native (mis)informants
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From: sepideh koosha sepidehkpfalsb@yahoo.com Date: August 11, 2006 3:23:52 PM EDT To: lbo-talk@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.
[…]
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.
[…]
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.