Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: Non leggiamo Lolita a Teheran!

From Edward Said to Amy Kaplan and Gauri Viswanathan, we now have a
sustained body of scholarship, extended from the US, through Europe, to
India and by theoretical implication all around the colonised world, a
persuasive argument as to how the teaching of English literature has
historically been definitive to the British, and now by extension
American, imperial proclivities. Again, none of these scholars and
theorists has reduced the literary to the political, but simply posited
a political interlocutor next to the work of literature by way of a
hermeneutic provocation of meaning and significance--with almost the
same token that one can place a feminist or an anti-racist critique of
the selfsame texts without negating or compromising their literary
significance.
The publication of Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran is the most
cogent contemporary case of yet another attempt at positing English
literature yet again as a modus operandi of manufacturing
trans-regional cultural consent to Euro- American global domination.
The factual evidence of the connection of Azar Nafisi to the US leaders
of the neoconservative movement and her systematic deprecation of
Iranian culture, and by extension local and regional cultures of actual
or potential resistance to the US empire, glorifying instead a
canonised inner sanctum for an iconic celebration of "Western
literature," are additional factors in placing her squarely at the
service of the predatory US empire--the service delivered via the most
cliché-ridden invocation of the most retrograde Oriental fantasies of
her readers in the United States and Europe.
GIVEN THE TRANSNATIONAL disposition of the globalised empire, a crucial
function of its ideological foregrounding is predicated on the role
that expatriate intellectuals can play. The transmutation of Azar
Nafisi from a legitimate critic of the atrocities of the Islamic
Republic of Iran (against women in particular) into a necessary
ideologue in George W Bush's empire-building project is a crucial
lesson in how the new breed of comprador intellectuals is being
recruited and put to immediate use for the ideological build-up (and
the cultural foregrounding) of an otherwise precarious claim to an
imperial hegemony.
In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, comprador native intellectuals were
actively recruited to perform a critical function for the militant
ideologues of the US Empire. Their task is to feign authority,
authenticity, and native knowledge and thus to inform the US public of
the atrocities that are taking place throughout the world, in the
region of their native birth in particular, by way of justifying the
imperial designs of the US as liberating these nations from the evil of
their own designs.
As all other acts of propaganda and disinformation, Reading Lolita in
Tehran is predicated on an element of truth. The Islamic Republic of
Iran has an atrocious record of stifling, silencing, and outright
murdering secular intellectuals, while systematically and legally
creating a state of gender apartheid. But the function of the comprador
intellectual is not to expose and confront such atrocities; instead, it
is to take that element of truth and package it in a manner that serves
the belligerent empire best: in the disguise of a legitimate critic of
localised tyranny facilitating the operation of a far more insidious
global domination--effectively perpetuating (indeed aggravating) the
domestic terror they purport to expose.
BECAUSE THE NATURAL domain for the operation of comprador
intellectuals, true to the origin of the term in facilitating
commercial transactions, is the middle class morality of their host
country (now mutated into an empire), innuendo and insinuation are
among the principal tropes of their operations. By far the most
immediate and intriguing aspect of Reading Lolita in Tehran is its
cover, which shows two female teenagers bending their heads forward in
an obvious gesture of reading something. What exactly is it they are
reading, we do not see or know. Over their heads we read "Reading
Lolita in Tehran." The immediate suggestion is very simple. The subject
of the book purports to be reading Vladimir Nabokov's "Lolita" in
Tehran, and here are two Iranian-looking teenagers in their headscarves
reading (one thing or another). The two young women appear happily
engaged with what they are reading, and they do so in such an endearing
way that solicits sympathy, and even evokes complicity. What better
picture to represent the idea--leaving it to the imagination of the
observer that they are indeed reading Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita ?
Right? Wrong.
A moment of pause on this cover begins to reveal something entirely
different. Under the banner of Reading Lolita in Tehran, the image and
the caption put together--in a classical case best read and analysed by
Roland Barthes in his magnificent essay on "The Photographic
Message"--suggest the tantalising addition of an Oriental twist to the
most notorious case of pedophilia in modern literary imagination. Both
as social sign and as literary signifier, the term "Lolita" invokes
illicit sex with teenagers. The covered heads of these two Iranian
teenagers thus suggestively borrows and insidiously unleashes a
phantasmagoric Oriental fantasy and lends it to the most lurid case of
pedophilia in modern literary imagination. Under the rubric that he
called a photographic paradox, Barthes gave a brilliant diagnosis of
how such imitative arts as photography "comprises two messages: a
denoted message, which is the analogon itself, and a connoted message,
which is the matter in which the society to a certain extent
communicates what it thinks of it." (Roland Barthes, "The Photographic
Message," in A Barthes Reader. Hills and Wang, 1982: 195-198).
The denoted message here seems quite obvious: these two young women are
reading "Lolita" in Tehran--they are reading ("Lolita"), and they are
in Tehran (they look Iranian and they have scarves on their head). The
connoted message is equally self-evident: Imagine that--illicit sex
with teenagers in an Islamic Republic! How about that, the cover
suggestively proposes and asks, can you imagine reading Lolita in
Tehran ? Look at these two Oriental Lolitas! The racist implication of
the suggestion--as with astonishment asking, "can you even imagine
reading that novel in that country?"--competes with its overtly
Orientalised pedophilia and confounds the transparency of a marketing
strategy that appeals to the most deranged Oriental fantasies of a
nation already petrified out of its wits by a ferocious war waged
against a phantasmagoric Arab/Muslim male potency that has just
castrated the two totem poles of the US empire in New York.
One of the most common clichés of the desirable Orient is the
under-aged men and women, staged in numerous Orientalist paintings .
Sir Frank Dicksee's "Leila" (1892) and William Clarke Wontner, "Safie,
One of the Three Ladies of Baghdad" (undated) are among the most
immediate archeological traces of the cover of Reading Lolita in
Tehran, itself a photographic updating of a long tradition in
Orientalist painting.
Equally evident in this cover is the whole genre of colonial picture
postcards of young Algerian women--staged, produced and bought by the
French colonial officers. Malek Alloula has studied these pictures in
The Colonial Harem (1995). In his study of these colonially
manufactured photographs, Malek Alloula has demonstrated how the
pathological colonial phantasm generated and sustained what Barthes has
called "the degree zero" of photographic evidence to represent and own
the colonised body. I find it prophetic, were it not so obscene, that
in the space of the front and back covers of Reading Lolita in Tehran
we have an updated pedophiliac Orientalism documented so succinctly: on
the front cover the picture of two veiled Iranian teenage "girls" and
on the back the endorsement of Professor Humbert Lewis of Orientalism
himself.
The evident act of provoking this colonial trait on the cover of Azar
Nafisi's book is not the end of what this cover does. There is more,
much more, to it. In fact the case of this cover provides an intriguing
twist on Roland Barthes' binary opposition between the denoted and
connoted messages of a photograph and its caption. The twist rests on
the fact that the picture of these two teenagers on the cover of
Reading Lolita in Tehran is in fact lifted from an entirely different
context. The original picture from which this cover is excised is
lifted off a news report during the parliamentary election of February
2000 in Iran. In the original picture, the two young women are in fact
reading the leading reformist newspaper Mosharekat. Azar Nafisi and her
publisher may have thought that the world is not looking, and that they
can distort the history of a people any way they wish. But the original
picture from which this cover steals its idea speaks to the fact of
this falsehood.
The cover of Reading Lolita in Tehran is an iconic burglary from the
press, distorted and staged in a frame for an entirely different
purpose than when it was taken. In its distorted form and framing, the
picture is cropped so we no longer see the newspaper that the two young
female students are holding in their hands, thus creating the illusion
that they are "Reading Lolita"--with the scarves of the two teenagers
doing the task of "in Tehran." In the original picture the two young
students are obviously on a college campus, reading a newspaper that is
reporting the latest results of a major parliamentary election in their
country. Cropping the newspaper, their classmates behind them, and a
perfectly visible photograph of President Khatami--the iconic
representation of the reformist movement--out of the picture and
suggesting that the two young women are reading "Lolita" strips them of
their moral intelligence and their participation in the democratic
aspirations of their homeland, ushering them into a colonial harem.
IN THE AGE OF "the end of history," as Azar Nafisi's fellow neocon
Francis Fukuyama has theorised it, the function of the comprador
intellectual is to oblige accordingly, helping to wipe out all national
histories, and providing an entertaining story to fill the vacuum. The
entertainment, however, must have a mass appeal. The content of Reading
Lolita in Tehran thus matches its cover--both serving its immediately
imperial context properly. History suspended, one reads this book in
vain in search of even a single conversation with any relevant literary
theory amassed for generations about and around the works of the
authors that hold the four chapters of the book narratively
together--Nabokov, Scott Fitzgerald, Henry James, and Jane Austen.
Reading Lolita in Tehran is a curiously insular text, not only
oblivious to Iranian history, society, and culture, but equally aloof
from libraries of commentaries and analysis accumulated for generations
around and about the authors and books that she discusses. But this
omission tallies well with what the text is commissioned to do--namely
to provide a wide range of readership with the functional equivalent of
a story that stands for history, reads like fiction, and distorts
reality as it pretends to tell it.
Back in the real world, however, there is of course nothing new or
extraordinary about Iranians reading works of fiction of any sort from
around the world as an act of political defiance. Here again, Azar
Nafisi proceeds to crop the picture she portrays inside her book in a
fashion similar to the visual burglary she and her publisher commit on
its cover--stealing a part of truth to tell a bigger lie. It is not
only "the Western classics," as this book suggests, that Iranians have
read in political defiance of ruling militant tyrannies--whether the
Pahlavis (about whose criminal atrocities Nafisi remains entirely
silent) or the current clerics. Throughout the nineteenth and the
twentieth century, great works of literature from around the world have
graced and enriched Iranian literary and political culture. In their
most recent history and in the course of colonial modernity and
beginning with the French Revolution, Iranians have systematically and
periodically been exposed to world literature, each time in fact
occasioned by a major revolutionary or traumatic event. The French
Revolution of 1789 occasioned the exposure of Iranians to French and
English literature. The European revolutions of 1848 deeply appealed to
expatriate Iranian intellectuals in Istanbul, which in turn resulted in
more translation of French and English sources. The Russian Revolution
of 1917 did the same with regards to Russian literature; as did the US
occupation of Iran during World War II, and later the Vietnam War and
the Civil Rights movement with regards to American literature. The
Latin American revolutions, the African anti-colonial movements, the
Indian anti-colonial nationalism, the Chinese Revolution, the Cuban
Revolution, the student uprising in France, etc--these are the
additional landmarks of Iranian exposure to world literature, as it is
equally evident in our exposure to modern Arabic literature in the
immediate aftermath of the colonial occupation of Palestine and the
Nasserite nationalism. Azar Nafisi is either ignorant of these
historical facts or else she is hiding it--in either case she is
cropping the actual form and framing of this complete picture,
shrinking it to a size that is useful for an active recycling of a very
selective reading of English literature.
AS AMY KAPLAN has demonstrated in her Anarchy of Empire in the Making
of US Culture, "the conceptual borders between domestic and foreign"
are the principal artifacts that empires both erect and destabilise.
The paradox that Amy Kaplan articulates is resolved in the dual task
that comprador intellectuals perform in both discrediting their own
native culture of resistance and, ipso facto, neutralising equally
potent cultures of resistance among immigrant communities and
racialised minorities at the metropolitan centres of the empire. There
is thus another--not so hidden--agenda or consequence evident in
Reading Lolita in Tehran. Decades into a sustained struggle against the
domination of Eurocentric curriculum in the US academy, fighting to
restore democratic dignity to the world literary scene, Nafisi once
again pushes the clock back for about half a century by a singular and
exclusive praise for the Eurocentricity of the literary imagination.
Promoting the racist cause of a singular literary canon in the United
States and Europe goes hand in hand with denigrating, dismissing, or
ignoring the existence of non-Euro-American literary and cultural
traditions. No one will ever know, reading Reading Lolita in Tehran,
that Iranians, like all other nations, have a literature of their own,
a constellation of women writers, poets, artists, activist, and
scholars second to none, that they are survivors and dreamers in terms
not just global to their geopolitics but also domestic to their own
perils and promises, and that in the span of the same period of time
(the 1990's) that Azar Nafisi deigned to live in Iran and sought to
save the soul of a nation by teaching a privileged few among them
"Western Classics," Iranians had produced a glorious cinema that has
captivated the globe in awe and admiration, produced a feminist press
and literature rarely matched in any other country, and elected more
women to their parliament than those in the United States. The
narrative eradication of Persian literature and Iranian culture while
writing in an entirely Iranian context mutates into a more global
dismissal of world literatures at large, any literature or culture that
might pause and pose an element of resistance to imperial designs and
their ideological foregrounding.
Criticising the calamity of the Islamic Republic--and recognising the
sustained heroism of a nation first investing its hope in it and now
fighting it to bitter end--is a perfectly legitimate and entirely
urgent project. But joining the neocon takeover of the democratic
institutions of the US by a band of militant renegades, and thus
helping build a literary canon for a predatory empire, is an entirely
different matter. In the former project you restore dignity and hope to
a nation and its cultural resistance to imperial domination; in the
latter you seek to steal such dignity and hope from them.
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.

 homeless minds and guns for hire
Ci fai un riassuntino con le tue parole? Grazie, aspettiamo fiduciosi. 
Sono le 22.56 ora locale di Roma.
Am.

"amalric" <ama...@TOGLIMIalice.it> wrote in message
news:amalric-B2E159...@reader3.news.tin.it...

#_Leggi ...sfaticato! :)
Giano

 wrote:

J'ai lu tous les livres, che l'estensore competa per la mia attenzione.
Pomero e Sergei hanno gia' divorato tutto, bombardando la nostra mente 
per saturazione con le loro caxxate.
Siamo orbi del *CINGHIALAZZO MONONEURONE MONOCOGLIONE DEL BOTSWANA* che 
fa da Guardiano della Porta.
E' un momento molto delicato in cui le difese della Federazione 
rischiano di essere sfondate...
Un riassuntino e' l'unica cosa che ci protegge dall'essere travolti. 
Crollata la Galassia Centrale, sara' il turno degli atolli...
Am.

"amalric" <ama...@TOGLIMIalice.it> wrote in message
news:amalric-6C7FB3...@reader3.news.tin.it...

#_Io, da ora in poi, lascio a Giannozzo il compito di postare quello che a
lui piace; con lui i riassunti sono superflui...
Quando sara` caduta la Galaxy, lo potrete trovare in cima all'ultima palma
emergente, con due noci di cocco in mano...
Io saro`gia`in viaggio tra le correnti, dentro la mia Giara o dentro il
ventre di una balena; da Giano a Giona poco ci passa!
G.

Giano ha scritto:

il porgiculo dei nazisti baltici si è formato sui bignami. E anche con
questi libricini veniva regolarmente bocciato <g>