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Over the past thirty-plus years, normal diplomatic relations between Iran and the West, particularly the United States, have been curtailed, encouraging much of the diplomacy between the two countries to be conducted either in deep secrecy (the Iran Contra Scandal during the Reagan-Rafsanjani presidencies), or allowed to surface in the media. This lecture focuses on the mediatic and diplomatic dance, in which five unlikely partners, that is, the Iranian government, the American government, American media, Iranians at home, and Iranians in the diaspora, have engaged, while addressing one another through film and electronic media. The lecture will be accompanied by video clips.
Hamid Naficy is Professor of Radio-Television-Film and the Hamad Bin Khalifa Al-Thani Professor in Communication at Northwestern University, where he also is an affiliate faculty in the Department of Art History and is a core faculty in the Middle East and North African Studies Program. Naficy is a leading authority in cultural studies of diaspora, exile, and postcolonial cinemas and media and of Iranian and Middle Eastern cinemas. He has published and lectured extensively, nationally and internationally, on these and allied topics. His English language books are: An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking; Home, Exile, Homeland: Film, Media, and the Politics of Place; The Making of Exile Cultures: Iranian Television in Los Angeles; Otherness and the Media: the Ethnography of the Imagined and the Imaged (co-edited); and Iran Media Index. His latest work is the award-winning four-volume book A Social History of Iranian Cinema, published in 2011-12. Naficy has also published extensively in Persian, including a two-volume book on the documentary cinema theory and history, Film-e Mostanad. He has also produced and directed many educational and documentary films.
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