Tehrangeles Dreaming: Intimacy and Imagination in Southern California's Iranian Pop Music (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9781478007906)

Los Angeles, called Tehrangeles because it is home to the largest concentration of Iranians outside of Iran, is the birthplace of a distinctive form of postrevolutionary pop music. Created by professional musicians and media producers fleeing Iran's revolutionary-era ban on "immoral" popular music, Tehrangeles pop has been a part of daily life for Iranians at home and abroad for decades. In Tehrangeles Dreaming Farzaneh Hemmasi draws on ethnographic fieldwork in Los Angeles and musical and textual analysis to examine how the songs, music videos, and television made in Tehrangeles express modes of Iranianness not possible in Iran. Exploring Tehrangeles pop producers' complex commercial and political positioning and the histories, sensations, and fantasies their music makes available to global Iranian audiences, Hemmasi shows how unquestionably Iranian forms of Tehrangeles popular culture exemplify the manner in which culture, media, and diaspora combine to respond to the Iranian state and its political transformations. The transnational circulation of Tehrangeles culture, she contends, transgresses Iran's geographical, legal, and moral boundaries while allowing all Iranians the ability to imagine new forms of identity and belonging.

Author: Farzaneh Hemmasi
ISBN-10: 1478007907
ISBN-13: 9781478007906
Publisher: Duke University Press
Language: English
Published: 04/10/2020
Pages: 264
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.30lbs
Size: 9.30h x 6.30w x 0.80d