Nostalgic heritage claims cannot sustain youth identity against present stigma

Evidence

When I asked Yara to expand on her final observation, that “being Iranian … some people don’t think of it as a good thing,” she surprised me with her answer: “If there are good things happening there right now, I don’t know about it, and maybe I should educate myself on it more. [It’s been] eclipsed by all the negatives, and it’s hard to find good examples from now, which would be better than bringing up examples from thousands of years ago.” I had asked Yara to say more about her comment that some people have negative associations with being Iranian, not expecting that she would include herself among those who “don’t think of it as a good thing.” Yara admitted she found it challenging to identify good things happening in present-day Iran that might mitigate the negative stigma of being Iranian. She took herself to task, along with first-generation parents and other Iranian elders, for deferring to ancient history in search of positive representations or information about Iran. — Neda Maghbouleh, The Limits of Whiteness, 465

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to the reader’s question: the ancient-glory essentialist identity (algebra, medicine, Cyrus’s human rights) fails to hold for the second generation — the irony-to-residence pathway breaks because the ‘residence’ is in a past the teen cannot inhabit. — connects to: People’s lived sense of their era may be wholly unrelated to its structural reality — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 615; Inserting raw politics into youth culture prevents achieving real cachet. — W. David Marx, Blank Space: A Cultural History of the…, 806
• QUESTION: Is Yara’s self-inclusion (‘I don’t think of it as a good thing’) an instance of the subject internalizing the very stigma the essentialist identity was meant to repel — evidence that collective ironic essentialism fails?

Broader Connections

• People’s lived sense of their era may be wholly unrelated to its structural reality #corroborates (0.85) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 615
• Inserting raw politics into youth culture prevents achieving real cachet. #complicates (0.75) — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 806