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  • Homeland In/Security:A Discussion and Workshop on Teaching Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis
  • Lisa Botshon (bio) and Melinda Plastas (bio)

One of the great challenges of teaching in the post–9/11 United States is contending with persistent stereotypes and misinformation about Islam, "Arabs," "Arab Americans," and the "Middle East" within our student bodies. Since 2003 we have been employing Iranian author Marjane Satrapi's work in the classroom as a way to begin discussions about race, terrorism, and war, and particularly about how these issues are gendered. Her critically acclaimed graphic novel/memoir Persepolis, which relates how she grew up in Tehran during the fall of the U.S.-backed Mohammad Reza Pahlavi monarchy, the rise of the Islamic regime, and the advent of the Iran-Iraq war, has sold over a million copies worldwide and has been taught in hundreds of classrooms around the nation. Moreover, the animated film version of the book, which won the Jury Prize at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival and was nominated for Best Animated Film at the 2008 Academy Awards, has brought Satrapi's story to an even larger audience.1Persepolis has proven to be a useful tool to begin such explorations in courses that range from women's studies to composition to history to politics, and it has yielded significant results in terms of students' critical thinking.

Our essay shares some of our insights from teaching Persepolis in a variety of classes at the University of Maine at Augusta and at Bates College over the last few years and provides some paradigms that may help others who are considering adopting such a text. It is worth noting that there are few similarities between the student populations at Bates College and the University of Maine at Augusta. The former primarily serves what are usually known as "traditional" college students: generally white, predominantly middle-class eighteen- to twenty-one-year-olds. The latter serves "nontraditional" generally white students, which means that their ages range from about sixteen to eighty, most of whom are working at least part time, most of whom are women, and many of whom are parents. When we began comparing notes about these two groups, we were sure that these students' responses to Persepolis would vary considerably, but we have found over the last few years that they are remarkably similar.

One of the principal ideas that unites them is a marked sense of "homeland [End Page 1] insecurity."2 We teach Persepolis, then, for two primary reasons. First it provides a creative venue for classroom discussions about nation, citizenship, gender, and war. Second, it offers a transversal space in which students can question Western notions about the Middle East. By offering students a more complex and less dualistic perspective on Iranian society and women in particular, Persepolis encourages students to question the source of their (perceived) national insecurity and offers models of agency rooted in the homeland (Iran) they have been encouraged to fear.

The overall rise in literature published in the United States about Iran, much of it memoirs by Iranian-born women, has drawn popular praise, but it has also drawn concern. In her book Jasmine and Stars: Reading More than Lolita in Tehran, Fatemeh Keshavarz argues that many of these recent works produce what she calls a New Orientalist narrative (2). Focusing most of her analysis on Azar Nafisi's immensely popular Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books, Keshavarz proposes that the New Orientalist literature erases the complexity and richness of local Iranian culture and substitutes it with a picture of "evil Muslim behavior" in relief against the "unconditional goodness of things Western" (122). Dwelling on Iranian "villains," Keshavarz contends, has the effect of "enforcing the myth that all is well where we live" (142). In her New York Times review essay "Beyond the Burka," Lorraine Adams concurs with Keshavarz, noting that "the veiled, oppressed Muslim woman has become overexposed," while the rich cultural, religious, and political complexity of the Middle East remains inscrutable to Western audiences. Keshavarz points out that although Nafisi claims that Reading Lolita in Tehran is about Iranian women, Nafisi silences Iranian women's past and present contributions to...

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