The Resonance of the Hostage Crisis in Funny in Farsi: A Memoir of Growing up Iranian in America (2004) by Firoozeh Dumas and the Limits of American Hospitality

Abstract

This chapter explores the limits of hospitality and the role of the modern nation-state in drawing borders between the self and Other in the reception of Iranian migrants in the United States, as reflected in Firoozeh Dumas’s Funny in Farsi: A Memoir of Growing up Iranian in America (2004). Dumas retraces her memories of migration to the United States and the reaction to the presence of Iranian migrants in 1980s America following the American Embassy hostage crisis. Drawing on Derrida’s Of Hospitality (2000) and Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas (1999), the chapter contends that the systematic othering of the migrant through nation-building processes, coupled with the representation of the migrant as placeless and the native as homed, conceal the fact that the guest and the host are each other’s hostages. By territorializing hospitality and ensuring the irreversibility of the place of the host and the guest, the modern nation-state distorts the universal Law of hospitality and allows for a forgetting of the transcendence of the other.