Reading Lolita in Tehran

I haven't finished the article that I'm reading, and I'll probably keep reading it as I write. Just, you know, heads up.

So, when I wrote my last entry, I was completely unaware of the discussion surrounding Reading Lolita; I mentioned the book to Jesse last week and he said he had heard a lecture on it last year at a conference. I did a little more research about the allegations against Nafisi, namely, that she is a big neo-con imperialist and is undoing the work of postcolonialist theorists everywhere (I'm reading Hamid Dabashi's article Native informers and the making of the American empire). It is all very fascinating. Dabashi identifies Nafisi as a "native informer," a designation which carries with it the implication of treachery; Nafisi has, according to Dabashi, turned on her country by denouncing the Iranian revoluation and enthusiastically endoring the classic works of the Western canon, supporting the imperialist project of "White men saving brown women from brown men," quoting Spivak. Dabashi accuses Nafisi of "(1) systematically and unfailingly denigrating an entire culture of revolutionary resistance to a history of savage colonialism; (2) doing so by blatantly advancing the presumed cultural foregrounding of a predatory empire; and (3) while at the very same time catering to the most retrograde and reactionary forces within the United States, waging an all out war against a pride of place by various immigrant communities and racialised minorities seeking curricular recognition on university campuses and in the American society at large." Quite the statement.

I find this fascinating not because of the argument it entails (passionate and largely predictable, with ample quotations from Orientalism), but because Nafisi, throughout Reading Lolita and in the brief statements cited in the Wikipedia article, wants to separate literature and politics, the public and the private. This, however, undercuts everything that makes Reading Lolita meaningful; Nafisi's literature class, which I was so excited about in the last post, is obviously only subversive if literature is intensely political-- being apolitical is not an effective counterpart to political injustice. The whole project of Reading Lolita seems to recognise this, even if Nafisi herself doesn't, and so occasional statements such as (following her account of a conversation with a friend about James' The Ambassadors) "[i]t seemed as if, apart from literature, the political had devoured us, eliminating the person or the private" (237) undercut what it is that makes Reading Lolita worth reading.

Anyway, I'm not interested in providing a passionate defense of either Nafisi or her book; maybe she is a big neo-con and maybe that does matter. At the moment I don't care enough to do all the research required to ascertain any of the "facts" of the matter; I feel as if both sides have valid points to make. Hamid Dabashi, the only critic I've read, overstates these arguments to the point where I find him a little bit difficult to take seriously, but one can easily read between the melodrama.

Conversation topics for another day: what makes a native informer? and how does the author/narrator function in the genre of memoir given the "death of the author", or can we not accept Barthes' proclamation in the case of a work like Nafisi's?