Investigating Cultural Palimpsests in the Works of the Iranian Diasporic Writers: A Case Study on Fereidoun Esfandyari and Firoozeh Dumas

Drawing on the palimpsest metaphor, the present paper explores the practice of fiction writing by the Iranian diasporic writers to show the way they translate the process of their translation into diasporic subjects and the way this translation results in cultural palimpsests and accented literature. To this end, two Iranian diasporic writers belonging to per-revolutionary and post-revolutionary diaspora have been selected and their self-expression has been scrutinized from the perspective of identity politics by a close reading. They include Fereidoun Esfandiary and Firoozeh Dumas. An attempt has been made to show these diasporic writers translate the Iranian universe into a Kafkaesque universe and the American dream. Moreover, it has been shown that how the cultural palimpsests from these translations can be read to make visible the identity dialectics of the diasporic writers. This analysis indicates that the identity politics of the post-revolutionary Iranian diaspora the continuation of that of the pre-revolutionary diaspora.