Memoirs of diasporic Iranian-American authors are a unique and culturally powerful way in which Iran, its politics, and people are understood in the USA and the rest of the world. This book offers an analysis of the processes of production, promotion, and reception of the representations of post-revolutionary Iran.
The book provides new perspectives on some of the most famous examples of the genre such as Betty Mahmoody's Not Without My Daughter, Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books, and Fatemeh Keshavarz's Jasmine and Stars: Reading More Than Lolita in Tehran. Hossein Nazari places these texts in their social, historical, and political contexts, tracing their origins within the trope of the American captivity narrative, teasing out and critiquing neo-Orientalist tendencies within, and finally focusing on modes of discursive resistance to neo-Orientalist narratives. The book analyzes the structural means by which stereotypes about Islam and women in the Islamic Republic in these narratives are privileged by news media and the creative industries, while also charting a growing number of 'counterhegemonic' memoirs which challenge these narratives by representing more nuanced accounts of life in Iran after 1979.
Iranian-American women who write memoirs are doing much more than writing self-narratives, argues Hossein Nazari in his illuminating analyses that take up some of the most urgent questions about the fraught relations between Iran and the United States. As his astute and timely study indicates, these women are (un)wittingly engaging in political work that is co-opted for promoting Western interventionist agendas.
His exploration of three paradigmatic memoirs penned by Iranian-American women unveils their political implications and the mechanism behind keeping conscious the collective Western memory that renders Iran the greatest threat to democracy and Islam the root of all evil. Deployed in the post-9/11 milieu, neo-Orientalist discourse has perpetuated misrepresentations of this Middle-Eastern country. Nazari addresses how Not Without My Daughter and Reading Lolita in Tehran owe their popularity to their alignment with the grand narratives promoted by Western governments and expected by mass markets. Bringing a new reading to Jasmine and Stars, Nazari argues that its attention to cultural complexities offers an alternative, resistant narrative.
Nazari's work is important for not just literary studies but for all who care about the troubled history of Iran and the US. It points the way to future studies on this exigent topic.
