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The Iranian revolution of 1979 launched a vast, global diaspora, with many Iranians establishing new lives in the United States. In the four decades since, the diaspora has expanded to include not only those who emigrated immediately after the revolution but also their American-born children, more recent immigrants, and people who married into Iranian families, all of whom carry their own stories of trauma, triumph, adversity, and belonging that reflect varied and nuanced perspectives on what it means to be Iranian or Iranian American. The essays in My Shadow Is My Skin are these stories.

This collection brings together thirty-two authors, both established and emerging, whose writing captures the diversity of Iranian diasporic experiences. Reflecting on the Iranian American experience over the past forty years and shedding new light on themes of identity, duality, and alienation in twenty-first-century America, the authors present personal narratives of immigration, sexuality, marginalization, marriage, and religion that offer an antidote to the news media’s often superficial portrayals of Iran and the people who have a connection to it. My Shadow Is My Skin illuminates a community that rarely gets to tell its own story.

The Iranian revolution of 1978–1979 uprooted and globally dispersed an enormous number of Iranians from all walks of life. Bitter political relations between Iran and the West have since caused those immigrants to be stigmatized, marginalized, and politicized, which, in turn, has discredited and distorted Iranian migrants’ social identity; subjected them to various subtle and overt forms of prejudice, discrimination, and social injustice; and pushed them to the edges of their host societies. The Iranian Diaspora presents the first global overview of Iranian migrants’ experiences since the revolution, highlighting the similarities and differences in their experiences of adjustment and integration in North America, Europe, Australia, and the Middle East.

Written by leading scholars of the Iranian diaspora, the original essays in this volume seek to understand and describe how Iranians in diaspora (re)define and maintain their ethno-national identity and (re)construct and preserve Iranian culture. They also explore the integration challenges the Iranian immigrants experience in a very negative context of reception. Combining theory and case studies, as well as a variety of methodological strategies and disciplinary perspectives, the essays offer needed insights into some of the most urgent and consequential issues and problem areas of immigration studies, including national, ethnic, and racial identity construction; dual citizenship and dual nationality maintenance; familial and religious transformation; politics of citizenship; integration; ethnic and cultural maintenance in diaspora; and the link between politics and the integration of immigrants, particularly Muslim immigrants.

With nearly half a million Iranian Americans living in and around Los Angeles, Southern California is home to more Iranians than anywhere outside Iran itself. Although many community members identify as secular, stereotypes characterize Iranian Americans, like other populations from Muslim-majority countries, as pejoratively religious and culturally suspect. For Iranian American women who do practice Islam, navigating their religious, ethnic, and political identities, on both personal and communal levels, is complex and fraught, influenced not only by racialized discourses but also by intra-community narratives that equate Islamic practice with the authoritarian state in Iran.

Folklorist Afsane Rezaei applies theories of vernacular religion to explore how these women shape their religious identities in this particularly delicate diasporic context, how they engage with external imaginaries in their practices and narratives, and how they develop a sense of agency over their religious identification. For many, Islamic religiosity in the diaspora is an integrated and embodied aspect of folklife, closely tied to the sense of self, social networks, and communal identity, and is negotiated and reimagined in everyday, improvised, and sometimes contradictory ways. Rezaei’s detailed, respectful ethnography reaches beyond the binary of piety and resistance and offers new and nuanced understandings of Iranian American lived religion.