The Family Idyll, Exclusion and Ideology in Persepolis

Films portraying migrant and refugee experiences are commonly viewed as opposing, rather than contributing to, anti-migrant racist discourse. Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Pernaud’s animated film Persepolis (2007), which chronicles Satrapi’s life during the Iranian Revolution, her migration to Vienna, her return to Iran and eventual residency in France, is widely celebrated for its complex portrayal of Iranian migrant experience. This chapter problematises the film’s representation of migrants by examining the film’s construction of racial and cultural identities. Applying Mikhail Bakhtin’s chronotope of the idyll to frame the analysis of the function of the family unit in the film, the chapter shows how Persepolis’s narrative pivots on the Satrapi’s family home as an enclosed, secular, middle class community that starkly contrasts to the turmoil of the Islamic revolution and migration. Essentialised Muslim characters emerge as hostile outsiders to the internal security of the idyll, where the Satrapi family share a similitude with a racialised French/Western subjectivity and cultural superiority over lower social classes. These representational strategies, the chapter argues, fuses Iranian ‘dislocative nationalism’ (Zia-Ebrahami 2016), an ideological current that seeks to dislodge Iran geographically and historically from the Middle East and Islam, with a French neo-republican discourse on ‘good’ citizenship that excludes Muslim and Arab migrant populations in Europe. The chapter seeks to raise questions, therefore, over the film’s widely claimed universality and draw attention to a broader problem of the terms through which a depoliticised and uncritical celebration of self-representation in migrant cinema is made.