Reading Reading Lolita in Tehran in Idaho

I do not consider myself Western, but rather modern.

—Azar Nafisi

There is nothing political in American literature.

—Laura Bush

A neoliberal cultural front has opened quietly and effectively in conjun- tion with the Bush administration's military imperialism in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is supported by the many private think tanks, foundations, and university foreign policy centers that have since the 1970s played significant roles in the triumph of neoconservatism in the U.S. government. Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books (2003) is an excellent example of how neoliberal rhetoric is now being deployed by neoconservatives and the importance they have placed on cultural issues.¹ For the past few years and especially in the critical period following 9/11, I have argued the importance of studying the long history of U.S. imperialism in order to understand the continuity of our current imperialist ventures abroad with traditional modes of political, economic, and cultural imperialism.² I have also consistently recognized the need to theorize and interpret new methods of cultural imperialism appropriate to the postmodern economic conditions fundamental to globalizing capitalism. Within these new transnational flows of goods, information, services, research and technology, cultural products, lifestyles, and political institutions, the U.S. nation continues to play a crucial role, despite the apparent "postnational" character of these phenomena. In the aftermath of 9/11, U.S. nationalism has taken on a peculiarly isolationist aura that is at the same time compounded by a deep investment in its own international deployment. The nearly hysterical patriotism legitimating the military build-up for the second Gulf war and our continuing occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan are compounded by a rhetorical emphasis on the United States as the democratic model for the rest of the world.³ Although this emerging mythology cannot be read with complete clarity at this moment, it has certain precedents in nineteenth-century Manifest Destiny, even its late-nineteenth-century variant, "the March of the Anglo-Saxon," insofar as both depend upon a U.S. democratic utopianism built upon the heritage of Western Civilization.⁴

The defense of such Anglo-Saxonism has traditionally been conducted by white male politicians, intellectuals, and writers. Neoconservatives have varied this pattern by supporting women and ethnic minorities who share their views and thus give legitimacy to the cultural diversity of their presumed meritocracy. Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, Dartmouth graduate and American Enterprise Institute Fellow Dinesh D'Souza, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, and Judge Janice Rogers Brown, Bush appointment to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, are familiar examples of women and ethnic minorities celebrated for their endorsement of this neoconservative agenda. Azar Nafisi represents an important variation of these models, insofar as her defense of literary culture, especially in the Euroamerican examples she uses to organize her book, appeals powerfully to liberal cultural values in ways specifically geared to attract intellectuals disaffected by the so-called culture wars of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Liberal and leftist intellectuals have readily dismissed Rice, D'Souza, Thomas, and Brown as puppets of the neoconservative agenda, but Nafisi represents a more complex figure whose defense of the aesthetic critique of social tyranny carefully imitates the rhetoric of classical liberalism.

In a recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Richard Byrne describes the controversy surrounding Hamid Dabashi's article criticizing Nafisi as a forerunner of U.S. plans to invade Iran.⁵ Byrne cites several scholars, who, like Karimi-Hakkak of Maryland's Center for Persian Studies, insist that Dabashi's criticism of Nafisi is too "shrill," especially in the claim that Nafisi's literary criticism somehow prophesies "war" (Byrne, A16). My own approach was developed well before the controversy surrounding Dabashi's article in "the Egyptian-language newspaper Al-Ahram" appeared (Byrne, A12), and I will try to work out the scholarly and historical terms that are often lacking in Dabashi's more strictly political analysis. Nevertheless, even as I wish to distinguish my approach from Dabashi's, I want to agree at the outset with his conclusions...