, diaspora, and self-narration. In the process of unsaying their life stories with the camera, how do these four artists go beyond merely telling about themselves, and develop a telling-self?; This was a qualitative study, both comparative and theoretical in nature, using verbal and visual documents as sources of data. The artists' self-representational images were regarded as partial truths, texts rich with subjectivity and open for substantive critical analysis. The theoretical lenses of Jacques Derrida, Walter Benjamin, James Elkins, Joel Snyder, and William Schubert were used to analyze texts. Methods of deconstruction, mediation, seeing, artifice, and the essay were applied.; The results of the study demonstrate how an Orientalist tool has been transformed into a means for self-representation and cultural critique. The artists use the camera to reclaim their life narratives, conveying four central themes: Unveiling, Cultural Recollection, Third Space: Unhomeliness, The Telling-Self. These artists perform their identities in autobiographical productions, while challenging both the Orientalist hegemony over and the Iranian censorship of the telling of their own life stories.; The implications of this research are that by literally and metaphorically seeing alternative realities and histories, these artist-philosophers offer an alternative of historical collaboration, cultural knowledge and political flexibility. This study calls for inclusion in the curriculum of strategies for re-claiming self-narratives---for a pedagogy of the telling-self, which is an empowering means of examining one's place in history; a space of agency and contestation. |
