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Catherine Burwell, Hilary E. Davis, Lisa K. Taylor

Reading Nafisi in the West: Feminist

Reading Practices and Ethical Concerns

ABSTRACT

Iranian women's memoirs have become increasingly popular in the West. Certainly the most popular of these has been Azar Naffsi's Reading Lolita in Tehran. But in a world in which Muslim women are increasingly the subject of neo-Orientalist fear and fascination, Reading Lolita in Tehran cannot be read as neutral. We begin this paper by analyzing the ways in which discourses such as "the clash of civilizations" and "global sisterhood" shape the reception of Naffsi's autobiography. We then examine how the autobiography is being taught, providing both a framework for problematizing current approaches to the text and a case study centred on teaching Reading Lolita in Tehran to a group of preservice teachers. We argue for a continuing interrogation into our own pedagogical practices and desires.

RÉSUMÉ

Les mémoires de femmes Iraniennes deviennent de plus en plus populaires dans l'Occident. Entre eux, le plus connu est Reading Lolita in Tehran par Azar Naffsi. Néanmoins, vu le contexte dans lequel les femmes Musulmanes sont plus en plus construites (ou vues) comme le sujet de la peur et de la fascination néo-Orientaliste, c'est impossible de lire Reading Lolita in Tehran comme un texte neutre. On

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4 commence cet article avec une analyse des façons dans lesquelles la circulation des discours publics - comme "

Le Choc des Civilisations

» de Samuel Huntington

et le féminisme impérialiste - ont construit la réception de l'autobiographie de Nafisi. Puis on examine quelques façons dans lesquelles on enseigne ce texte, et on propose un cadre pour problématiser ces approches pédagogiques populaires. On examine une étude de cas d'un cours pour de futurs enseignants dans lequel l'approche est basée dans le cadre théorique propos comme une exemple d'une

interrogation réflexive de nos pratiques et désirs pédagogiques.éflexive de nos pratiques et désirs pédagogiques.flexive de nos pratiques et désirs pédagogiques.

Iranian women's memoirs and fiction have become increasingly popular reading material in the West. 1 Certainly the most popular of these texts has been Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran (2003). A contemplation on Nafisi's experience living and teaching classics of Western literature in revolutionary Iran, this rich literary work topped the New York Times bestseller list for more than ninety weeks, sold more than one million copies and received enthusiastic reviews from critics across the West. 2 It has also been marketed to both book clubs and teachers with the addition of a reader's guide at the end of the book and a teacher's guide available online (Random House 2006). ?e book is appearing on course syllabi across North America in the disciplines of women's studies, international relations, English studies and anthropology, with course titles such as "Understanding Totalitarianism," "Understanding Culture and Cultural Difference" and, of course, "Women and Islam." 3 In the introduction to their anthology Going Global: ?e Transnational Reception of ?ird World Women Writers (2000), Amal Amireh and Lisa Suhair Majaj argue that practices of reading must be placed within historical and political contexts. At a time when the renewed forces of imperialism converge with an unprecedented commodification of culture, it becomes necessary, in Gayatri Spivak's words, "to render transparent the interests of the hegemonic readership" (qtd. in Kahf 2000:

167). ?is means paying particular attention to the specific geopolitical discursive

landscapes in which Reading Lolita in Tehran is being so enthusiastically taken up, situating the text within the resurgence of Orientalism which has allowed for the circulation of Islamophobic discourses. In a world in which Muslim women are increasingly the subject of neo-Orientalist pity, fear and fascination, Reading Lolita in Tehran can hardly be read as a neutral text. Indeed, in the context of the U.S.- led war on terror, the invasion and occupation of Iraq, and recurrent suggestions that the U.S. government is contemplating war on Iran (Hersch 2006), we need to ask exactly how this book is being read by students, teachers and feminists across North America. ?e question challenges us to problematize our reading choices, our pleasures and our chosen pedagogies. And for those teaching texts such as Reading Lolita in Tehran, it means asking probing questions about the kinds of imaginaries and desires we bring to a text, and the identifications we find there.

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?is paper had its origins in a conference panel in which six feminist scholars came together to contextualize Reading Lolita in Tehran within the traditions of feminist antiracism education, feminist philosophy and Iranian feminist cultural politics. We bring together here three of those papers, written from our disciplinary and embodied locations as white antiracism feminists. In part one, Burwell, writing within a cultural studies framework, sets the stage by mapping the current context of reception for Nafisi's memoir, examining the circulation of the "clash of civilizations" thesis and the appearance of a discourse of "global sisterhood" within the mainstream media. In part two, Davis undertakes a philosophical discussion of the ways in which Reading Lolita in Tehran is being taught, revealing the tendency towards problematic readings based on empathetic identification and reading for knowledge, and then outlines a framework for self-subversive, self-reflexive reading practices. Finally, in part three, Taylor, drawing together Burwell's call for geopolitically situated readings and Davis's reading strategies framework, reflects on her own pedagogical experiences teaching Nafisi's memoir to a group of preservice teachers in a small Canadian university. Each section is presented here in the writer's own voice, as she contemplates the possibilities of ethical reading practices in an age of war. Together, the three pieces present a multidisciplinary argument for the ongoing explication of reading practices and pedagogies that challenge complacent reading and problematize "a too-quick enthusiasm for the other in the aftermath of colonialism" (Spivak 1996: 248).

Mapping the Current Context of Reception:

The Clash of Civilizations and Global Sisterhood

One way to begin to think about reading practices in an age of war is to locate them within prevailing structures of power, for, as Henry Giroux has reminded us, meaning lies not simply within cultural artifacts themselves, but also in the ways such artifacts are "aligned and shaped by larger institutional and cultural discourses" (2004: 10). Such discourses not only play a role in selecting what will be read, but also help to form the "horizon of expectations" (Jauss 1982) which readers bring to a text - their prior knowledge about its content and conventions, their unconscious assumptions, their desired ends. ?us, in a sense, such discourses teach us how to approach a text. Of course, no discourse is total, and the multiple discourses present in a single location may clash, overlap and even crack, providing spaces for subversion and resistance. Nonetheless, it is possible, I believe, to consider Canada and the United States at the present moment as particular "sites of consumption" (Ghosh 2000: 39) in which responses to texts are scripted by quite specific social and material practices, political transactions and ideologies. In this opening section, I (Burwell) consider the fields of reception formed by the circulation of the "clash of civilizations" thesis and by the movement of a discourse of "global sisterhood" into the mainstream media. In both cases I suggest ways in

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which such discourses give shape to textual encounters, supplying predetermined meanings and funnelling modes of reading along accepted paths. Although it has a rather long history within both Orientalism (Said 1978) and the Eurocentric "imperial imaginary" (Shohat and Stam 1994), the clash of civilizations thesis in its current form was most recently put forward by Samuel Huntington in his 1997 book ?e Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. ?is thesis presents a Manichean view of the world, in which an essentialized Islam "constitutes the anti-West, the perennial opponent to Western values of democracy and individual liberty" (Sabra 2003: 8). ?ough presenting itself as a work of history, it is in fact largely ahistorical, erasing records of Euro- American colonialism and replacing them with a series of myths, recycled images and stereotypes dating back as far as the Crusades. While Huntington's book has been hailed, since 9/11, as "prescient," and his ideas used by the U.S. administration to justify the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, his colleague, Bernard Lewis, has pushed the influence of the clash of civilizations discourse into the public realm. In What Went Wrong? ?e Clash Between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East implies, Lewis argues that the events of 9/11 can be explained by an ideological difference between Islam and the West, between tradition and modernity. Adam Sabra suggests that What Went Wrong was enthusiastically taken up not only by media commentators but by "an ignorant public, eager for information that might help it to make sense of the events of September 11" (Sabra 2003: 2). ?e influence of such discourse has not been limited to the United States. As Sedef Arat-Koc (2005) convincingly argues, after 9/11, the political right in Canada began a campaign to rearticulate Canadian identity within a "clash of cultures" framework, in the process making claims for Canada's place within "Western civilization" and aligning Canadian interests with United States foreign policy. As Arat-Koc suggests, it is a campaign that has been largely successful. While some channels of the mainstream media worked to distance Canada from U.S. politics after the declaration of war on Iraq, the clash of civilizations thesis has gone mostly unchallenged, giving space to a notion of "Canadian identity as a Western civilizational identity" (Arat-Koc 2005: 35) that represents a reassertion of racialized myths of Canada. ?is wide circulation of the clash of civilizations thesis inevitably affects the ways in which works from or about the Middle East are approached. Not only does it predefine the discursive space in which such works are received, it also generates particular modes of reading. When heterogeneous histories are reduced to the myth of an unchanging monolith, single texts may be perceived as representing "the truth" about large and diverse populations. ?us, reading a book about a single Iranian woman may be perceived as enough to "know" not only these women, but also the history of the Middle East and its "oppression" of women. ?e clash of civilizations thesis provides further problems for reading in the way in which it

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relies on and circulates stereotypes. Amal Amireh points to "how Arab feminist work [is] consumed by a western audience in a context saturated by stereotypes of Arab culture and ... this context of reception, to a large extent, ends up rewriting both the writer and her text according to scripted first-world narratives" (2000:

215). Given the broad generalizations that collapse Arab, Muslim and Middle

Eastern cultures within the polemics of war and terror, otherwise thoughtful and varied texts may find their narratives and ideas reduced to the oversimplified staples of the clash of civilizations thesis: fundamentalism, totalitarianism, oppression and tradition. A second, related discourse which prewrites scripts for the reception of ?ird World women's narratives is that of "global sisterhood." Such a discursive regime posits a sense of solidarity between women based on assumptions about shared gender, without posing questions about race, class, imperialism and power. Related to this notion of global sisterhood is the discursive construct Chandra Mohanty has called "?ird World difference" - "that stable, ahistorical something that apparently oppresses most if not all women in these countries" - which she notes runs through much of Western feminist scholarship (1997: 257). Such scholarship, "predicated upon assumptions about Western women as secular, liberated and having control over their own lives" (ibid.), discursively produces the "?ird World woman" as a singular, monolithic subject, without agency and in need of rescue. While one might predict that these discourses of "global sisterhood" are limited to academic feminism, this is not the case. As Arat-Koc (2002) argues, variations of global sisterhood have been popularized in the Canadian and American mainstream press, where the U.S. war in Afghanistan and its invasion of Iraq are represented and justified as "humanitarian war ... about saving women" (53). Yasmin Jiwani (2005) notes the presence of such discourses within Canadian media in her study of ?e Globe and Mail reporting directly after 9/11, where she suggests that representations of Muslim women as passive and oppressed serve to provide justification for Canadian involvement - itself framed as moderate and benevolent - within the region. Notions of global sisterhood are perhaps even more obvious in images of Afghan women unveiled and supposedly liberated (Arat-Koc 2002), in local newspaper stories about women hosting parties to raise money for Afghan girls' schooling (Calgary Herald 2005), or in reports which highlight the visits of prominent white women, such as Laura Bush and Flora McDonald, to Afghanistan (Chiang 2005). Amireh and Majaj argue that this issue of the relationship between First and ?ird World women is of paramount importance to the study of reception. Indeed one can say that the history of the reception of ?ird World women's texts in the West reflects in miniature the history of the relations between First and ?ird world women. (6)

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Clearly, these kinds of repetitive, static images - what Arat-Koc calls the media's stare - as well as sentimental narratives about Canadian and American women helping Afghan women, frame the publishing, marketing and reception of even far more nuanced narratives. Amireh and Majaj note the ways in which marketing pressures emphasize "?ird World women's 'exoticism' and 'difference' in the interest not of transcultural communication, but of profit" (2000: 6). As well as exploiting difference, the book industry also plays on many North American women readers' desires for an idealized sense of connection with a text's characters. 4 Amireh (2000) notes the ways in which Nawal El Saadawi's works are not only depoliticized through translation for an American audience, but also altered for the possibilities of identification. Reading that occurs in this spirit of unproblematized global sisterhood not only "provides legitimacy and support to existing and newly redefined relations of imperialism" but also impedes thequotesdbs_dbs47.pdfusesText_47

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