Rewriting Oppositional Family Histories in the Play Where/As

• In Event: Counterhegemonic Inheritances: Following Anti-Imperial Family Histories From the Diasporic Iranian Left

Abstract

This paper reflects on my research process for the play, WHERE/AS, which follows a queer Iranian student-activist as she learns more about her uncle, a communist revolutionary in the 1960s US diaspora who was later assassinated in Iran. For the protagonist, reckoning with 21st century American empire (her present) becomes an intimate search for radical, alternative pasts that intersect with her family history—and my own. I discuss how literary forms provide a narrative model to address the historiographic and deeply personal complexities that emerge when scholars rewrite their kin into oppositional histories. I focus on plays, which were central to the literary legacies of social movements in the 1960s US and globally (especially political, guerilla, and street theatre) in part because plays can pedagogically stage the erasures, contradictions, and violences that pervade both historical and familial archives. In particular, plays draw attention to how imperialism is constituted and contested through multiscalar sites (e.g., laws but also the kinship tie between an uncle and his niece) as well as technologies of rule like aesthetic forms. What then, is the aesthetics of anti-imperial struggle and how are these aesthetic practices linked to our methodological choices as scholars? In its exploration of such questions, WHERE/AS unfolds through a series of flashbacks that bridge the temporal gap between characters, thereby highlighting (dis)continuities in their organizing—and epistemological—strategies. What I call “simultaneities,” which place characters from different time periods in the same scene, create the imaginative conditions for a confluence of geopolitical contexts that reveal possibilities for how we might think with Leftist genealogies
against the nation.

Author

• Tala Khanmalek