"The West -- Love It or Leave It" is not a "criticism" -- it's just a piece of ideology, like the old saying, hurled at natives and migrants alike: "If you like Communism so much, why don't you go live in Soviet Russia!" That doesn't belong to any political culture of the Left, for sure.
On 10/21/07, Stephen Philion <stephen.philion at gmail.com> wrote:
> Joanne wrote:
> I read the inteview Yoshie sent along and found Satrapi's observations
> quite sensible. I would prefer to discuss those remarks on their own
> merit without dragging Satrapi's current residence into it.
>
> --I would agree at the surface level surely, but I think the critiques
> of diaspora taking on the role of 'subaltern victimised other' that
> one finds in the writing of Nanda and Ahmad has more to do with than
> simply where such people live.
It's Satrapi's refusal to present herself as a woman victimized by Iran and rescued by the West that angers Doug. She's successful in Paris and yet criticizes the West -- including its anxious and sexist sexual culture -- as much as Iran -- what an ungrateful bitch, taking our money and wounding our narcissism at the same time!
On 10/21/07, Jim Farmelant <farmelantj at juno.com> wrote:
> One could probably ask the same question of two
> 19th century exiles
> from Germany who came to England to spend of
> their lives following the 1848 revolutions.
>
> I suspect that years after those uprisings, both
> men could have safely returned to Germany but they
> never did. Perhaps, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
> too fell prey to the charms of British imperialism.
Many revolutionary intellectuals, both those who managed to lead actual revolutions like Marti, Lenin, Ho, and Khomeini, and those who never did, spent at least some time in imperial metropolises, sometimes in exile, sometimes by choice. I rather think that seeing and experiencing both sides of imperialism firsthand, rather than just being stuck on one side, is what motivates intellectuals -- except those who are stricken by the myth of the West -- to criticize it most fiercely. It is not just material dispossession but also cultural displacement that is part of the making of the revolutionary spirit.
On 10/21/07, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
>
> On Oct 21, 2007, at 9:48 AM, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>
> > If you have a lot of
> > formal education or a great deal of uncommon talents like Marjane
> > Satrapi's artistic gift, you are likely to make much more money in the
> > West than in Iran or anywhere else in the South for that matter.
>
> So, in other words, the materialism of the West - which Satrapi
> denounces from Paris, the echt cosmopolitan city, and you denounce
> from Columbus, the echt middle-American city - has charms that trump
> the revolutionary appeal of building the new Islamic society. It's
> not like they're eating tree bark and beetles in Tehran, either. That
> sounds to me like desk-chair radicalism that barely pauses, if at
> all, to take note of its own contradictions.
You are oversimplifying the case, especially regarding Marjane Satrapi. She criticizes sexist aspects of consumerist individualism, but she also likes Bruce Lee and smoking (yes!) among other things, which is clear from her artistic work and many interviews. Why does it upset you if she doesn't think highly of plastic surgery or the tendency to insist that women "look like a piece of meat" to sell commodities? You sound as if you feel that criticizing _any_ aspect, however trivial or worthless, of capitalist culture is a grave ideological sin. Since when have you become a Red Guard of the Capitalist Cultural Revolution?
> You relocated yourself from Japan - certainly not a poor country -
> more than ten years ago. Why? Is there some appeal to the American
> way of life that's caused you to stay here for a decade?
I enjoy all foreign literature, including English and American literature, little appreciated by most Americans, as it is! My English is far better than my French and Spanish, let alone my Persian, but that's an accident due to the Japanese public education system that mandates English from the seventh grade on.
As a matter of fact, I think of myself as an inventor of the Western Civilization that ought to have existed but never did. So is Satrapi -- maybe she is my Persian Princess. -- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/>