Moving: knowledge, image, embodiment and Iranian-American identity in the post-911 USA

This dissertation ascribes an extended methodology of auto-ethnography to the problem of apprehending the cultural and affective crossways symbiotic with post 911, late capitalism, in the United States and on the Transnational Stage. It introduces a performative approach derived from Somatics and forms of improvisation to further elucidate notions of presence as culture in this particular context. It also includes storytelling elements that I feel necessary for surviving this period of time intact, that being a reliance on hope, wonder, audacity and truth-telling. As global structural elements have shifted, new wars are being fought and new types of racisms appear, patterns of communication as affect and presence make tricky new turns which practitioners of the technologies of affective resistance, need to understand. This dissertation works to contribute in that direction. To make this goal, extended elements of performance ethnography and auto-ethnography are used in conjunction with the tried and true formal elements of performance ethnography. Some of these include, the use of self-portraiture, time lapse photography, installation, the use of improvisational movement and the use of elements of magical realism in storytelling. Many, many of my moves here are rooted in the works of postcolonial writers, thinkers and, in particular, postcolonial third world feminist artists. I place this work in the honorable lineage of postcolonialists and third world feminists, who are busy capturing meaning and producing counter practices and counter narratives to hegemonic practices and narratives. My work attempts this kind of intervention on a tacit level