Representing Post-Revolutionary Iran
eBook - ePub

Representing Post-Revolutionary Iran

Captivity, Neo-Orientalism, and Resistance in Iranian–American Life Writing

Hossein Nazari

Share book
  1. 232 pages
  2. English
  3. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

Representing Post-Revolutionary Iran

Captivity, Neo-Orientalism, and Resistance in Iranian–American Life Writing

Hossein Nazari

Book details
Book preview
Table of contents
Citations

About This Book

Memoirs of diasporic Iranian-American authors are a unique and culturally powerful way in which Iran, its politics, and people are understood in the USA and the rest of the world. This book offers an analysis of the processes of production, promotion, and reception of the representations of post-revolutionary Iran. The book provides new perspectives on some of the most famous examples of the genre such as Betty Mahmoody's Not Without My Daughter, Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books, and Fatemeh Keshavarz's Jasmine and Stars: Reading More Than Lolita in Tehran. Hossein Nazari places these texts in their social, historical, and political contexts, tracing their origins within the trope of the American captivity narrative, teasing out and critiquing neo-Orientalist tendencies within, and finally focusing on modes of discursive resistance to neo-Orientalist narratives. The book analyzes the structural means by which stereotypes about Islam and women in the Islamic Republic in these narratives are privileged by news media and the creative industries, while also charting a growing number of 'counterhegemonic' memoirs which challenge these narratives by representing more nuanced accounts of life in Iran after 1979.

Frequently asked questions

How do I cancel my subscription?
Simply head over to the account section in settings and click on “Cancel Subscription” - it’s as simple as that. After you cancel, your membership will stay active for the remainder of the time you’ve paid for. Learn more here.
Can/how do I download books?
At the moment all of our mobile-responsive ePub books are available to download via the app. Most of our PDFs are also available to download and we're working on making the final remaining ones downloadable now. Learn more here.
What is the difference between the pricing plans?
Both plans give you full access to the library and all of Perlego’s features. The only differences are the price and subscription period: With the annual plan you’ll save around 30% compared to 12 months on the monthly plan.
What is Perlego?
We are an online textbook subscription service, where you can get access to an entire online library for less than the price of a single book per month. With over 1 million books across 1000+ topics, we’ve got you covered! Learn more here.
Do you support text-to-speech?
Look out for the read-aloud symbol on your next book to see if you can listen to it. The read-aloud tool reads text aloud for you, highlighting the text as it is being read. You can pause it, speed it up and slow it down. Learn more here.
Is Representing Post-Revolutionary Iran an online PDF/ePUB?
Yes, you can access Representing Post-Revolutionary Iran by Hossein Nazari in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Literature & Middle Eastern Literary. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Information

Publisher
I.B. Tauris
Year
2022
ISBN
9780755617388
Edition
1
Topic
Literature
Subtopic
Middle Eastern Literary
Index
Literature

Chapter 1

Introduction
Iran in Western Imaginary

In the introduction to her travelogue, Two Wings of a Nightingale: Persian Soul, Islamic Heart (2011), the New Zealand author Jill Worrall writes that “Iran is probably the most misunderstood country in the world, and its people are among the most feared” (Worrall). This statement alone is a testament to the significance of Iran, as a major locus in the Muslim Orient, in the Western imaginary, particularly in the mainstream Western discourse apropos the Oriental/Muslim Other. It also bespeaks the power of the representational regime through which the country, its people, and particularly its main religion, Islam, have been subject to constant tropes of Othering, demonization, marginalization, and negation in the West, not least in the United States.
It is the dominance, ubiquity, authority, and serious cultural and political implications of such representations that lend urgency to a methodical analysis and critique of such regimes of knowledge production about the Oriental Other. This book, therefore, seeks to critique literary representations of Iran, which were part of the proliferation of literary productions informed by the two defining historical junctures of the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran—and within that context the Iran–Iraq War (1980–8) and the Hostage Crisis (1979–81)—and what is now commonly referred to as 9/11. The corpus of literary texts dealing specifically with Iranian contexts has expanded exceedingly since the revolution and reached its apex in what Professor Hamid Dabashi has dubbed “the haymarket of post 9/11 anxieties” ( Post-Orientalism 276). Sanaz Fotouhi has recorded that while between 1980 and 2001, no more than sixteen memoirs had been published by Iranians residing in the West, from 2001 to early 2012 at least fifty more memoirs were published (99), excluding works of fiction and poetry volumes—a trend that still continues.
This book provides a much-needed analysis of this literary phenomenon in Iranian-American self-narratives, undertaking a critical perusal of three paramount memoirs penned by Iranian-American women, which are deemed to be paradigmatic works in their representations of Iran and Islam. The three texts are Betty Mahmoody’s Not without My Daughter (1987), as the quintessential pre-9/11 example of captivity narratives; Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books (2003), as the iconic neo-Orientalist post-9/11 Iranian-American, and by extension Middle Eastern, memoir; and Professor Fatemeh Keshavarz’s Jasmine and Stars: Reading More than Lolita in Tehran (2007), as the paramount counter-narrative. While there also exist memoirs written by hyphenated Iranian-European women, none of them share the iconic status of the three memoirs in question, in terms of their popular reception, their impact on the perception of Iran and Islam, their engagement with political agendas, and the celebrity status of their authors. Furthermore, the ongoing tension in US-Iran relations lends a sense of urgency and topicality to Iranian-American memoirs, which is rather lacking in other memoirs.
The critical exegesis of the texts in question is built primarily upon Edward Said’s theorization and critique of the concept of Orientalism in his seminal 1978 book of the same title, and its latter-day manifestation, that is, post-9/11 neo-Orientalism. The analysis of the three iconic texts seeks to reveal that notwithstanding their formal and, to a lesser extent, thematic differences, the narratives in question represent Iran and Islam within a long-established Orientalist frame of reference and through similar representational apparatus. Furthermore, even though these texts are products of two different eras, that is, pre- and post-9/11, the similarities in the social, political, and historical contexts of their production have significantly contributed to their promotion, dissemination, and reception in the United States, and more broadly in the West.
In my perusal of the three narratives, I will demonstrate how the dominant Western representations of Iran and Islam can be read as manifestations of a sustained and long-standing Orientalist discourse formulated in and popularized by the West. Such discursive continuity is a fact that Edward Said bemoans in his Preface to the twenty-fifth-anniversary edition of his Orientalism. Said laments the lack of any evident change in the manner in which American and European representations of the Middle East portray contemporary Muslim societies primarily in terms of what they see as “their backwardness, lack of democracy and abrogation of women’s rights” (xviii). He then goes on to demonstrate how the overall understanding of the Middle East and Islam has deteriorated in the United States since the first publication of his Orientalism in 1978:
I wish I could say, however, that general understanding of the Middle East, the Arabs and Islam in the United States has improved somewhat, but alas, it really hasn’t . . . In the US, the hardening of attitudes, the tightening of the grip of demeaning generalization and triumphalist clichĂ©, the dominance of crude power allied with simplistic contempt for dissenters and “others,” has found a fitting correlative in the looting, the pillaging, and destruction of Iraq’s libraries and museums. (xviii)
Therefore, my critique of the three narratives engages not only with the representational tropes of othering vis-à-vis Iranian people, their culture, main religion, and politics but also with a counter-narrative that seeks to challenge and offer an alternative to the dominant Orientalist discourse via which Iran is often represented and understood. Through an in-depth analysis of the three texts, I will demonstrate how the dominant Western representations of Iran conditioned by certain historical junctures are informed by an Orientalist episteme. Within this regime of knowledge production, the Iranian/Muslim Other, in general, is represented as inferior, and Iranian/Muslim women, in particular, are depicted as oppressed, victimized, passive, and in need of liberation. Such a rendition corresponds with the official view of the United States toward Iran—regardless of which party may be in power—which represents the country not only as its arch-nemesis but often as the greatest threat to world stability. Such representations have, indeed, disturbing political implications in the context of the continuing tensions between Iran and the United States. I will also illustrate, in my discussion of the last narrative, how through an intervening discourse of resistance, hyphenated authors and artists can construct a space that can enable a mode of writing back to the hegemony of Orientalist representations, and can lend greater visibility to the voices that are perpetually dehumanized, marginalized, and silenced in the dominant Western narratives.
Any attempt at investigating certain selective representations of any subject must take account of the historical context that underlies the subject of representation and in which the subject is constantly re-conceptualized and recycled. This is because, in all their normative selectivity, particular conceptualizations of any given country, culture, or people are always informed by a historicity that is definitive of the image represented. Hence, without such contextualization, neither the subject of representation nor its (mis)representations can be fully appreciated. It is only apt, therefore, to briefly demonstrate first the historical significance of Iran to the West and then the historicity of its representations.

Earliest Figurations: The Lavish Nemesis

Although Worrall’s observation, quoted at the beginning of this section, about the endemic misconceptions of Iran clearly encapsulates the current Irano-Islamophobic zeitgeist in the West, representations of Iran in the Western imaginary extend as far back as classical antiquity. With Iran, formerly known as Persia, occupying one of the most significant geostrategic loci on the world stage throughout history, the image of the country has always remained central to the Western imaginary. As Lila Azam Zanganeh has observed, “[w]hether as a haven of exotic sensuality or a stronghold of fanatic religiosity, Iran has, since ancient times, inflamed the popular imagination” (xi). From 550 BC, when it was deemed the world’s preeminent empire during the Achaemenid era, right through to when it fell subject to the colonial whims of Russia, Britain, the Ottoman Empire, the USSR, and the United States, and, later, the 1979 Islamic Revolution that toppled the Pahlavi dynasty, ending twenty-five centuries of monarchy, Iran has always been of considerable geopolitical significance to its immediate neighbors and dominant world powers alike.
The earliest imaginings of Persia1 as the realm of luxury, excess, despotism, and arrogance were primarily inspired by the rise, reign, and decline of the Persian Empire as the world’s largest ancient empire and civilization hitherto, and the archrival of its Occidental counterparts. That the Persian Empire became the subject of much obsession, awe, and apprehension in the European collective consciousness is evident in the figurations of Persia in the literary imaginary of the Occident throughout centuries. This reflects the importance of Persia as an immediate neighbor and antagonist of the Greek states in this period, and the lasting centrality of the Greek and Roman classical period in the West. Some of the most ancient representations of Persia appeared in the earliest of Aeschylus’s surviving plays, The Persians (472 BC), which, according to Edward Said, is the earliest, and the quintessential, text in which “Europe . . . articulates the Orient” ( Orientalism 57). In this historical tragedy about the Greek defeat of the Persians in the Battle of Salamis (480 BC), the Persians are made distinct from their Greek counterparts through their indulgence in such “Eastern excesses”2 ( Orientalism 57) as extravagance, hubris, sensuality, despotism, and irrationality (Pirnajmuddin 21).
In his pioneering study of the literary representations of Persia, Hossein Pirnajmuddin has meticulously demonstrated how the foregoing figurations were also circulated in the canonical and non-canonical works of such English Renaissance texts as Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great (1587), Edmund Spencer’s The Faerie Queene (1590), and John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667) and Paradise Regained (1671), to name but a few (4). Thanks to the Romantic poets’ interest in and appropriation of the matter of the Orient, images of Persia as a land of exoticism, mystery, indulgence, and unbridled sexuality appeared more than ever before in the English literary tradition, especially in the works of such Romantic poets as Lord Byron and Robert Southey. Such an interest is clearly exemplified in such works as Thomas Moore’s Oriental romance, Lalla Rookh (1817), as well as the late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century “Persian poetry fad” in England. John D. Yohannan has attributed the Romantic interest in Persia to “the establishment, in England, of a genuine, firsthand study of the languages of Persia, Arabia, Turkey, and India,” among other things (137).
Foundational to the Occidental imagining of Persia is the text popularly known in the West as One Thousand and One Nights (or alternatively, Arabian Nights). Arguably, no other work has contributed as widely to the exoticization and eroticization of Persia in the Western imaginary. With the harem—as a site where pleasure and peril are curiously intertwined—lying at the heart of the narrative, One Thousand and One Nights represents Persia as a locus of unbridled sensuality and cruelty and has significantly shaped the European view of the licentious, misogynistic, and murderous Persian, best epitomized in the character of the Persian King Shahriar and his treatment of his many doomed wives. Regardless of such figurations of Persia (or the greater Orient), and consistent with an Orientalist view of Oriental philistinism, Said draws attention to how in his Eothen (1844), Alexander William Kinglake concludes that “the Arabian Nights is too lively and inventive a work to have been created by a ‘mere Oriental, who, for creative purposes, is a thing dead and dry—a mental mummy’” ( Orientalism 193).3
It was, however, in the Oriental travelogues penned by European travelers, missionaries, and delegates mostly during the age of European, and particularly British, colonialism that representations of Persia as uncivilized, backward, primitive, decadent, and unfit-for-self-governance pervaded the mainstream Western discourse on the Orient in earnest. Prominent in this category is James Morier’s The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan (1824). Written by a British imperial diplomat,4 the novel has been considered “the most popular Oriental novel in the English language and a highly influential stereotype of the so-called ‘Persian national character’ in modern times” (Amanat 561). Such colonial accounts are characterized by overwhelmingly negative representations of Persia and its peoples. The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan, for instance, “lampoons Persians as rascals, cowards, puerile villains, and downright fools, depicting their culture as scandalously dishonest and decadent, and their society as violent” (Amanat 561). The opening passage from another one of Morier’s works, The Mirza (1841), a collection of tales about Persia, encapsulates the dominant discourse of the British Empire concerning both its Persian Other and itself. The passage bears quoting in full:
Although the Persians cannot be complimented upon their morality, as a nation, yet no one can deny that they abound in a lively wit, a social disposition, and in qualities which fit them to be agreeable companions. The Englishman, bred up in reverence of truth, in love of justice, and in admiration of every thing that constitutes good government, with a strict sense of honour, and a quick impulse to uphold his rights as an independant man, remains perfectly astonished and incredulous at all he sees and hears, when first he finds himself an inhabitant of an Asiatic state. In Persia particularly, where truth and falsehood are upon equal terms, where a man to live, must practice deceit, where the meaning of the word honour is not to be defined, and where there is no government but such as emanates from caprice or despotism, there his astonishment and disgust are complete, although, at the same time, should he have any turn for humour, he cannot help being amused at the ingenuity of the wiles exercised, at the light-hearted levity, and apparent clown and pantaloon philosophy with which evils, such as the Englishman would call great, are supported. (1–2)
Such depictions would be best understood if read against the backdrop of an expanding British imperialism in its heyday. In the colonial context of their own time, such accounts served as “soft weapons,” to borrow Gillian Whitlock’s phrase ( Soft Weapons 3), deployed to justify and perpetuate colonial domination that pledged the civilizing of the Oriental subject. Such nationalistic chauvinism is also applied to other countries (including European ones) and at times to the British, too. Nevertheless, the British, and other colonial European powers’ accounts become more dominant as other aspects of imperialism support their ascendancy.
As far as representations of Iran in the United States are concerned, it is imperative to contextualize such representations within the historico-political context of the last century. In the second half of the twentieth century, the role played by the United States in Iran’s political landscape became increasingly more dominant. The US intervention in Iranian internal affairs reached its climax when in 1953 the new US administration decided to execute a coup d’état that overthrew Iran’s first democratically elected prime minister—Dr. Mohammad Mosaddeq, who had nationalized Iran’s oil and incurred the wrath of the British—and reinstated the second Pahlavi Shah. Following the coup, which was to become Iranians’ most painful collective memory of the United States for decades, the shah set out to consolidate his power, and in so doing sought the backing of the United States, to which he now owed his throne. The United States had now a much stronger presence in Iran, partly justified by its fear of Iran’s Communist neighbor. As a result, the official relations between the two countries strengthened. The US presence was both justified and solidified through such factors as the alliance whereby the United States assisted in the buildup of Iran’s military and the notorious SAVAK (Iran’s intelligence and security organization), and the creation of diplomatic immunity, known commonly in Iran as “capitulation”, granted to all US military personnel stationed in Iran. Such displays of American dominance and superiority were among a variety of factors that fueled the anti-American sentiment, which, in turn, played a significant role in setting the ground for the 1979 Islamic Revolution. With the collapse of the last Pahlavi dynasty and the advent of a new era for Iran, characterized by an Islamic system of governance and strong opposition to any form of foreign inte...

Table of contents