Azar Nafisi s Reading Lolita in Tehran (2003) is an American success

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1 Anne Donadey Huma Ahmed-Ghosh Why Americans Love Azar Nafisi s Reading Lolita in Tehran Azar Nafisi s Reading Lolita in Tehran (2003) is an American success story. A 350-page memoir on life in Iran under a theocratic Islamic regime between 1979 and 1997, it was published a year and a half after the attacks of September 11, 2001, as the United States was going to war against Iraq. It quickly catapulted to the number one paperback best seller position on the New York Times Book Review list, where it remained for a year and a half. By April 2004 it ranked second on the list of most-read books on college campuses (Chronicle of Higher Education 2004, A8). By September 2004 it was the fifth-most-borrowed nonfiction book in U.S. libraries (Library Journal 2004, 96). Reading Lolita has been translated into Spanish and French. As of February 2004 it was in its fifteenth printing and was being translated into ten other languages (Birnbaum 2004), including Chinese and Hebrew. And perhaps inevitably, by March 2005 movie rights ha[d] been optioned (Memmott 2005, 1D). This enthusiastic public reception has been matched by overwhelmingly positive reviews. While Iranian women s memoirs have become something of a cottage industry, notably in the United States and France, Reading Lolita has had the most exposure of such books in the United States by far. The memoir s author, English and American literature professor Azar Nafisi, was almost unknown as a writer in the United States before the book was published. This article addresses the question raised by reviewer Trudy Bush, who wonders why this book should be so popular in a culture that supposedly discourages serious reading (2004, 32). We contend that this memoir has been successful for a variety of political and ideological reasons in addition to the current popularity of the memoir as a genre, Reading We thank Carine Bourget, Ghada Osman, Bonnie Kime Scott, Veronica Shapovalov, the participants in the 2005 Seminar in Experimental Critical Theory on Present Tense Empires, Race, Biopolitics at the University of California, Irvine, the anonymous external reviewers, and the Signs editors for their insights. [Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 2008, vol. 33, no. 3] 2008 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved /2008/ $10.00

2 624 Donadey and Ahmed-Ghosh Lolita s literary value (manifest in the various narrative techniques used to make the past present and to maintain suspense), and its ability to elicit the reader s empathy for the characters. In particular, Reading Lolita can easily lend itself to interpretations that reinforce a dominant western, especially U.S., ideology. 1 The book provides the kind of ideological perspective that American and European audiences have come to expect, if not demand, from women in Muslim countries. In addition, we argue that its greatest weakness is that it was written exclusively in terms of an Iranian context, yet written for a U.S. audience that is not provided with the historical and political tools to understand the text other than in western terms. Given the conservative ideological context in which the book is circulating in the United States today, and given that it is being taught in many women s studies classes at the college level, it is particularly important that women s studies practitioners be aware of its pitfalls in order to avoid unwittingly recirculating the damaging orientalist trope of the oppressed Muslim woman. We begin with a section on the Iranian historical and political context, with which most American readers are unfamiliar. We then discuss literary reasons for Reading Lolita s popularity. In the longest section, we analyze the many ways in which the memoir, unfortunately, easily lends itself to conservative U.S. ideological rescripting. Reading for context The history of feminism and women s movements is neither new nor unheard of in Iran. The feminist discourse in Iran has historically been split along ideological lines between left-secular and religious feminisms. The woman question has a long history and even now is the burning issue in Iran, where feminists are demanding their fair share of justice and rights in a fundamentalist state. In Iran, the status of women is measured in pre- and postrevolutionary terms. In the prerevolutionary era, questions of feminism were determined by elite, western-educated, and socialist feminists in relation to western feminism. The emphasis was on individual rights in terms of clothing (abandoning the veil) and equal access to education and employment within a secular state and western framework. In the postrevolutionary era, questions of feminism shifted to reclaiming women s rights as prescribed in Islamic texts, especially through the 1 Like many other postcolonial scholars, we do not capitalize western, eurocentric, or orientalism, in order to signal a desire to unsettle the primacy of western belief systems.

3 S I G N S Spring Quran. Shoring up rights claims with references to Islam and the Quran can be perceived as a strategy by secular/socialist feminists who chose to remain in Iran and continue the fight for women s rights. This historical framework has led to questions about what feminism really entails, simultaneously opening up a discourse about how feminism has existed in different locations, through different historical periods, and in diverse political climates. Various scholars have attempted to trace the history of women s movements in Iran since the 1900s. Iran, like Turkey and other Muslim societies, was exposed to westernization, a sense of nationhood, and issues of women s rights because of European countries colonialism and expanding economies (which was, in the case of Iran, related to England s quest for oil). These multiple changes caused elite families in Iran to send their children, including daughters, to Europe for an education. This process was closely tied to the opening up of Iranian society to modernization defined as westernization. Higher education abroad had its own appeal and was a status symbol for the elite. It can also be tied to the need to create a highly educated, westernized labor pool in Iran. As happened in Egypt in the early decades of the twentieth century, Iranian women returned home after spending time abroad and rebelled against traditional gender roles and the invisibility of women by removing their veils and adopting western clothes. As Shahrzad Mojab points out, upperand middle-class women, long confined to the private domain of the household, were demanding participation in public life. Some rural women, too, had been drawn into the anti-colonial struggles and land reform movements (2001, 130). These developments marked the beginning of women s movements in Iran. By the 1930s, wearing the veil had become illegal because under the U.S.-backed Pahlavi dynasty, symbols of modernity were insisted upon. Most women in Iran did not have a choice in the matter. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini started gaining popularity in Iran during the 1960s. The Pahlavi dynasty tried to suppress the clergy and religious forces in Iran because Islamization was countering Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi s modernization process, especially in terms of women s rights, and also because the clergy was threatening the monarchy, which it saw as westernized and in opposition to Islamic dictates. The shah s new family laws purposefully intended to diminish the power of the clergy and to move toward modernization. Khomeini s main platform was opposition to these family laws (which granted women more rights) because they set up a contestation between the clergy and the secularists by challenging

4 626 Donadey and Ahmed-Ghosh Islamic family laws. By the 1970s he was able to garner a massive following in Iran, which was composed mainly of the rural and urban poor. Millions of women also supported him. The class divide is vital to understanding women s lives in Iran. According to Elaheh Povey, under the Pahlavi regime during the 1970s, the persistence of patriarchal norms in many cases did not allow the majority of the working-class women and middle-class religious women to benefit from the reforms (2001, 46). Because the lower and lowermiddle classes were neglected by the rapid modernization project of the Pahlavi monarchy and felt alienated from it, female support for the 1979 revolution was mainly drawn from these classes. Rising poverty, unemployment, and a growing economic and cultural gap between the poor and the elite during Shah Pahlavi s regime caused popular discontent and set the stage for Khomeini, who appealed to the people through his antiwest, pro-islam rhetoric (Moghadam 1999). Iranian critic Roksana Bahramitash notes that the Islamic revolution in Iran restricted opportunities primarily for upper-middle-class women (2005, 232). According to at least some indicators, there has been some improvement in the status of women in Iran, including steep declines in illiteracy, infant mortality, and birth rates, as well as a correspondingly steep increase in life expectancy for women in the last thirty years or so. In addition, more women than men currently attend universities, and because there are gender-segregated schools, more girls are going to school than did before the revolution, especially in rural areas (Hoodfar 1999; Moruzzi 2001, 93 94; Bahramitash 2005, 233). These changes have affected the lives of poor women positively but have had less of an impact on upper-middle-class women s lives, since the latter already had access to education and health care. 2 Immediately after the Islamic revolution of 1979, protests and demonstrations broke out when Khomeini mandated veiling and issued other dictates banning women from work, changed the family laws in ways that made women lose some of their legal rights, segregated education and entertainment, and made compulsory the accompaniment of a mahram (male family member) and/or the permission of the eldest male in the house before a woman could travel out of the home. In addition, he lowered the age of marriage and gave the father sole custody of children. 2 As Bahramitash rightly points out, Reading Lolita, which gives voice to a variety of women, excludes subaltern women s voices, such as Nafisi s servant s, from the narrative, exhibiting a lack of empathy for poorer women that goes against the grain of Nafisi s own focus on the importance of empathy (2005, 231, 234).

5 S I G N S Spring These laws led to a massive demonstration on March 8, International Women s Day, in In the 1980s, the Iran-Iraq war also led to heightened gender consciousness. The large number of men participating and dying in the war left many women widowed as single mothers and as older women bereft of adult sons to take care of them. This resulted in more women being allowed to work and also to fight for rights to economic subsistence, such as inheritance rights to their husbands properties. Islamic women, especially war widows, began to demand rights within the framework of Islam (Povey 2001, 47). Islamic feminism became highly visible in both postrevolutionary Iran and globally, with the emergence of fundamentalist states, and has been strengthened after September 11, The main assumption underlying Islamic feminism is that Islam as a religion can provide a just hierarchy and is a fair social system that empowers women. Empowerment of women can be achieved through following the teachings of the Quran, which forms the backbone of society, rather than through a focus on equality with men, which is perceived to be a western concept. 3 Islamic feminism is seen as an attractive alternative to western feminism (which itself is composed of multiple strands) and could be perceived as the only strategically viable option in a fundamentalist state. By the 1990s the challenge to oppressive family laws in the Islamic constitution was organized by both Islamic and secular feminists. Despite fundamental differences in their worldviews, these two groups were able to come together to fight for women s rights based on specific issues (Afshar 1998; Povey 2001; Gheytanchi 2006). Iran offers a good example of how women s groups, students, secularists, and even Islamic leaders can resist the current theocracy by challenging the repressive system. According to Homa Hoodfar (1999), activists have used the media and various venues to protest executive and legislative decisions. Some of these protests have been heard, and certain laws have been changed. Women elected to the Majlis (Assembly), such as Azam Taleqani, Maryam Behruzi, and Zahra Rahnavard, have sought over the years to pass laws more favorable to women (Afshar 1998, 18). However, while Hoodfar points to changes in the family law and the reinstatement of women lawyers as positive steps emerging from such protests, in practice the new laws implementation and adoption by the general public are almost nonexistent. But such protests and changes do reveal the open spaces where women in Iran can influence the clergy system by basing their demands on the Quran. This has led to outcomes as varied as the creation of the Bureau 3 See Ahmed 1992; Hoodfar 1999; Mir-Hosseini 1999; Hassan n.d.

6 628 Donadey and Ahmed-Ghosh of Women s Affairs, women s active participation in elections, the 1996 landslide election of Islamic feminist Faezeh Hashemi Rafsanjani (the expresident s daughter) to the Majlis, and a greater number of women in the military (Hoodfar 1999). Two prominent women s journals that keep the feminist debate alive are Zanan and Farzaneh, among many others. A question does remain: Should women s movements aim at reforms within an Islamic framework, or should there be a call for rights within a universalized human rights discourse? Given that basing one s claims on a framework of universal rights appears difficult to do in Iran at this point and that nowhere in the world have women been able to effect equality, pushing for reforms within the national framework may well be the appropriate strategy. This is a process and not the solution, and Iranian women s groups have successfully kept the woman question alive through their demands for better laws and rights. Nafisi comes from an illustrious and wealthy Tehran family and was schooled in Europe and the United States between the ages of 13 and 30 (Nafisi 2003, 81 86). She was antimonarchy because her father, then mayor of Tehran, was jailed by the shah for receiving an international award recognizing his intellectual achievement. As a graduate student in the United States, she joined the leftist Confederation of Iranian Students, which was the only alternative Iranian student movement at the time. In 1979, when most elite Iranians were fleeing the country, Nafisi courageously chose to return to Iran to teach, well aware of the political situation. She wrote Reading Lolita, a memoir of her Iranian years, after she and her family were finally able to leave Iran for the United States in the late 1990s. The memoir chronicles the ways in which she found herself more and more alienated by the myriad ways in which the totalitarian theocracy regulated the daily lives of women and suppressed defiance. She rightfully expresses disillusionment with the Left, too. As is skillfully explicated by Maziar Behrooz (2000) and Nafisi (2003, 253), the major Marxist parties, the Tudeh and the Fadaiyan, were not able to respond to the growing religiosity of the working class or to the increasing poverty among them. They focused more on the concept of total revolution, which ignored the economic, social, and cultural realities of the working class in Iran. Eventually, the above-mentioned parties ended up compromising with the Islamic Republic of Iran. Because Nafisi is operating from an entirely secular perspective, she does not discuss the attempts, and in some cases strides, made by Islamic feminists toward women s rights while she lived in Iran. Yet it is not possible for her to be unaware of the emergence of the various women s journals and movements, given the elite, educated background Nafisi

7 S I G N S Spring shares with their most active participants, such as Shirin Ebadi, Mehrangiz Kar, and Shahla Lahiji. These women are nationally recognized and are also influential figures in the Iranian diaspora in the west. 4 Although the situation has ranged and continues to range from challenging to abysmal for most Iranian women, Nafisi s analysis of the Islamic state and its relationship to the woman question throughout her memoir is silent about the advances women and women s groups have made in Iran since the mid-1980s. While these attempts at change may seem marginal given the transformation of society the revolution brought about, a lack of acknowledgment of such efforts feeds into western stereotypes of Iranian women as passive and helpless. It further reinforces the west s rhetoric that such oppression of women and backwardness are rooted in Islam. Reading for the literary and the pedagogical The popularity of the memoir genre has been evident for at least fifteen years, and as Trudy Bush notes, a subgenre of the memoir has appeared: the memoir of the reading life (2004, 32). She places Reading Lolita in this category. Since the early 1990s, in the United States and elsewhere, academics like Nafisi have jumped on the memoir bandwagon, often with success. Although some academic memoirs incorporate theoretical or scholarly sections, Reading Lolita is unique in that it includes actual lectures given in a variety of classrooms over a span of close to twenty years, staging a number of classroom confrontations and debates in interesting ways. Nafisi s memoir has a wide appeal because it fits very well in the niche market of the U.S. book club (Simpson 2003, 103) and can be adopted for classroom use. It mirrors the setting of book clubs, which have been enjoying renewed popularity thanks to Oprah Winfrey. Western women gathering to read and discuss books can identify with Iranian women 4 Ebadi s own memoir, Iran Awakening (2006), was published after this article was completed. Ebadi, an Iranian lawyer and defender of women s rights who resides in Iran, is the recipient of the 2003 Nobel Peace Prize. She places her critique of the Islamic regime s excesses in a historical context that begins with the U.S. support of the shah and the 1953 CIA-backed overthrow of the democratically elected socialist Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh, who had nationalized the oil industry. She thus provides a sense of historical causality for Iranian people s disenchantment with the shah s regime and with the United States that is absent from Nafisi s account. At the end of her memoir, Ebadi explains that she had to fight the U.S. government for the right to publish her memoir in the United States, demonstrating that the freedom of speech Nafisi sees as an uncontested hallmark of U.S. society can never be taken for granted.

8 630 Donadey and Ahmed-Ghosh secretly meeting in a teacher s living room to read and discuss canonical texts of English and American literature. Reading Lolita encourages this structure of identification through a variety of techniques such as intertextuality (references to other texts), self-referentiality (references to Nafisi s memoir), and an emphasis on empathy. Many aspects of the memoir are sure to appeal to professors looking for a recently published, highly teachable text. The timely Muslim women s theme, the book s international provenance, and the fact that its intended reader is so clearly western/american (Nafisi 2003, 283) are central to its appeal. The three major themes of the memoir the relation between fiction and reality (Nafisi 2003, 6), the importance of empathy and imagination in fiction, and women s freedom are bound to fascinate literature teachers and students (Levinson 2003, 24). Reading Lolita is also of interest for its use of scenes mirroring and refracting the process of active teaching, learning, and writing (Nafisi 2003, 37 38, 124, ). Other elements explaining the memoir s appeal to university professors include its focus on the mentoring relationship between teacher and student, on the importance of good teachers and of literature in their students lives (333), and on feminist consciousness-raising through course work (272 73). It is therefore understandable that feminist professors would want to teach this book, especially if they are not specialists in Middle Eastern studies and do not catch on to the easy appropriations the book seems to invite. The memoir s literary value is also an important aspect of its appeal. The literary references in Nafisi s memoir are part of the reason for its success and are certainly a factor in its appeal to an academic audience. Reading Lolita follows a mimetic style, often reminding the reader of the nineteenth-century novels the characters are discussing or of Vladimir Nabokov s fiction (Roncevic 2003, 100; Bush 2004, 34). The memoir s style is also evocative of famous lines from The Great Gatsby (Nafisi 2003, 108, , 149, 341). Reading Lolita includes several scenes of instruction (Awkward 1999), which replicate Nafisi s class lectures at the university. These passages of literary criticism often take on a self-referential quality, as they also apply to the memoir we are reading. For instance, the comments about the structure of Jane Austen s novels being one of dance and digression (Nafisi 2003, 267) also apply to the structure of Nafisi s memoir, composed as it is of vignettes and short scenes. The remark that the voices in Austen s fiction leave the novel tingling in our ears (Nafisi 2003, 269) is perhaps also the expression of a similar hope for the memoir s effect on its readers. Nafisi engages her audience through a variety of literary techniques such as direct appeals to the reader and maintaining suspense by remaining

9 S I G N S Spring purposefully vague about the exact nature of her relationship to her male mentor, whom she calls her magician, and by hinting that he may be an altogether fictional character (2003, 33 34, 202, 337). The text also uses narrative techniques to recreate the past in the present, to give the impression that past memories have become present. For instance, Nafisi frequently relates past scenes by beginning in the past and then abruptly switching to the present and even to the future (7, 40, ). She also juxtaposes two memories (190) or uses a flashback within a flashback (240, 264). The most interesting technique used to make the past present is the way Nafisi switches from descriptive narration in the past tense to direct address in the present, especially in the classroom scenes. This is the literary equivalent of the fade-in to indicate a flashback in cinema. Several times in the memoir she actually tells her students which page to turn to, bringing her present readers into her past lectures (110, , 305). When the lecturing Nafisi, who has just made her students turn to page 125 of The Great Gatsby, tells them, let s look at what he s done to give this scene the texture of a real experience (110), the reader can easily infer the self-referential quality of that comment, as Nafisi s narrative technique has just sent us back to her past classroom and made it present for us. Yet, while Nafisi is extremely aware of the importance of the audience, she does not appear to be as alert to the difference between an Iranian and a U.S. audience. Although the text was written in English and published in the United States for a U.S. audience, Nafisi does not address the multiple overdeterminations of her subject matter Iranian women in the west. 5 Reading for the ideological Context reveals itself to be central to interpretation, as what was subversive resistance in totalitarian Iran (the refusal of political engagement, of revolution, and of literature committed to supporting social justice goals) can be easily appropriated by a conservative discourse in a post culture wars, post September 11 U.S. context in which multiculturalism and Islam are under attack. Tales of the totalitarian nature of the Islamic Republic 5 Our use of the concept of overdetermination follows Frantz Fanon s terminology in his Black Skin, White Masks (1967). For Fanon, colonized people are overdetermined from without (116), meaning that the weight of colonial and racial stereotypes makes it difficult for the colonized to be heard and seen for who they are. We argue that Muslim women are similarly overdetermined because the constant use of western stereotypes of these women as oppressed by their religion, culture, and male relatives makes it hard for them to be heard and seen on their own terms.

10 632 Donadey and Ahmed-Ghosh of Iran inevitably take on a very different framing in the United States than they did in Iran because of the major difference in context. This is a problem shared by dissident authors from the former Soviet Union, such as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn; since these authors criticized a totalitarian regime from a U.S. location, their works also served to bolster a rabidly anti-communist U.S. ideology, which was the reason they had been welcomed in the United States to begin with. Reading Lolita easily opens itself to ideological rescripting from a dominant U.S. context. The title of the memoir seeks to attract the reader by instantiating a binary opposition from the start: Nabokov connotes the licentious west; Tehran connotes Islamic theocracy and the eurocentric trope of the oppressed Muslim woman. Reading provides the bridge between the two worlds, for the women in the memoir as well as for the readers of the memoir. The use of Lolita as an intertext sensationalizes Iranian women s situation; the title is shocking in an Iranian context and tantalizing in a western one. The cover illustration of two women wearing head scarves, heads lowered together, gazing at an object hidden from view (presumably a book) adds to the slick and predictable marketing package by catering to a western audience s expectations (Abbott 2004, 106). 6 The veil: Universal symbol of women s oppression or historically dynamic? Given that one of the major symbols of Islam for the west is the veil, it should perhaps come as no surprise that Nafisi s book, which is framed in western terms for a western audience, opens with a powerful image of the head scarf as a symbol of women s oppression: I have... two photographs in front of me now. In the first there are seven women.... They are, according to the law of the land, dressed in black robes and head scarves, covered except for the oval of their faces and their hands. In the second photograph... they have taken off their coverings.... Each has become distinct through the color and style of her clothes, the color and the length of her hair; not even the two who are still wearing their head scarves look the same.... When my students came into that room, they took off more than their scarves and robes. Gradually, each one 6 This article was completed before Hamid Dabashi s (2006) polemical appraisal of Nafisi s memoir was published. Among other things, Dabashi provides a biting criticism of the choice of the memoir s cover photograph.

11 S I G N S Spring gained an outline and a shape, becoming her own inimitable self. (Nafisi 2003, 4 6) From the very first pages, Nafisi thus establishes a clear binary opposition between the enforced robe and head scarf as homogenizing symbols of women s oppression and the glorious individuality symbolized by diverse clothing and hairstyles. There is a sense that the head scarf prevents women from expressing themselves as individuals, and the phrase not even indicates some surprise on Nafisi s part that the two women who have chosen to keep their head scarves also retain some individuality. This is a response to a situation in which women s coverings were imposed on them, which was very traumatic for most women in Iran. Yet it takes on a somewhat different valence in a western context, in which the veil has long served as an emblem of women s oppression under Islam (Ahmed 1982, 524; Bahramitash 2005, ). The veil in itself is not viewed by all Muslim or secular feminists as a primary impediment to women s struggle for rights and, in fact, has been perceived as a facilitator of education and mobility for women in the poorer and rural regions of Iran. 7 The hijab could be seen as one of the key topics (along with family laws) in the discourse on Muslim women s gender consciousness. Reviewing Reading Lolita, Peter Kramer reiterates the stereotypical western equation between the veil and women s oppression: A glimmer of hope attaches to the way bright clothing emerges in a private room, once the prescribed robes and scarves are removed. The regime maintains its hegemony first through the repression of women (2003, 2252). If women s liberation is connected to their ability to wear bright clothing, capitalist consumerism becomes a disturbing component of feminism. In a totalitarian context in which control is maintained through strictly enforced rules regarding women s clothing, Nafisi s focus on variety in clothing as a sign of freedom makes sense, yet in a U.S. context it can also serve to reinforce a dominant consumerist ideology that often targets women. For over twenty years now, third-world and Muslim feminists have tried to undo the western assumption that wearing the veil automatically equals women s oppression. Nafisi does not appear to be aware of postcolonial feminist framings of the issue by U.S.-based scholars such as Chandra Talpade Mohanty and Leila Ahmed. Ahmed s (1982) article on the harem is particularly germane to our argument because she clearly shows the need to modify one s emphasis when moving from a Middle Eastern to 7 See Afshar 1998; Mir-Hosseini 1999; Povey 2001; Gheytanchi 2006.

12 634 Donadey and Ahmed-Ghosh a western location. She explains that a critique of male control of women in Middle Eastern countries needs to be directly articulated in the Middle East but must be framed very differently in the United States, where a straightforward critique inevitably dredges up deeply rooted colonialist and orientalist stereotypes of backward Islam and the oppressed Muslim woman (Ahmed 1982, ). Mohanty, in her influential article Under Western Eyes (1991), shows that wearing the veil has different meanings in different contexts. If it is enforced by the government or patriarchy, as it is in the Islamic Republic of Iran and was in Afghanistan under the Taliban regime, the veil is indeed an instrument of women s oppression. However, women may choose to wear the veil for a variety of reasons, in which case that choice may or may not have anything at all to do with oppression. Nafisi does try to nuance the issue by providing some historical information (2003, ) and by describing her students disagreements about the significance of the robe and head scarf, demonstrating the many meanings that can be attached to wearing them (70). Another section includes a discussion of religious Mahshid, whose choice to wear the head scarf was rendered meaningless when it became compulsory for women (13). Nafisi also mentions that the decision to wear the hijab could sometimes have had a romantic or a sheltering appeal for women before it became compulsory (53, 192). In other words, the memoir both illustrates the western framework that equates the veil with women s oppression and offers a more subtle analysis of the historic[al] dynamism of the veil (Fanon 1965, 63). As a result, in order to counteract the power of stereotypes regarding the veil, teachers of Nafisi s memoir will need to focus on the aforementioned sections of the book, frame the reading and discussion in self-reflexive terms, and highlight overdetermined interpretations of the head scarf in the west. Nafisi historicizes meanings of the veil in Iran by criticizing the various ways in which the image of women has been harnessed by divergent political projects: The unveiling of women mandated by Reza Shah in 1936 had been a controversial symbol of modernization (2003, 112), whereas in 1979 the reveiling of women mandated by the Islamic regime became a symbol of a return to Islam. The parallel between the enforced nature of the unveiling and reveiling through the term mandated suggests that, in both cases, women s status was used as a symbol rather than as an end in itself. Negar Mottahedeh notes that the female body was... a pivot in Iran s historical transition to modernity and that women s bodies have long been politically charged symbols within Iran s national history (2004). As Deniz Kandiyoti and others have shown, when

13 S I G N S Spring women s bodies are hijacked by political, nationalist projects, whether secular-modernist or fundamentalist, their interests are not being defended in and of themselves. When the winds of power shift, gains made by women under secular regimes as diverse as Shah Pahlavi s in Iran or Saddam Hussein s in Iraq can easily be overturned for the sake of political expediency if there is no strong feminist commitment underpinning the gains (Kandiyoti 1994; see also Paidar 1995). Individual freedom as a necessary demand under theocracy and as western liberal ideology As reviewer Cassius Peck remarks, none of the women in Nafisi s class fits the American stereotype of Iranians as being either religious zealots wholly committed to the regime or irreligious hedonists aping pious behaviors because the mullahs force them to. Nafisi s students represent seven different attitudes toward Islam, toward the regime, and toward the future (2003, 59). In this sense, the memoir does break some stereotypes of Muslim women (Birnbaum 2004). In the context of a regime squashing individual rights, Nafisi s focus on the primacy of the individual makes sense as a strategy of resistance and explains why she would be attracted to literature with no explicit political agenda and to works that center on individuality and the uniqueness of each subject (Nafisi 2003, 77, 118). Her text makes the reader feel and understand the deep sense of horror and alienation experienced by an individual who sees her personal and intellectual space shrink to nothing in a totalitarian context. However, translated to a U.S. context, there is a very real danger that readers will take it as a confirmation that the U.S. way of life and individualistic ethos are superior to others. Despite Nafisi s distaste for ideologically driven literature, her memoir can ironically serve to bolster a dominant U.S. ideology of individual freedom, which is often used in the United States to cloak the operations of globalized capital. This is reinforced by the fact that Nafisi repeatedly frames her argument against totalitarianism in liberal terms, which are likely to resonate with U.S. readers: individual freedom (2003, 262, 281), the right to choose (307), ice cream and freedom (338), and above all, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness (281, 341, 347). The focus on freedom is understandable from the perspective of a woman who lost many basic rights after 1979; it can also be read specifically as a rhetorical response to Ayatollah Khomeini s equation of freedom with counterrevolutionary imperialism and immorality (Afshar 1998, 34). Because Khomeini s regime positioned the United States as the Great Satan, taking up U.S. concepts against his regime is highly transgressive from an

14 636 Donadey and Ahmed-Ghosh Iranian perspective. Yet, as critics note, Nafisi s connection to neoconservative milieus (she thanks Fouad Ajami and Bernard Lewis in her acknowledgments) may also help illuminate her position (Mottahedeh 2004; Bahramitash 2005, 230). Reading Lolita bolsters a liberal feminist desire for a sovereign female bourgeois subject position, an aspect of the memoir that is part of its appeal for general American readers. Like many other academic memoirs, then, Nafisi s reinstates liberal humanist understandings of the centrality and uniqueness of individual consciousness (Franklin 2002, 423). In Reading Lolita, the United States becomes symbolic of the freedom the characters seek (2003, 32, 270, 285). Even more striking, the expressions of anti-american hatred orchestrated by the Islamic regime are presented as psychologically damaging for the Iranian characters, including children (59). Toward the end of the memoir, Nafisi does begin to wonder whether she offered her students a problematic model by presenting the United States as the promised land, thus showing some awareness of the limitations of the U.S. model for Iranian women s liberation (270, 281, 312). Finally, her repeated statements that she values rebellion over revolution are transgressive in a context of a totalitarian revolutionary regime (31 32, 84 85, 95, , 282). However, in the U.S. context they may also serve to reinforce passivity and support the status quo. While a world that demands the politicization of everyday life may be subverted through reveling in the apolitical whether it be literature, music, or ice cream a focus on nonideological practices may ironically become highly ideological in a world of self-satisfied consumerism that discourages political activism. Canonical travels and the meanings of politics Nafisi presents herself as being fully aware of the place one s social location may play in the reading life (Bush 2004, 35). Reviewer Cheryl Miller rightly points out that one of the book s central themes... [is] that the act of reading is always colored by our place in the world (2003, 93). The memoir is particularly poignant when it shows Iranian women working through the difficulties of their situation by providing allegorical interpretations of classics of western literature (Nafisi 2003, 6, 144), or when it shows Nafisi immersing herself in Henry James s Daisy Miller or T. S. Eliot as a diversion and solace while facing repeated bombings of Tehran by Iraq or the unexpected disappearance of her mentor (186 88, 207 8, 228). Nafisi makes it clear why the western canonical literature she selected for her classes speaks to her students. In the words of reviewer Mona Simpson, these books take on added, ironic dimensions when we

15 S I G N S Spring remember that the legal age for marriage in Iran at this time was nine (younger than Lolita) and that the punishment for female adultery, such as Daisy Buchanan s affair with Gatsby, was stoning (2003, 103). In a scene that is sure to delight any teacher who has known the pleasure of sharing a particularly effective teaching technique, Nafisi describes her friend Mina s use of the metaphor of the chair to teach perspective (each person sees the chair differently depending on where she is in the room; Nafisi 2003, ). Yet this insight does not seem to register for Nafisi in terms of how differently her story of women oppressed under a fundamentalist Muslim regime will play in the United States. If she makes the reader explicitly aware of the differential meaning of western literature in Islamic Iran, she does not appear to perform the reverse gesture of wondering to what ideological uses her Iranian memoir might be put in the United States after September 11, Nafisi is painfully aware of the overdetermination of women under fundamentalist Islamic law: women were never free of the regime s definition of them as Muslim women (2003, 28). Yet she seems strangely unaware that Muslim women are also never free of western readers definition of them as inherently oppressed. In one of the most ironic moments of the memoir, which returns to Edward Said s (1983) concept of traveling theory, a fundamentalist Islamist student appropriates Said s insights in Culture and Imperialism (1993) to critique Austen as a colonial writer (Nafisi 2003, 289). While Nafisi comments on the double irony of a fundamentalist quoting Said against Austen, and of reactionary Iranians co-opting the work of a progressive thinker, she does not seem aware of other layers of irony. First, the fundamentalist student, rather than the secular, U.S.-trained teacher, is the one who has access to the latest in U.S. literary criticism. Second, the critique of Austen as a writer implicated in the contemporary colonial imaginary in England is valid and, from a postcolonial, anti-eurocentric perspective, should be part of the debate on her works. Finally, Nafisi s own memoir can be as easily appropriated as Said s work, this time by westerners seeking a justification to vilify Islam wholesale (Nafisi 2003, 290). In the U.S. context, Reading Lolita reinforces conservative assumptions about the white (and primarily male) British and American literary canon as having universal value and as being both necessary and sufficient. Coming from a female Iranian writer, the book s recentering of western, white, mostly male canonical literature can be used as fodder in the U.S. culture wars for those who seek to prevent multicultural perspectives from being included in the canon. Such a danger of conservative appropriation is

16 638 Donadey and Ahmed-Ghosh exemplified in Miller s (2003) review of the memoir, which begins with her claim that contemporary literary and theoretical studies are irrelevant and builds on Heather Hewett s argument that Nafisi provides a stirring testament to the power of Western literature to cultivate democratic change (Hewett 2003, 21). Nafisi s argument that good literature is necessarily apolitical, which should be interpreted in the context of her critique of a totalitarian regime saturated with ideology (Nafisi 2003, 277, 289), is easily appropriated by Miller to serve a conservative U.S. agenda that is critical of multicultural, Marxist, feminist, and generally political perspectives on literature (Miller 2003, 95 96). As Nafisi notes, works of imagination that did not carry a political message were deemed dangerous by both the Islamic fundamentalists and the Marxist opposition (2003, 277). That is precisely why she is attracted to such works. Both Nafisi and her mentor subscribe to a belief that the university should be allowed to function as a university and not become a battleground for different political forces (Nafisi 2003, 150). The word politics has a different valence in Islamic Iran than it does in the United States today. In their travel and translation from one location to another, terms may change connotations and become false cognates, as Said (1983), Robert Stam and Ella Shohat (2005), and others have pointed out. Since 1979 the term politics in Iran has served as shorthand for the concept of political Islam, whose goal is to imbricate religion and the state to a point of total theocracy. With respect to education, the Islamic government sought to forcibly Islamize the curriculum, which included banning western materials, especially in the humanities (Afshar 1985, ). The university became a battlefield between those who would impose a religious curriculum and those who would impose a Marxist curriculum (Afshar 1998, 70). Consequently, Nafisi became vehemently opposed to politics and ideology because they were being used to circumscribe any margin for maneuver on the part of individuals and because single-focus ideology directs and reduces literary production and interpretation. (She very effectively lampoons transparently ideological literature on pages ) In the United States, curricular debates have taken a very different form. Demands for curricular reform came on the heels of the civil rights and women s liberation movements of the period from the 1950s to the 1970s. Groups whose cultural production, social needs, and physical presence had been marginalized in the rarefied spheres of the U.S. university system demanded curricular and physical inclusion. They rejected the falsely objective premises of positivism and argued that scholarship has an ethical obligation to be sensitive to various social justice agendas and to

17 S I G N S Spring link the aesthetic to the social. Such redefinitions became influential in the 1980s and 1990s, leading to fierce debates (dubbed the culture wars) that pitted progressive voices arguing for the inclusion of a plurality of multicultural perspectives in the curriculum against conservative voices arguing for the universal value of the western canon and mocking the political correctness of the multiculturalists. In this particular context, Nafisi s remarks about politics having no place in the university might be used to devalue politicized interpretations of literature that critique imperialist, racist, or sexist biases in the curriculum. As a result, Nafisi s text can be appropriated by U.S. conservatives seeking to circumvent the insights of feminist, postcolonial, and ethnic studies. As Nafisi s ideal reader her magician once exclaimed in a curriculum meeting before he resigned, a proper university cannot run without teaching Jean Racine (Nafisi 2003, 139). In the Islamic Republic of Iran, where all educational material was [being] revised to eliminate traces of un-islamic attitudes (Afshar 1998, 65), the statement has a subversive, antinativist, and anticensorship effect. In the context of the United States, however, it can easily be used by conservatives as an ideological argument to reinstate the supremacy of the western canon. The difference between the valences of the term politics in Islamic Iran and in the contemporary United States is crystallized in Nafisi s reinterpretation of the classic U.S. feminist phrase the personal is political. In the United States, this phrase was meant to redefine politics, to challenge its narrow realm in the public sphere of electoral politics, and to offer a broader vision transcending the binary division between public and private in order to show that apparently mundane and apolitical elements of everyday life may be part of a broader system of subjection of the female to the male. Feminist and antiracist redefinitions of politics have sought to dispel the pretense that some oppressive practices are natural and for the common good. Such redefinitions of the political have by now permeated the U.S. academy. In contrast, Nafisi takes issue with the concept that the personal is political because she comes from a situation in which the dominant ideology of political Islam, uniting religion and the state, sought to penetrate everywhere: It is said that the personal is political. That is not true, of course.... Personal and political are interdependent but not one and the same thing... the Islamic Republic s first task had been to blur the lines and boundaries between the personal and the political, thereby destroying both (273). As Ziba Mir-Hosseini has similarly pointed out, political Islam is an ideology that demolish[es] the de facto divide between the personal and political (1996, 163). Nafisi s interpretation is also supported by the work of Norma Claire Moruzzi, who

18 640 Donadey and Ahmed-Ghosh highlights the fact that for women in Iran, the most intimate life choices of the past twenty years have been directly shaped by political as well as social and cultural factors (Moruzzi 2001, 89). It is precisely because in Iran, the political defined the personal (Moruzzi 2001, 90) that Nafisi seeks to open up a space between the two concepts. Whereas the push to politicize the personal in the United States came from societal margins and was part of a movement for women s liberation, it was state imposed and was used primarily to restrict women s options in Iran. The reaction of Carol Anne Douglas, who reviewed Reading Lolita for the feminist magazine off our backs, was that Nafisi had simply misunderstood the meaning of the phrase (2004, 51). Rather than being a misunderstanding, Nafisi s interpretation refers to politics solely as an enforced religious ideology in the Islamic Republic of Iran. It is a response to political Islam, not to the context of U.S. social politics out of which the phrase was generated. Reading the memoir, one often experiences not just a feeling that words have different meanings in the two contexts but also a sense of time lag. Nafisi was trained in the United States before 1979, at a time when the white male canon still reigned unchallenged and when multicultural, Marxist, feminist, and generally political perspectives on literature were marginal. Cut off from these developments in British and American literary studies, she teaches 1960s and 1970s critical perspectives to her Iranian students well into the 1990s (Nafisi 2003, 236). For instance, she discovered the works of Zora Neale Hurston only after she left for the United States in 1997, about ten years after the rediscovery of Hurston s works (Nafisi 2003, 342). Her interpretation of Janie in Their Eyes Were Watching God as a character seeking to discover herself, to see herself through interactions with others erases race as a central factor in that process of discovery and once again reinstates the sovereign subject at the center of the interpretation by comparing Janie s quest to those of characters in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature (Birnbaum 2004). Ironically, Nafisi repeats insights gleaned in the United States in the 1970s, adapts them to an Iranian context, and then exports them back to the United States where they can be usefully appropriated by a conservative agenda and refurbished precisely because in the United States she can be presented as a multicultural subject having no need for anything but the white, primarily male, western literary canon. Selective historical memory One of the most important ways to counter eurocentric, orientalist perspectives is to provide a clearly articulated historical picture that dem-