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  • Women Write Iran: Nostalgia and Human Rights from the Diaspora by Nima Naghibi
  • Sanaz Fotouhi (bio)
Nima Naghibi. Women Write Iran: Nostalgia and Human Rights from the Diaspora. Minnesota UP, 2016. 224 pp. ISBN 978-0816683840, $28.00.

Over the last several decades, the examination of Iranian women's writing, produced inside and outside of Iran, has been the subject of detailed and scholarly analyses in a number of books in English as well as in numerous essays.1 The diversity of global and theoretical approaches has produced varied opinions on the way these texts can be examined and read, each shedding light on a different angle of this complex body of work we call "Iranian women's writing." Among these, there have been studies on Iranian women's autobiographical narratives, a very popular genre that has peaked in the last two decades. This scholarship examines the popularity of this genre among Iranian—and other Middle Eastern women—and highlights the reasons why life writing as a form offers an accessible framework for the expression of trauma, pain, and healing for writers and a space for witnessing for readers.2

Within the scholarship about Iranian women's writing, Nima Naghibi's Women Write Iran: Nostalgia and Human Rights from the Diaspora, for the first time, brings together a book-length study of Iranian women's autobiographical narratives and issues of human rights, trauma, and memory. Women Write Iran picks up where some major studies about Iranian women's writing have left off.3 Although the study oscillates between the events of the 1979 revolution and the 2009 presidential elections as points of departure for the popularity of Iranian women's autobiographical narratives both among readers and writers, the text starts with Neda Agha Soltan's death and the social media revolution that surrounded the 2009 presidential elections in Iran. The first [End Page 377] chapter, "Claiming Neda," opens with the 2009 elections and a thorough examination of Neda's death as well as the viral spread of her video across social media platforms. Naghibi examines how brief social media posts contribute to interest in new kinds of narratives and autobiographical accounts about post-2009 life in Iran based on a sense of global empathy. She begins by highlighting how one individual's "story resonated effectively and affectively with a large number of people across the world" (17). An analysis of Neda and her story as a poster child situates one of the main arguments of the book, which is concerned with "how emotions circulate within and between texts" and "why some are more popular (or affecting) than others" (10), leading to new questions about and innovative approaches to reading these autobiographical narratives.

While studies of Iranian (and other Middle Eastern) women's autobiographical accounts have touched on the circulation of emotion and the reasons for the popularity of these narratives, they have usually done so by situating the narratives in very specific sociopolitical and historical contexts. For example, in Soft Weapons: Autobiography in Transit, Gillian Whitlock examines the sudden popularity of Middle Eastern (including Iranian) women's autobiographical narratives in relation to the events of 9/11. In my own work, I discuss the social and political waves that led to the surge in Iranian women's narratives, identifying the Iranian revolution of 1979, the events of 9/11, and the 2009 elections as watershed moments that inspired both the narrators to tell their stories and the readers to pick up these books. While in these studies there is some explanation for the emotional reasons why writers choose to engage autobiographically in particular moments in time, and why readers pick up these narratives, these approaches sometimes sum up and situate the production and popularity of Iranian women's memoirs in relation to very specific political and social moments and acts. Consequently, some of the memoirs and their writers have been accused of having political agendas. As Naghibi observes, "diasporic Iranian memoirists have thus had to contend both with a suspicion of the genre in which they write and of their political motivation" (8). There is usually an overt politicization and skepticism about this body of work in the...

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