Cultural Identity Of The Iranian Diaspora In Anne Tyler's Digging To America

Anne Tyler(1941-)is among the most renowned contemporary American writers.Until 2018 she has published twenty-two novels.Digging to America is Tyler's seventeenth novel.The novel describes the cross-cultural communication and a long-established friendship between an Iranian-American immigrant family and a white American family.The novel,which benefits from Tyler's personal associations with Iranians,depicts the life of two-generation Iranian immigrants in America,who,in their communications with indigenous Americans,experience multiple cultural conflicts.In the novel,Iranian diaspora display the two divergent tendencies of adjusting to American mainstream culture and preserving original Iranian culture.It is through negotiating with the co-influences of the two cultures that Iranian American immigrants explore and reconstruct their cultural identity.The thesis is theoretically based on Stuart Hall's view of cultural identity.According to Hall,cultural identity includes both the collective cultural identification shared by people with common history and ancestry,and individual differences of identification under the intervention of historical factors.Hall rejects the essentialist view of cultural identity as a piece of unchanging heritage and defines cultural identity as an unstable positioning within the discourses of history and culture.Under the guidance of Stuart Hall's cultural identity theory,this thesis aims at analyzing the cultural identity of the Iranian diaspora in Digging to America.The thesis includes five chapters.The first chapter provides an introduction of Anne Tyler's life experiences and her novels,a brief literature review of her works at home and abroad,an explanation of the theoretic basis of the thesis,and a description of the thesis' focus and structure.The second chapter analyzes the tendencies of Iranian diaspora's cultural identity by focusing on their cultural practices.Iranian diaspora's cultural practices,to a large extent,keep the traditions of their original culture,but they are also influenced by the dominant culture of America.The overall intergenerational trend is that Iranian diaspora's cultural identity is increasingly Americanized.In terms of language,Iranian Americans generally alternate between Farsi and English.The first-generation Iranian immigrants widely use Farsi for in-group communications and English in the face of Americans,while the second-generation Iranian immigrants use English regardless of occasions.Iranian diaspora keep their love of ethnic food,but their food preferences tend to be more varied.Elder Iranian Americans continue to observe Iranian mannerism by dressing comparatively formally and behaving in an over-polite manner,but their offspring are more accustomed to the widely-accepted social manners in America.Iranian diaspora build a family-centered ethnic community in America,which consolidates their group ethnic identity and helps preserve their original cultural identity.The Iranian diaspora,as their association with white Americans increases,begin to invite Americans into their society.Lastly,Iranian diasporic community still retains influences from the collectivist values in traditional Iranian culture,which are shown in family education,gender roles,caring of the elderly and interpersonal relationships.But there are changes in Iranian diaspora's values under the impacts of American individualism.The third chapter discusses the "outsider" cultural stance of Iranian diaspora in American culture and its causes.The Iranian Americans in the novel for a long time remain in an exterior position of American dominant culture,which can be attributed to the causes of both the immigration environment and the Iranian diaspora's own cultural attitudes.On the one hand,Euro Americans regard Iranian diaspora as "the Other".Antagonism between U.S.and Iran makes Americans hold political hostility and racial and cultural discrimination against Iranian Americans.On the other hand,Iranian diaspora maintain a psychological and emotional attachment to Iran,which influences the "Tranianness" in their cultural identity.The first-generation Iranian diaspora display an outstanding"Iranianness" with their respect and preservation of their traditional culture,concern for Iranian politics and a nostalgia for homeland.And the second-generation Iranian diaspora share their parents' national consciousness.Besides,Iranian diaspora hold cultural prejudices when looking at American culture,including their ethnocentrism and stereotyping of Americans,which impede their acculturation in America.The fourth chapter summarizes the two characteristics of Iranian diaspora's cultural identity:ambiguity and diversity.First,Iranian diaspora's cultural identity bears an ambiguous and contradictory character.They are situated in the middle of two cultures,not completely belonging to either cultural group.The first generation cannot integrate into American mainstream culture,and have more or less lost identification with their culture of origin.The second-generation Iranian diaspora are Americanized on the surface,but they are psychologically close to Iranian community and culture.Second,Iranian diaspora present an intragenerational and intergenerational diversity in the development patterns of their cultural identity.The first-generation Iranian Americans display different tendencies in cultural positioning due to different diasporic experiences,while the second-generation Iranian Americans have formed different cultural identities through diverse family educations and cultural assimilations in America.The last chapter summarizes the main ideas of previous chapters and arrives at the conclusions of this thesis.A comparative study of the two generations finds an intergenerational trend of increasing Americanization of Iranian diaspora's cultural identity.But on the whole,the younger generation of Iranian Americans display an "Iranianness"different from that of their parents,which is shown in their identity consciousness instead of cultural practices.This thesis holds that the descriptions of Iranian Americans' difficult cultural adjustments and struggles of identification in the novel suggest Anne Tyler's realistic concern for the cultural positioning of the minority Iranian American ethnicity.