Abandoned Complaint: Iranian Foreign Nations and the Carceral State after 1979

On October 23, 1986, Iranian foreign national Samad Nassirnia was brought into a Cambridge, Massachusetts police station after an officer arrested him for posting flyers to public street poles. After finding out that he was an Iranian national, the arresting police officer began physically assaulting him during questioning and processing. As the officer bruised Nassirnia’s body, he shouted at him about Iranian involvement in the 1979-1981 Hostage Crisis. Following the incident, Nassirnia began to file charges against the assaulting officer, but soon abandoned the endeavor.
This paper explores the relationship between displacement, geopolitics, and the U.S.
carceral state through a sustained engagement with this instance of police assault on an Iranian foreign national. While this incident made regional news, it has largely gone unstudied in work on post-Revolutionary displacement of Iranians in the United States. Using police and judicial records from the Cambridge police department and court district, I argue that the affective residues of the Iranian takeover of the U.S. embassy in Iran continued to characterize how Iranians were racialized in the years and decades after. The institutional perspective that this paper provides builds on the arguments of prior studies while also examining the bureaucratic mechanisms through which police brutality against Iranian foreign nationals was quietly sustained during these decades. Furthermore, this study broadens the geographical bounds of Asian American Studies to consider the role of West Asia and its diaspora in the field’s analysis of empire, belonging, and exclusion.