Sing A Song for Home: How Displaced Iranian Song-Writers in LA Conceive of Home and Homeland

Pouya Morshedi; Lisa-Jo K. van den Scott

doi:10.18778/1733-8077.21.1.02

Authors

Pouya Morshedi Memorial University, Canada https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8856-3307
Lisa-Jo K. van den Scott Memorial University, Canada https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7442-6918

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.18778/1733-8077.21.1.02

Keywords:

Home, Diaspora, Music, Iran, Ethnographic Content Analysis

Abstract

We ask how being apart from home impacts the very definition of home. We conducted a content analysis of songs produced by Iranians who have left their first “home” in Iran and resettled in Los Angeles. Our findings suggest that distance from one’s home expands the definition and image of home from a structure where one dwells and calls home, to an imagined community at the personal (home family), local (hometown), and regional (homeland) levels. The 1979 revolution in Iran caused many people, including singers and songwriters, to immigrate. Many of them moved to Europe and North America. We analyzed songs from 1979 to 1999, produced in Los Angeles, as the heart of Iranian pop music after the revolution, focusing on the concept of “home.” Four main themes emerged: the “body of the home,” which includes windows, niches, and gardens; “homeland as home;” “home and family;” “home as a heaven to remember and a haven for return,” which involves home as a place for making memories and recalling them and home as a retreat. We explain how these themes are related to Iran’s situation post-revolution, the image of the Iranian home, and the singers’ situation in Los Angeles after the revolution. The most significant finding is the relationship between home and homeland. Songs use home as a metaphor for the homeland, even when describing the body of the home. The sadness about the destroyed home, hope to return to home, and the tendency to come back to their mother (or motherland) point to the singers’ emotions about their homeland. The distance from home has changed the conceptualization of “home.” The borders of home are not around the songwriters’ houses or intimate families anymore, but they are around the homeland.

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Author Biographies

Pouya Morshedi, Memorial University, Canada

Pouya Morshedi is a Ph.D. candidate (ABD) in sociology at Memorial University of Newfoundland and Labrador. He is a qualitative researcher specializing in the sociology of space and place, the sociology of cinema, and the sociology of revolution. Pouya is one of the co-organizers of the Qualitative Analysis Conference from 2022. He also serves as the chair of the Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Committee at the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction (SSSI). Pouya is one of the co-founders of Avalon Research Society.

Lisa-Jo K. van den Scott, Memorial University, Canada

Lisa-Jo K. van den Scott is an Associate Professor at Memorial University. Her interests include time and place in our everyday lives. She has introduced the concepts of “spatial fusion” and “spatial fission” to talk about how we conceptualize spaces as the same or distinct places. She has also studied public performances of social deaths and has coined the term “eulogy work” to talk about the emotional labor of publicly framing one’s social death as a good death. She co-authored Qualitative Research in Action and her book, Walled-In: Arctic Housing and a Sociology of Walls, came out in 2024. She is currently the editor-in-chief of Symbolic Interaction.

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