Khashayar Beigi
Berkeley Lecture Series Presents:
A Lecture by Khashayar Beigi, Scholar
Topic: “Subjectivity and Territoriality in the Soviet Memoirs of Tudeh Party Emigres”
Lecture: During almost a decade the main communist party of Iran, Tudeh, faced several waves of persecution and setback, starting with the crisis of Azerbaijan (1945-46) and culminating with the exposure and prosecution of its military branch (1954). As a result of these continuing pressures thousands of Iranians affiliated with the party fled overseas mainly to the Soviet Union. The present paper draws on parts of my dissertation research on the Soviet Memoirs of Iranian Emigres with an analytical emphasis on territory and subjectivity. In the memoirs of a particularly unfortunate group of those Tudeh emigres who were accused of espionage and sentenced to hard labor in the notorious Gulags, charges of exaggeration and self-aggrandizement are launched against one another’s memoirs. Analyzing these charges in the larger context of the biographies of each memoirist I argue that there are important differences in the way each of these memoirs proceed to extract a set of critical affects, namely shame and glory, in the act of memorialization. These affective differences not only have resulted in divergent narrative pictures of shared events and sagas but also echo the subjective distance originally produced by the conditions of imprisonment and exile.
Khashayar Beigi has received his PhD in anthropology from UC Berkeley with a specialization in psychological anthropology. His dissertation, Hospitality at Thresholds, explores anthropological modes of territoriality spanning from hospitality to exilic and traumatic subjectification of lived territory in Soviet and post-Soviet Central Asia. Currently he is continuing and expanding on two projects from his dissertation work: ethnographic research on the healing rituals of Central Asian labor migrants living in Russia and oral history and archival study on the subject of territorial memory in the memoirs of Soviet Iranian emigres, based on which he is preparing a book manuscript. The present paper will offer an introduction/synopsis to his ongoing research on the second project.
Lecture in Persian
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