From: sepideh koosha <sepidehkpfalsb at yahoo.com> Date: August 11, 2006 3:23:52 PM EDT To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org Subject: Reading Lolita in Tehran.
Native informers and the making of the American empire
Lacking internal support or external legitimacy, writes Hamid Dabashi*, the US empire now banks on a pedigree of comprador intellectuals, homeless minds and guns for hire
IN THE COURSE OF the US presidential election of 2004, during the final round of campaign between President George W Bush and Senator John Kerry, at one point the public debate came down to a comparison between the competing notions of an empire with no hegemony (for President Bush) versus a hegemony with no empire (for Senator Kerry). The issue remained moot, rather tangential and academic to the debate, and unresolved with the re-election of President Bush.
Soon after Seymour Hersh published an article in The New Yorker in April 2006, exposing an apparent Pentagon plan to attack Iran--an attack in which for the first time since Hiroshima and Nagasaki the use of nuclear weapon was contemplated--anti-war activists all over the world were alerted that this particularly frightful extension of US militarism might mean the death of tens of thousands of more innocent people. An organisation of concerned scientists issued a warning in the form of a video simulation, predicting that such an invasion, if it included the so-called "tactical" use of nuclear weapon, would immediately kill at least 3 million people, and expose millions of others to cancer causing agents, with the domain of the catastrophe extended eastward beyond Iran into Afghanistan, Pakistan, and even India.
Conspicuously absent in the public response, for or against this criminal thought threatening the life of millions of innocent people in the region, was any systematic linking between the identical rhetoric of the Bush administration against Iran with those presented only a few years earlier against Afghanistan and Iraq.
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ONE MAY ALSO ARGUE that this act of collective amnesia accompanies a strategy of selective memory --two pathological cases that in fact augment and corroborate each other. A particularly powerful case of such selective memories is now fully evident in an increasing body of mémoire by people from an Islamic background that has over the last half a decade, ever since the commencement of its "War on Terrorism," flooded the US market. This body of literature, perhaps best represented by Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran (2003), ordinarily points to legitimate concerns about the plight of Muslim women in the Islamic world and yet put that predicament squarely at the service of the US ideological psy-op, militarily stipulated in the US global warmongering. As President Bush has repeatedly indicated, the US is now engaged in a prolonged and open-ended war with terrorism. This terrorism has an ostensibly "Islamic" disposition and provenance. "Islam" in this particular reading is vile, violent, and above all abusive of women--and thus fighting against Islamic terrorism, ipso facto, is also to save Muslim women from the evil of their men. "White men saving brown women from brown men," as the distinguished postcolonial feminist Gayatri Spivak puts it in her seminal essay, "Can the Subaltern Speak?"
Three years after the publication of Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran, and right in the middle of a global concern about yet another American military operation in the region, one can now clearly see and suggest that this book is partially responsible for cultivating the US (and by extension the global) public opinion against Iran, having already done a great deal by being a key propaganda tool at the disposal of the Bush administration during its prolonged wars in such Muslim countries as Afghanistan (since 2001) and Iraq (since 2003). A closer examination of this text thus reveals much about the way the US imperial designs operate in its specifically Islamic domains.
The publication of Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran coincided with the most belligerent period in the recent US history, the global flexing of its military muscles, and as such the text has assumed a proverbial significance in the manner in which native informers turned comprador intellectuals serve a crucial function in facilitating public consent to imperial hubris. With one strike, Azar Nafisi has achieved three simultaneous objectives: (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.
So far as its unfailing hatred of everything Iranian--from its literary masterpieces to its ordinary people--is concerned, not since Betty Mahmoody's notorious book Not Without My Daughter (1984) has a text exuded so systematic a visceral hatred of everything Iranian. Meanwhile, by seeking to recycle a kaffeeklatsch version of English literature as the ideological foregrounding of American empire, Reading Lolita in Tehran is reminiscent of the most pestiferous colonial projects of the British in India, when, for example, in 1835 a colonial officer like Thomas Macaulay decreed: "We must do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern, a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, words and intellect." Azar Nafisi is the personification of that native informer and colonial agent, polishing her services for an American version of the very same project.
Domestically within the United States, Reading Lolita in Tehran promotes the cause of "Western Classics" at a time when decades of struggle by postcolonial, black and Third World feminists, scholars and activists has finally succeeded to introduce a modicum of attention to world literatures. To achieve all of these, while employed by the US Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowits, indoctrinated by the father of American neoconservatives Leo Straus (and his infamous tract Persecution and the Art of Writing ), coached by the Lebanese Shi'i neocon artist Fouad Ajami, wholeheartedly endorsed by Bernard Lewis (the most wicked ideologue of the US war on Muslims), is quite a feat for an ex-professor of English literature with not a single credible book or scholarly credential to her name other than Reading Lolita in Tehran.
Azar Nafisi's book is thus the locus classicus of the ideological foregrounding of the US imperial domination at home and abroad in three simultaneous moves: (1) it banks on a collective amnesia of historical facts surrounding successive US imperial moves for global domination--for paramount in Reading Lolita in Tehran is a conspicuous absence of the historical and a blatant whitewashing of the literary; (2) it exemplifies the systematic abuse of legitimate causes (in this case the unconscionable oppression of women living under Muslim laws) for illegitimate purposes; and (3) through the instrumentality of English literature, recycled and articulated by an "Oriental" woman who deliberately casts herself as a contemporary Scheherazade, it seeks to provoke the darkest corners of the Euro- American Oriental fantasies and thus neutralise competing sites of cultural resistance to the US imperial designs both at home and abroad, while ipso facto denigrating the long and noble struggle of women all over the colonised world to ascertain their rights against both domestic patriarchy and colonial domination. In the latter case, the project of Reading Lolita in Tehran is just on the surface limited to denigrating Iranian and by extension Islamic literary cultures and feminist movements; its equally important target is to dismiss and disparage competing non-white cultures of the immigrant communities, ranging from African-American, to Asian-American, to Latino-American, and other racialised minorities.
Rarely has an Oriental servant of a white-identified, imperial design managed to pack so many services to imperial hubris abroad and racist elitism at home--all in one act. It is thus exceedingly important to read Nafisi not just for her ideological services to the US imperial designs globally, but, equally if not more important, for her reactionary consequences inside the United States as well.
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The major problem with Reading Lolita in Tehran in fact lies not in its systematic distortion of Iranian literary and social history but even more importantly in how utterly ignorant (indifferent or dismissive) of the massive debates of a counter-culture movement in the US academy, briefly code-named multiculturalism, Nafisi has been, thus joining force with the right-wing, conservative resistance to curricular changes in the US and European colleges and universities, and by extension the world at large. Nafisi has never taught at any liberal arts college or university in the US. She is entirely ignorant of or indifferent and hostile to the decades of struggle that racialised minorities and women's and minority studies have endured to make a dent in the vacuum-packed curricular terrors of the white establishment. At a time when the entire nation is engaged in a radical debate about the necessity of curricular diversity, Azar Nafisi joins ranks with the worst reactionary elements singing the praise of the "Western masterpieces." After decades of consistent struggles, native-Americans, African-Americans, Latin-Americans, Asian-Americans, feminists, and scores of other denigrated and disenfranchised communities, have successfully engaged the white male supremacist canon of the US higher education, against all odds and against powerful opposition from Christian fundamentalism and other conservative bastions upholding this empire. With utter disregard for this struggle across the nation, across the globe in fact, Azar Nafisi squarely places yet another non-European culture outside the fold of the literary--of the sublime and the beautiful.
IN PROVIDING HER SERVICES to the predatory empire, the comprador intellectual does her or his share to normalise the imperial centre and cast its peripheral boundaries as odd, abnormal, and grotesque. Nafisi writes about the oddity of reading "Lolita" in Tehran as if its reception in the United States or Europe has been a piece of the proverbial cake. The book and both its film adaptations have been systematically banned or boycotted since its original publication in France in 1955. Nabokov could not even find a US publisher willing to take a risk with "Lolita." By 1954, at least four publishers had turned Nabokov down. He finally took his book to Europe and consented to Maurice Girodias' Olympia Press--the publisher of such pornographic titles as "White Thighs," "With Open Mouth," and "The Sexual Life of Robinson Crusoe"--to publish only 5,000 copies of "Lolita."
Until Graham Greene took "Lolita" seriously and published an interview with Nabokov, no one in Europe or the US was willing to review the book. Greene's endorsement outraged the British public. John Gordon, editor of Sunday Express, called "Lolita" "the filthiest book I have ever read" and "sheer unrestrained pornography." The British Home Office ordered the UK customs to confiscate all copies entering the United Kingdom and pressured the French Minister of the Interior to ban the book. In 1962, when Stanley Kubrick released his adaptation of "Lolita" he faced the censorial policies of the Production (censorship) Code of Hollywood and the Roman Catholic Legion of Decency. Years later, in 1998, when Adrian Lyne's "Lolita" was released he was skewered by the conservatives in both the US and Europe. The 1994 Megan's Law in New Jersey, the Child Pornography Prevention Act of 1995, and the murder of JonBenet Ramsey in 1996 were all back in public debate casting the odds against Lyne's "Lolita."
As a literary work of art, Nabokov's Lolita has endured much praise and condemnation, uses and abuses the world over--and casting the evident oddity of reading it in Tehran is nothing but exoticising an otherwise perfectly cosmopolitan literary scene--a scene consistently distorted and ridiculed by Azar Nafisi.
TO SUSTAIN THE LEGITIMACY of the predatory empire, the comprador intellectual must also do her or his share in re- accrediting the hitherto discredited ideologues of the imperial project. The comprador intellectual speaks with the voice of authenticity, nativity, Orientalised oddity. He is from "there," and she "knows what she is talking about," and thus their voices carry the authority of a native informer. Nafisi's most useful task has thus been to be an Oriental voice accrediting the most discredited Orientalist alive-- the sole surviving Orientalist who links his services to British colonialism and US imperialism in the span of a lifetime (he is quite a museum piece). The relationship between the author of Reading Lolita in Tehran and Professor Humbert Humbert of Orientalism is quite a warm and fuzzy one, mutually quite beneficial. Long before Bernard Lewis "opened the door" for Azar Nafisi and anointed Reading Lolita in Tehran a "masterpiece," in an infomercial that The US News and World Report published on the aging Orientalist (Jay Tolsonn, "A Sage for the Age: Bernard Lewis," The US News and World Report, 12/3/2001) this is what Azar Nafisi had to say about Lewis:
"'When I was studying in the States in the 70's I was very much against people like Lewis. I had far more books by people like Said. When I went back and lived and taught in Tehran in 1979, I began to discover how many of my assumptions were wrong.' Reading Lewis, she discovered, among other things, that Muslims until mid-19th century had been far more critical of their own culture than any Orientalist ever was--a self-critical spirit that she had been ignorant of until Lewis and other 'Orientalists' led her to it."
If Edward Said dismantled the edifice of Orientalism, Azar Nafisi is recruited to re-accredit it. It is for that very same reason that in anticipation of Bernard Lewis' favourable disposition, Azar Nafisi makes sure that one of the demonic characters she portrays in her Reading Lolita in Tehran is an avid supporter of Edward Said--thus identifying one of the most celebrated public intellectuals of his generation with some of the most retrograde sentiments in a theocracy--all to appease Bernard Lewis and solicit his favourable disposition towards a neocon debutante.
As for the substance of the endorsement of Bernard Lewis, Azar Nafisi may indeed be ignorant of any number of things--including of the Islamic intellectual history. But to assume that before Humbert Lewis and other mercenary Orientalists told them so, Muslims were not aware of their own self- critical spirit simply defies reason. How could Muslims be self-critical of their own culture but not be aware that they have been self-critical, and wait for Orientalists to come and tell them so? The sheer inanity of the suggestion flies in the face of reason and sanity. But the quotation from an Oriental confirming the structural hatred of a civilisation across lands and cultures pays back lucratively when Lewis returns the favour and blurbs Azar Nafisi's book as "a masterpiece" and facilitates her entrance into the subterranean dungeons of power in Washington DC.
TO ANALYSE THE CULTURE of US imperialism, according to Amy Kaplan in The Anarchy of Empire, "it is necessary to cross . . . borders and challenge the interpretative framework of national paradigms, which use history for 'inflating our national ego.'" Otherwise lacking internal support or external legitimacy, the US empire now banks on a pedigree of comprador intellectuals, homeless minds and guns for hire. All this to momentarily manufacture consent, to secure a selective memory, and to sustain a far more enduring collective amnesia that may perhaps serve immediate US imperial purposes well, but will ipso facto sustain its self-destructive force of building fictive sand castles near the factual waves of history. This empire will not last. No empire does. If empires lasted, the whole world would be speaking ancient Persian today.
* The writer is the Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University in New York. Among his best- known books are Authority in Islam, Theology of Discontent, Truth and Narrative, Close Up: Iranian Cinema, Past, Present, Future, and an edited volume, Dreams of a Nation: On Palestinian Cinema (2006). His forthcoming book Iran: A People Interrupted is scheduled for publication in 2006 by the New Press.
full text: <http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2006/797/special.htm>