Defending the "Republic of the Imagination": Imagining Diasporic Iranian American Identities beyond the Jurisdiction of the Nation-State

To mistake sound bites for deep thought, politics for action, reality shows for creative entertainment; to forget the value of dreams; to lose the ability to imagine a violent death in Darfur, in Afghanistan, in Iraq; to look at this as passing news: Are these not indications that now--more than ever we need the courage and integrity, the faith, vision and dreams that these books instilled in us? Is this not a good time to worry with Bellow's hero in The Dean's December about what will happen if a country loses its poetry and soul?... In this day and age when politics are paramount, belligerence the order of the day, and questions of culture take second seat to power, I'd like to propose that there is such a thing as the Republic of the Imagination. It is a country worth building, a state with a future, a place where we can truly know freedom. --Azar Nafisi, "The Republic of the Imagination" (BW 10) With all due respect to President Bush, the people of the world do not have to choose between the Taliban and the US government. All the beauty of human civilization--our art, our music, our literature lies beyond these two fundamentalist, ideological poles. --Arundhati Roy, Power Politics (130) Traditionally, the concept of the nation has played a central role in regulating the academic study of literature: most institutions organize literary study in terms of national languages and cultural traditions; literary texts are frequently interpreted as expressions of national identity; and critics routinely invoke some concept of the nation to explicate, categorize, and evaluate literary texts. For example, Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities advocates a particularly strong connection between literature and nationalism, going so tar as to reconceptualize the nation itself as an "imagined political community" forged less in some shared history of blood and soil than in the cultural crucible of national languages and literatures, which make it "possible for rapidly growing numbers of people to think about themselves, and to relate to themselves and others, in profoundly foundly new ways" (6, 36). Focusing specifically on Third World contexts, Fredric Jameson's "Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism" argues even more emphatically that "[a]ll third-world texts are necessarily ... allegorical, and in a very specific way: they are to be read as what I will call national allegories" because "the story of the private individual destiny is always an allegory 'of the embattled situation of the public third-world culture and society" (69). In short, critics regularly identify a strong interrelationship between nations and cultural narratives: not only does the concept of the nation influence how we interpret and teach cultural texts, but cultural texts also play a significant role in articulating, expressing, and even producing the "imagined political community" of the nation itself As Kwame Anthony Appiah explains, "intellectuals everywhere are now caught up ... in a struggle for the articulation of their respective nations, and everywhere, it seems, language and literature are central to that articulation" (53). While I appreciate these critics' diverse attempts to explain the material, political significance of literary texts as cultural forces that shape the development of nationalist ideologies, I question the usefulness of relying so exclusively--and, in Jameson's case, so absolutely--on nationalism as a privileged conceptual framework for interpreting cultural narratives. In our rapidly globalizing world, contemporary cultural critics now largely reject the nation as a privileged locus for understanding and interpreting culture, and they have begun advocating instead a wide range of new transnational cultural models, ranging from Homi Bhabha's notion of "cultural hybridity" (The Location of Culture 4) to concepts such as "traveling cultures" (Clifford 17), "diasporic public spheres" (Appadurai, Modernity at Large 4), "postnational narratives" (Pease 2), "discrepant cosmopolitanisms" (Robbins 181), and "Global Souls" or "offshore beings" (Iyer 21, 22). …