"Amy Malek's Culture Beyond Country is an essential contribution to the growing field of Iranian Diaspora Studies. Her insightful and comparative study gives us the longer view of Iranian diaspora communities and the unique and specific ways that cultures evolve and are shaped by the forces of nation, politics, and circuitous navigations of belonging . Her work illuminates how Iranians reinvent and redeploy some of their most cherished symbols, rituals, and myths to feel at home in diasporic spaces." - Persis M. Karim, Neda Nobari Chair in Iranian Diaspora Studies, San Francisco State University
"Through this rich ethnography transcending multiple cities and countries, Malek beautifully illustrates how Iranians across the diaspora enact and make claims to cultural citizenship, and in challenging negative representations, resist their exclusion and assert their belonging. She therefore provides important evidence of how cultural citizenship matters in a smart analysis useful to scholars across many disciplines." - Jean Beaman, author of Citizen Outsider: Children of North African Immigrants in France
"Culture Beyond Country establishes Malek as a leading scholarly voice on Iranian diasporic culture and an expert contributor to debates on multiculturalism, migration, race and ethnicity. Meticulously researched and engagingly written, this book centers the labor of Iranian culture workers - festival volunteers, creatives and activists - to chart new paradigms for understanding citizenship and belonging." - Sarah Gualtieri, author of Between Arab and White: Race and Ethnicity in the Early Syrian American Diaspora.
