Auto-Orientalism and Trauma

Alexandre Dorriz
BA University of California Berkeley
MFA Candidate University of Southern California 

Alexandre Dorriz revisits Edward Said’s definitions around latent Orientalism and imagines for us the Occidental Vacuum. He posits the reality of exiled bodies Orientalizing their own Iranian narratives as a trauma-induced mechanism in order to navigate their transnational, liminal Iranian states – looking at PTSD symptoms such as Survivor’s Guilt and Re-Enactments within the DSM, and using Shirin Neshat’s Women of Allah series as a catalyst to understanding coping mechanisms through exilic lenses in a Post-1979 Iranian Revolution Era while separated from her Motherland. In Neshat’s work these coping mechanisms include the psychotherapeutic and meditative benefits to self-portraiture and psychotherapeutic benefits to calligraphic practices. The research observes the anti-Iranian rhetoric rising in The New York Times from 1971 through 1976, Neshat emigrating in 1975, and then looks at where Neshat lived and studied until 1983, the University of California, Berkeley, and its publication’s archives, The Daily Californian, discovering sentiments steeped in Islamophobia across campus, within this historically liberal oasis, including bricks thrown into the windows of Iranian students’ homes and cars.