<underfire> fruits of total war

Tue Nov 7 19:27:44 EST 2006

Radhika, Ananya, Susan, sdv,  all...

I wonder too about the question Radhika raises on constructing a response 
that expresses outrage. A response that does not at the same time parttake 
of zones of fear and terror, but also of zones of visual pleasure and 
fetishism I would add.  How do we in the heart of the empire construct a 
response at all?  I wonder at this as my US colleagues who work on Iranian 
Cultural and Literary Studies attempt to respond to the bravado surrounding 
Azar Nafisi's fictional memoir READING LOLITA IN TEHRAN -- a gesture that 
engrains the story of Iranian women in the call for total war.

In READING LOLITA IN TEHRAN the author of the fictional memoir, Azar 
Nafisi,  reflects on her return to Iran after years of studying abroad. Her 
story is set during the course of the revolution and the first years of the 
Islamic Republic. Here Nafisi reflects on her work as a University 
professor in English literature in Tehran and on the ways in which the 
female body plays a pivotal and assertive role in the formation of the new 
Republic.  Describing a city battered by war, she writes about the students 
who attended her classes during the 1980s and early 1990s to read "the 
great books" of the Western canon, including novels by Jane Austen, Henry 
James, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Vladimir Nabokov. Her goal of describing how 
her female students, sitting in the private study circle that she founded 
in 1995, identify their own plight with the plights of Lolita and Elizabeth 
Bennet is enough to capture one's interest. The writing, too, is gripping. 
Each of Nafisi's characters "glows on the page," one reviewer writes, 
"illuminated by Nafisi's affection." Most reviews of the book in the US 
press are comparably fervent and enthusiastic. "Reading Lolita in Tehran 
had a most unusual effect on me," writes another reviewer. "I didn't want 
to be interrupted, so I canceled a dental appointment and a business lunch 
and missed a deadline. I read and read and ignored the world. This is what 
brilliant books will do; they seize you until the story is over."

Thomas Hibbs writes of the book in the National Review: "A brilliant and 
dramatically moving exposition of the power of literature to transform 
souls and create spaces for the retention of community and identity in the 
midst of totalitarian oppression." "[T]he book also makes a persuasive case 
for the way literary masterpieces can aid the ordinary individual in 
carving out spaces marginally free from the omnipresent totalitarian regime 
and can provide the basis for alternative forms of community."

And  yet, he continues with an air of surprise  "Nafisi’s crisply written 
book has come under fire as an alleged instrument of neoconservative 
imperialism."  Hobbs refers here to Hamid Dabashi's critique of the uses of 
Nafisi's book for "cultivating US 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)."  In his article on 
READING LOLITA IN TEHRAN, Dabashi writes, "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. "

It seems undeniable that READING LOLITA IN TEHRAN and its author have been 
promoted, at least in part, to fulfill the ends of total war. Although 
human rights violations are ongoing, the urgent concern for the restoration 
of such rights is not the driving force of the total war in which Nafisi's 
book has been embedded.

Former Marine Adam Mersereau explains the concept of total war in the 
National Review. It is a war "that not only destroys the enemy's military 
forces, but also brings the enemy society to an extremely personal point of 
decision, so that they are willing to accept a reversal of the cultural 
trends that spawned the war in the first place." While a total war strategy 
does not have to "include the intentional targeting of civilians," sparing 
them "cannot be its first priority. The purpose of total war is to 
permanently force your will onto another people." The purpose of the total 
war that is the US-led "war on terror" is to force American values onto a 
culture that is, at its best and at its worst, ambivalent to it.

For some time before and after the publication of her runaway bestseller, 
Nafisi was being promoted alongside proponents of total war by Benador 
Associates, which arranges their TV appearances and speaking engagements 
and helps to place their articles in the top newspapers. Such 
neo-conservative luminaries as Richard Perle and James Woolsey, who 
notoriously referred to the war on terror as "World War IV," are still 
clients of the agency. In September 2004 when READING LOLITA was topping 
the bestseller list, Benador Associates agent Eleana Benador traced the 
cognitive links the neo-conservatives draw between the war and Middle 
Eastern women in a posting "From Eleana's Desk" on the agency's website: 
"One of the most memorable experiences [of the 2004 Athens Olympics] was to 
watch the Afghan woman participating in one of the races, as well as an 
Iraqi woman. They didn't go far, they were among the last ones. But, 
watching them, I couldn't avoid thinking: 'We are winning!' Yes, we are 
winning over extremism, whether religious or secular. More accurately, we 
are starting to win. The road ahead is still a long one, but the beginning 
is already giving results. We have rescued from the hands of those 
extremists these women who have regained their status as human beings, and 
who are learning now what it is to be treated with respect and dignity."

I urge you to study Hamid Dabashi's analysis of the cover image to  the 
English version of READING LOLITA which shows two teenagers with obligatory 
veils (thus presumed to be in Tehran) reading with glee (a book presumed to 
be LOLITA). The titillating connotations of the cover are enough to suggest 
the book's circulation within an Orientalist phantasmagoric economy.

But the Italian cover to the same book, entitled in Italian LEGGERE LOLITA, 
suggests more forcefully, the complicity of our own visuality in a system 
that prescribes the saving of veiled Iranian women in an act of total war. 
For aren't precisely the contrasting images of unveiled women in hair 
salons, images of unveiled women enjoying a cut or a blowout, images that 
suggest US victory to us today? Aren't these precisely the images that are 
repeatedly drawn upon to connote the fall of the Taliban and parade the 
fruits of another US-led war?

REFERENCES:

THOMAS HIBBS NATIONAL REVIEW ARTICLE "WHAT's THE MATTER WITH READING LOLITA 
IN TEHRAN"
<http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=MzllYWMzMGI1Y2FmNGY2NDdkMmQ4MzMxMGJlY
WY3Njg>

HAMID DABAHSI AL AHRAM "Native informers and the making of the American 
empire"
<http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2006/797/special.htm>
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