The Cultural Politics of the New American Studies

6. Reading Reading Lolita in Tehran in Idaho

A neo-liberal cultural front opened quietly and effectively in conjunction with the George W. Bush Administration’s military imperialism in Iraq and Afghanistan. It was supported by the many private think-tanks, foundations, and university foreign policy centers that have since the 1970s played significant roles in the success of political neo-conservatism. Although the election of President Barack Obama and the near collapse of late capitalism in 2008 seemed to indicate a change in political and economic directions, the popularity of Sarah Palin and the rise of the Tea Party and Tea Party Express in 2009–2010 indicate the strength of conservatism even in the face of such political and economic reversals. The strategic use of women in the new conservative movements deserves special attention, because of what it tells us about both neo-liberalism as a tool of neo-conservatives and about the changing social and political issues facing contemporary feminists. A good deal of attention has been paid since 9/11 to the ways the U.S. has used the issue of the international rights of women to bolster diplomatic and military interventions in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Morocco, Iran, and Turkey. Barack Obama’s appointment of Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State seems to have extended the entanglement of U.S. neo-imperialism with international women’s rights, although my focus in what follows is primarily on conservative uses of international women’s rights, women émigré intellectuals, and EuroAmerican high culture during President George W. Bush’s administration.

Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books (2003) is an excellent example of how neo-liberal rhetoric is now being deployed by neo-conservatives and the importance they have placed on cultural issues. [123] For the past decade 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. [124] 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 “post-national” 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. [125] 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. [126]

The defense of such Anglo-Saxonism has traditionally been conducted by white male politicians, intellectuals, and writers. Neo-conservatives have varied this pattern by supporting ethnic minorities who share their views and thus give legitimacy to the cultural diversity of their presumed meritocracy. George W. Bush Administration’s 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, George W. Bush appointment to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, are familiar examples of ethnic minorities celebrated for their endorsement of this neo-conservative 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 neo-conservative 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 2006 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. [127] 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. Although I do not think that there is a direct relationship between Nafisi’s work and U.S. plans for military action in Iran, I do think Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran represents the larger effort of neo-conservatives to build the cultural and political case against diplomatic negotiations with the present government of Iran. Nafisi also brings together micropolitical academic issues, such as the “new” aesthetics, and macropolitical questions, such as the role of the U.S. in contemporary world affairs.

Drawing on the enthusiasm among some intellectuals for a “revival” of the “aesthetic function”, including its left-intellectual heritage of “negative dialectic” in Adorno’s famous phrase, Nafisi appears to be following the consensus forming around Elaine Scarry’s On Beauty and Being Just (1999) and other contributions to the “new aesthetics”. [128] Scarry’s arguments in favor of the aesthetic function as deeply involved in reformist struggles for greater social justice are politically radical, however one might dispute her claims, and she has made her own politics explicit in other works, including Dreaming by the Book (1999) and Who Defended the Country? (2003). [129] Although Nafisi’s work is easy to confuse with Scarry’s or other figures among the “new aestheticists”, Nafisi’s political affiliations are indisputably neo-conservative. After leaving Iran in 1997, Nafisi found an “academic and intellectual home” at “the Paul H. Nitze School for Advanced International Studies (SAIS) at Johns Hopkins University”, where she was able to complete Reading Lolita in Tehran and “pursue my projects at SAIS” with a “generous grant from the Smith Richardson Foundation” (346–347).

The Smith Richardson Foundation is based on the Vicks Vaporub fortune of H. Smith Richardson, and uses its $ 500 million in assets to make “nearly $ 25 million in grants a year”, emphasizing work in political science, public policy, and international relations. The Foundation also “provides significant support to conservative think-tanks across the country”, especially the American Enterprise Institute. [130] The Smith Richardson Foundation website traces its support of “conservative causes” to “1973 when R. Randolph Richardson became president” and “funded early ‘supply-side’ [economics] books of Jude Wanniski and George Gilder”. [131] The Foundation’s board includes some of the most influential neo-conservatives from government, the military, and higher education, including Zbigniew Brzezinski, Christopher DeMuth, Samuel Huntington, General Edward D. Meyer, Ben Wattenberg, and E. William Stetson. [132] Of course, the mere fact the Foundation supported Nafisi’s work is by no means incontrovertible proof of her own neo-conservative politics; the Foundation’s recent grantees have included Columbia University, the City University of New York, Boston University, and Cornell University, along with such neo-conservative groups as the American Enterprise Institute, the Hoover Institution, the History of Neo-conservatism, and Brigham Young University. [133]

Further circumstantial evidence for Nafisi’s neo-conservative credentials is her association with Johns Hopkins University’s The Paul H. Nitze School for Advanced International Studies, where she is Director of the Dialogue Project, “a multi-year initiative designed to promote—in a primarily cultural context—the development of democracy and human rights in the Muslim world”. According to the Dialogue Project’s website, the research group addresses topics “that have been the main targets of Islamists and, as a result, are the most significant impediments to the creation of open and pluralistic societies in the Muslim world, including culture and the myth of Western culture [sic] imperialism, women’s issues, and human rights, among others”. [134] Located on 1740 Massachusetts Ave., N.W., in downtown Washington, D. C., 200036–1983, independent of Johns Hopkins University’s main Homewood campus in Baltimore, SAIS was founded to train members of the diplomatic corps and a variety of other government services, including positions in the intelligence communities. Former Deputy Secretary of Defense and President of the World Bank Paul Dundes Wolfowitz (b. December 22, 1943) taught at Yale University (1970–1973) and briefly at SAIS in 1980, just before heading the Policy-Planning Staff at the U.S. State Department (1981–1982) in the first term of President Reagan’s Administration. [135]

SAIS is an unusual institution for a scholar with Dr. Azar Nafisi’s credentials: a Ph.D. in English literature from the University of Oklahoma and previous positions as an Assistant Professor of English Literature at the University of Tehran (1979–1982), the Free Islamic University, seven years as an Associate Professor of English at the University of Allameh Tabatabai in Iran, and in 1994 as a Fellow at Oxford University who gave “tutorials on women and cultural change”. [136] As far as I know, there is no connection between SAIS and Johns Hopkins University’s English Department or other literature-based curricula, except for programs, such as the “3-2 year” program, which allow undergraduates at Johns Hopkins to move directly from their B.A. degrees to complete Masters’ degrees (of several varieties) offered by SAIS. On the one hand, Azar Nafisi’s professional identity as a “Professor at Johns Hopkins University” should raise no questions, except perhaps our admiration for the distinction of such a prestigious appointment. On the other hand, for a Ph.D. in English Literature to hold her appointment in SAIS, a school for the training of diplomats, certainly does pose a set of intriguing questions. In fact, Nafisi is listed by the SAIS website as “Research Associate” and her Department as “Instruction—Substantive”, and in several other places on the Johns Hopkins University website she is listed as a “Visiting Research Associate”. [137]

Of course, Reading Lolita in Tehran testifies to Nafisi’s understanding of the complex political, social, and cultural realities of modern Iran from the fall of the Shah’s regime through the Islamic Revolution and the rule of Ayatollah Khomeini to the status of that revolution under the current government of the Islamic Republic. After all, the purpose of Nafisi’s book is to expose the extensive corruption of the ideals of the original revolution and the tyranny under which many people suffer in the current Islamic Republic. Given her credentials as an informed and native witness to social and political transformations in her home country, Nafisi would be an appropriate consultant to a school of international relations, like SAIS, but hardly eligible for a professorial appointment. Her specific professorial credentials have little to do with these questions and derive exclusively from the study of Anglo-American literature, supported by her two book-length studies: Anti-Terra: A Critical Study of Vladimir Nabokov’s Novels (1994) and Reading Lolita in Tehran (2003). [138]

All of these factors are extrinsic to Nafisi’s compelling narrative in Reading Lolita in Tehran and its interesting hybrid form, suggested in its subtitle, A Memoir in Books. Widely publicized, a # 1 New York Times bestseller in the year of its release, and winner of the 2004 Book Sense Book of the Year Award, Reading Lolita in Tehran has been praised by a wide spectrum of writers, intellectuals, and cultural commentators, ranging from politically identifiable leftists, like Susan Sontag and Margaret Atwood, to respected neo-liberal writers, like Cynthia Ozick. [139] Selected by countless reading groups as a title and used as “summer reading” for first-year college students at Mount Holyoke College, Reading Lolita in Tehran has quickly become a classic work, anthologized in the second edition of the popular college textbook, The New Humanities Reader. [140] As a consequence of her book’s success, Nafisi has given numerous lectures, such as her appearance at the National Association of Independent Schools’ annual conference in Denver, where she was promoted as “an educator and liberator”. [141]

What accounts for the fascination and publicity stimulated by this book, which combines traditional literary criticism of four canonical western authors with an insider’s commentary on the political failures and repression of the Islamic Revolution and Republic? In the aftermath of 9/11, many intellectuals have discussed the notorious lack of interest by the general public in the Middle East, Muslim religion, and related issues. I need hardly remind my readers who are professional literary critics how little interest there is today among the broad U.S. reading public in the hermeneutic problems of modern Anglo-American literature. The once thriving market for belles lettres has dwindled since the early 1960s to a professional niche market barely able to survive on substantial subsidies from major universities to their financially desperate presses. Even the brief public interest in the 1980s and early 1990s in “academic memoirs” and “autobiographies” by scholars as intellectually diverse as Frank Lentricchia, Edward Said, and Marianna Torgovnick hardly compares with the wide circulation and discussion of Nafisi’s best-seller. [142]

Some scholars have suggested that the popularity of Nafisi’s book has much to do with our interests in how literary and other cultural texts depend for their meanings on where they are read. Nabokov, Fitzgerald, James, and Austen may no longer be “radical” writers in the United States, but the enthusiastic responses Nafisi claims these authors attracted among her students in Tehran signal a culturally different reception history. In his analysis of Reading Lolita in Tehran, Steven Mailloux contends that “where you are does matter in reading Western classics, indeed, in reading anything”. [143] Susan Friedman emphasizes how Nafisi’s aesthetic values do very different political work in Tehran, where the U.S. and English novels Nafisi prizes are judged decadent, than in the United States or England, where their aesthetics are judged merely to be part of the cultural past. [144] The problem with this approach to the location of reading in the specific case of Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran is that it reinforces Nafisi’s own substitution of her reading group for “Iranian women” or even Iranians opposed to the policies of the Iranian state. Yet the intense privacy of Nafisi’s reading group, according to her necessitated by state censorship, does virtually nothing to affect Iranian politics. Written by an Iranian immigrant educated and living in the United States and published only in English for Anglophone readers, Reading Lolita in Tehran relies primarily on its location within the United States. [145]

Nafisi’s cultural politics in Reading Lolita in Tehran and in all of her journalism supports the “modernization” process we often identify with one-way globalization by the first-world nations, especially the United States. In Reading Lolita in Tehran, Nafisi makes only two brief references to the Shah’s regime, leaving the reader with the overall impression that the Islamic Revolution occurred in a political vacuum and that its repressive rule was not motivated at least in part by the tyranny of the U.S.-backed Shah’s regime and the brutality of its secret police, SAVAK. [146] In her journalism, Nafisi praises more clearly the Shah’s era in terms of its advocacy of western-style modernization:

Nafisi’s phrasing “a degree of consciousness among women” is interesting, insofar as it recalls the second-wave feminist strategy of “consciousness raising” as a crucial stage in feminist activism. The “secret seminar” Nafisi organized for her students in her home in Tehran seems modeled on such “consciousness raising”, which in the late 1960s and early 1970s in the United States often occurred by means of reading groups. She tells her readers in a matter-of-fact manner that, “It is said the personal is political. That is not true, of course”, denying one of the basic tenets of second-wave feminism, but Nafisi nonetheless clearly emulates other second-wave feminist political practices in her university classes and the seminar she teaches in her Tehran home (273). This private seminar, organized after she left the University of Tehran in protest of its repressive practices, is composed exclusively of her women students. Nafisi argues that “to teach a mixed class in the privacy of my home was too risky, even if we were discussing harmless works of fiction”, but she also permits “one persistent male student, although barred from our class, […] [to] read the assigned material, and on special days […] come to my house to talk about the books we were reading” (3). [148]

The success of Reading Lolita in Tehran is undoubtedly based in part on the book’s appeal to many Western readers with feminist commitments, especially the feminist universalism that ignores the different historical and cultural situations of women around the world. Nafisi’s reading group in her Tehran home differs only superficially from those held in the United States, despite Nafisi’s bare gestures to give her class a regional flavor. Introducing her students at the beginning of the book, Nafisi portrays each woman in Islamic dress, which each student removes to reveal the Western clothes she wears in the safety and privacy of Nafisi’s home (4–6). Mitra Rastegar notes how several reviewers of the book interpret this ritual of unveiling “as a process whereby the women ‘emerge as individuals’ […], revealing ‘vivid personalities’ […] and ‘shedding their inhibitions, speaking openly’ […]”. [149] Inspired by the Anglo-American novels they study with Nafisi, her students are effectively transformed into Western subjects, who are thus capable in Nafisi’s view of recognizing and protesting the repressive policies of the Iranian government.

Many feminists around the world have criticized such feminist universalism as readily adaptable to Western cultural imperialist projects. Shortly after the United States invaded Afghanistan, Laura Bush justified our actions as opportunities to “liberate” Afghani women from the gender hierarchies of the Taliban. Lisa Yoneyama has argued that there is a long history of the U.S. government justifying its foreign policies and military actions in terms of “feminist emancipation”, as the United States did during the occupation of Japan (1945–1952). [150] In his classic study of how cultural work helped legitimate U.S. policy during the Mexican-American War (1846–1848), Robert Johannsen interprets the “visions of romance and chivalry” in which U.S. forces “saved” Mexican women from barbarous Mexican men. [151] Less obviously, the “critical universalism” advocated by Martha Nussbaum as a measure of women’s quality of life in different societies risks linking the ethics of human rights with economic developmental programs driven by first-world nations, especially the United States. [152]

In her analysis of the Anglophone reviews of Reading Lolita in Tehran, Mitra Rastegar observes that the book’s popularity in the West has much to do with readers’ desires to understand the authenticity of Iranian women: “Despite ambivalence about Nafisi’s own ‘authenticity’ as ‘representative’ Iranian woman, her representation of other women and their interests and desires is read [by reviewers] as ‘authentic,’ as is her account of the appropriate solutions”. [153] The tendency to transform personal memoirs, however idiosyncratic, into ethnographies of foreign peoples has long been recognized as integral to cultural imperialism, especially in the history of the literature of exploration and travel. As Rastegar notes, Nafisi’s autobiography is difficult to accept as “representative” of a typical Iranian woman, but by stressing the diverse personalities of the women students in her private reading group she offers the reader a deceptive synecdoche for Iranian women. Within the reading group, Nafisi’s students are quite equally committed to the aesthetic values of the Anglo-American literary texts they read together, but Rastegar notes that the “views of female students who actively supported the revolution are never described”. [154]

The popularity of Reading Lolita in Tehran among liberal feminists committed to such western universalism is noteworthy, because Nafisi’s own views on women’s rights are so inconsistent and at times contradictory. For example, she consistently criticizes second-wave feminists, like Germaine Greer, often confusing them with “postmodern feminists”, whom she usually identifies as dogmatic and inflexible: “But what postmodern feminists deny us is the right to change”. [155] Actually, postmodern feminism, sometimes equated with “third-wave feminism”, usually distinguishes itself from second-wave feminist values and strategies, especially the tendency of the latter to universalize their own privileged situations as white, middle-class, American women. [156] Nafisi not only confuses the distinction between second-wave and postmodern feminist positions, she also reverses the usual postcolonial critique of both feminisms for their privileged Western perspectives by insisting that as an Iranian émigré to the United States (her father was Mayor of Tehran during the Shah’s regime) she is hardly privileged: “Now for the past twenty years I have not been privileged at all. In Iran, my family, power, and money, if I had any, was taken away from me. The right to dress, to act the way I wanted, all of this was taken away from me”. [157] This observation, valid in its reference to Nafisi as an individual who has suffered in her diaspora from Iran the consequences of the Islamic Revolution, leads her to an odd conclusion regarding the postcolonial critique of Western civilization and values: “Because Western is equal to privileged, not class, not power, just being Western […] I think that is such an insult to those societies”. [158] Nafisi’s confusion of herself with the West is here quite significant, because it indicates how amenable she is to serving as a non-Western representative of a renewed defense of Western civilization and its liberal promise, regardless of its historical failures to realize those ends.

We are familiar from the culture wars of the late 1980s and early 1990s with the neo-conservative confusion of such discrete political and intellectual positions as neo-Marxism, feminism, postcolonial theory, deconstruction, poststructuralism, and a loosely deployed “postmodernism”. During the culture wars, many academics attempted to sort out this confusion, assuming that once neo-conservative “mistakes” were identified the terms of the cultural and political debates might be more effectively conducted. But it now appears that the confusion of different positions and their respective terms may have been a well managed rhetorical and cultural strategy from the beginning, much as other propaganda campaigns have worked to combine different groups into a single “enemy”. Something of this sort seems evident in the particular uses to which Azar Nafisi’s own political and cultural values have been put in the period of her association with SAIS.

In Power and the Idealists (2005), Paul Berman uses Nafisi’s career and book to exemplify the shift within Muslim political radicalism to “liberal antitotalitarianism”. [159] Berman focuses on Nafisi in the first half of his chapter on “The Muslim World and the American Left”, another installment in his larger argument that the “New Left” has warped into a new “liberal and anti-totalitarian thinking”, which has abandoned the “radicalism” of its past. Crucial to Berman’s argument in this book, which he considers “a freestanding sequel” to his 1996 A Tale of Two Utopias: The Political Journey of the Generation of 1968, is his contention that the “idealism” of the New Left survives in “liberal antitotalitarianism”, whereas the American Left’s failed bid for power lingers only in the political correctness of tenured radicals. [160] Berman considers Reading Lolita in Tehran a “classic in this particular genre” of books that recount the “evolution” “from the revolutionary leftism of the student movement […] to a moral or philosophical crisis, to a new stage of antitotalitarian liberalism in adult life” (152). He also judges the book “doubly dramatic, not just because of the revolutionary past that it recounts, but because of its date of publication, which was March 2003: the very moment when the invasion of Iraq was getting underway” (152).

Berman has very little to say about Nafisi’s literary analyses or aesthetics, except to endorse the general liberal values represented by the Anglo-American authors she discusses. Berman is far more interested in Nafisi’s conversion from “radical” leftist at the University of Oklahoma, where she wrote her doctoral dissertation on Mike Gold, to the neo-liberalism Berman advocates: “Here, then, in Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran, is the story of someone who enlisted in the leftism of circa ‘68, and went on to discover moral and political failures in the left-wing movement, and came to adopt a different attitude altogether—an attitude of respect for the individual imagination. A liberal attitude” (165–166). [161]

Just why Berman considers it important for Nafisi’s book to have appeared at the same time as the U.S. invasion of Iraq is clear enough: “antitotalitarian liberalism”, Berman’s neo-liberalism, finds the same totalitarianism represented by Saddam Hussein as it does by the Ayatollah Khomeini and his heirs to the Islamic Republic of Iran. Like George Bush’s infamous reduction of Iraq, Iran, the PLO, and North Korea into related parts of an “Axis of Evil”, Berman’s liberalism creates a simple binary between liberal democracy, represented best by the United States, and totalitarian regimes around the world. Dismissing arguments that Islamic fundamentalism is very different from the modern fascist states ruled by Mussolini, Hitler, and Franco, Berman equates Iraq, Iran, Franco’s Spain, Hitler’s Germany, Mussolini’s Italy, Soviet Communism, and Maoist China: “The political scientists, some of them, may go on waving their European check-lists and objecting that Khomeini’s Islamism cannot possibly be a modern totalitarianism. But I think that readers of literature, who judge by smell and feel, will sense at once that Nafisi is speaking of familiar experiences” (170).

Yet what does this curious adaptation of neo-liberal discourse by neo-conservative political interests have to do with the cultural values Nafisi defends with such passion in Reading Lolita in Tehran, especially when we consider how her enthusiasm for aesthetic “radicalism” accounts in part for the success of this book in the United States? Nafisi’s literary examples constitute a short history of Anglo-American literary modernism and thus constitute a spirited defense of its internal critique of modernization we have often identified with positions as various as classical liberalism and the Frankfurt School’s cautious defense of an “aesthetic function”, either in Adorno’s “negative dialectic” or Brecht’s “Verfremdungseffekt”. [162] Nafisi’s cultural history is arranged in her narrative in a chronologically reversed order, beginning with Nabokov’s Lolita (1955 in Paris; 1958 in US) and followed by F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925), Henry James’s Daisy Miller (1878) and Washington Square (1881), and Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813) and Mansfield Park (1814). Nafisi’s regressive literary history interestingly culminates with a sort of intertextual reading of Austen and Saul Bellow (1915–2005), the contemporary U.S. novelist and neo-conservative intellectual who figures prominently in “Part IV: Austen”. [163]

One of the powerful appeals of Nafisi’s uses of these canonical Western authors must be the possibility that they do new political work in the radically different cultural context of the repressive regime of the Islamic Republic. Such aesthetic and political re-functioning has often been praised by liberal and left intellectuals as one means of challenging the hegemony of Western Civilization and its cultural colonialism. There are, of course, many circumstances in which we can interpret just this sort of effective ideological critique in even the most traditional literary and aesthetic works. Indeed, I will try to suggest some of the ways in which alternative interpretations might bring forth this potential in the Western literary examples Nafisi offers us, even as I argue that Nafisi’s own literary interpretations work to re-legitimate the broadly defined Anglo-American modernization process. In developing this dialectical argument, I do not presume to know the appropriate terms for an effective criticism of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Indeed, I confess my ignorance of the internal workings of that state’s political institutions and its social habitus, simply as a statement of fact that I am incapable of challenging Nafisi’s account of the repressive conditions under which she and many others lived (and many died) from her return to Tehran in 1980 (at the age of 30) to her departure in 1996. In my confession of ignorance, I also do not mean to turn a blind eye upon the conditions Nafisi describes in Iran. Those conditions may well be as terrifying and terroristic, especially toward women, minorities, and political opponents of the state as Nafisi claims. My concern is with her proposed alternative: the cultural, economic, and political “modernization” offered by liberal western democracies, especially as they are exemplified in the liberal idealism of what she judges our “best” literature.

A full study of how scholarly studies of Nabokov, Fitzgerald, James, and Austen have changed under the influences of deconstruction, feminism, New Historicism, postcolonial studies, and cultural studies of the past twenty years would be very long and complicated. There is very little mention of these professional studies in Nafisi’s book. In the few places she comments on the general status of “critical theory” in literary study, she follows the neo-conservative tendency to dismiss many different competing approaches as “postmodern” or “relativist”. Nafisi’s colleague Mina, a specialist in Henry James, who loses her university position, complains that critical studies like Leon Edel’s The Modern Psychological Novel and Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel “aren’t so fashionable these days”, because “everyone has gone postmodern. They can’t even read the text in the original—they’re so dependent on some pseudo-philosopher to tell them what it says” (236). One of Nafisi’s students, Nassrin, who has fallen in love, complains that “girls like me, […] who talk about Derrida and Barthes and the world situation […] know nothing, nothing about the relation between a man and a woman, about what it means to go out with a man” (297). Of course, Nafisi’s book is aimed at a non-professional audience, but her literary interpretations come from a much older generation of professional criticism. For Nafisi, “a novel is not an allegory” and the best novels, like The Great Gatsby, are “non-political” (111, 129). Novels offer us “the sensual experience of another world”, which requires us to suspend our disbelief and enter them with the “empathy [that] is at the heart of the novel” (111). Several different formalist approaches to literature from the late 1930s to the early 1960s advocated similar values, including Anglo-American New Criticism (Murray Krieger), the “literary phenomenology” of the Geneva School (Georges Poulet and J. Hillis Miller), and the “reader-response” theories of Wolfgang Iser, David Bleich, Jane Tompkins, and Steven Mailloux in the1970s and 1980s. [164]

Such critical approaches rejected overt political intentions in literature and made sharp distinctions among propaganda, mass culture, popular culture, and literature—the last term reserved for a special discourse that transcended its historical circumstances and appealed to audiences beyond the time and place of the literary work’s production. Much scholarly work has been devoted to the ways American New Criticism in particular reacted to the presumably “failed” project of the 1930s Left and the unsuccessful “cultural fronts” announced at various times by the CPUSA. [165] In “Part II: Gatsby”, Nafisi contrasts Fitzgerald’s novel with Mike Gold’s orthodox Marxism. Both authors “had written about the same subject: dreams or, more specifically, the American dream”, but “what Gold had only dreamed of had been realized in this faraway country, now with an alien name, the Islamic Republic of Iran. ‘The old ideals must die[…]’ he wrote. ‘Let us fling all we are into the cauldron of the Revolution. For out of our death shall arise glories.’ Such sentences could have come out of any newspaper in Iran. The revolution Gold had desired was a Marxist one and ours was Islamic, but they had a great deal in common, in that they were both ideological and totalitarian” (109).

Fitzgerald imagines instead “the American Dream”, which is what makes The Great Gatsby “an American classic, in many ways the quintessential American novel”, alongside of which Nafisi considers some of the “other contenders: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Moby-Dick, The Scarlet Letter” (109). Her desire to identify the “Great American Novel” recalls a nearly forgotten era in American literary criticism, satirized effectively by Philip Roth’s The Great American Novel (1973), when critics struggled to identify the novel most representative of the “American Experience”. [166] A significant number of scholarly studies between roughly 1950 and 1970 focused on the elusive “American Dream”, with its promise of an ideal democracy characterized by the individual’s capacity to realize his promise and as a consequence the civic virtue of the self-reliant, self-conscious citizen. Myth critics in this same period often keyed their own specific studies of Manifest Destiny, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Mississippi River, and Pastoralism to an Ur-myth, such as R. W. B. Lewis’s American Adam. [167] Circulating through both of the main American literary critical discourses of the post-World War II era, the New Criticism and the Myth-and-Symbol School, the “American Dream” was firmly grounded in the liberal tradition, especially identifiable with Emersonian self-reliance and Walt Whitman’s expansive “democratic vistas”. What I have criticized elsewhere as the “Emersonianism” that urges “aesthetic dissent” in the place of political activism and genuine social reform is yet another way to describe the liberal tradition informing the myth of the American Dream. [168]

In her classroom at the University of Tehran, Nafisi finds that Fitzgerald’s novel provokes such widely divergent responses from her students that she proposes the students stage a mock-trial of the novel. Condemned by Islamic fundamentalists as an “immoral” novel for romanticizing the adulterous relationship between Gatsby and Daisy Buchanan and as “decadent” by the Communist students for its idealized portrayal of Gatsby’s aristocratic pretensions and corrupt accumulation of wealth, the novel is vigorously defended by a handful of Nafisi’s women students and Nafisi herself, who has the last word in this trial: “‘You don’t read Gatsby”, I said, “to learn whether adultery is good or bad but to learn about how complicated issues such as adultery and fidelity and marriage are. A great novel heightens your senses and sensitivity to the complexities of life and of individuals, and prevents you from the self-righteousness that sees morality in fixed formulas about good and evil. . .’” (133). Of course, Gatsby’s deep conflict between crass materialism and lofty idealism has long distinguished Fitzgerald’s novel as an eloquent defense of liberal individualism. Zarrin, a woman student who defends the novel, points out that Nick Carraway’s strict insistence on “honesty” as the moral standard against we should judge all of the characters, including Gatsby, reinforces this myth of American individualism, distinguishing its ideal form from mere selfishness.

Professional readers of The Great Gatsby know there are profound ironies in both Gatsby’s idealism and Nick’s standard of “honesty”. Claiming descent from “the Dukes of Buccleuch”, an English aristocratic line “invented” by King James II to secure his power after the Restoration, noting that other family members had sent paid “replacements” to the Civil War, Nick hardly comes from an “honest” family. [169] Indignant that Jordan Baker cheats at golf and is a reckless driver, Nick is himself a bond broker in the highly speculative economy of the roaring 1920s and obviously enjoys rubbing shoulders with the rich and famous at Gatsby’s elaborate parties. Long after Gatsby’s funeral, when Nick leaves Long Island and the “big shore places”, closed for the season, he makes a final visit to Gatsby’s shuttered mansion. He finds “some boy with a piece of brick” has scrawled “an obscene word” on the steps, which he erases with his shoe to preserve Gatsby’s “Platonic conception of himself”, rather than tell Fitzgerald’s story of Gatsby’s personal and public corruptions. [170] Interestingly, both the Islamic fundamentalist and Leftist condemnations of Gatsby’s immorality are easily readable in Fitzgerald’s novel, but Nafisi allows both groups only the most dogmatic rants in her classroom trial, noting explicitly how little they cared to read the novel, enjoying instead their own tendentious speeches about religious or political proprieties.

Quite predictably, Nafisi urges careful attention to the literary text—close reading—as our only way to access the “magical” aesthetic experience offered by the novel. Equally important for her is how a great novel “disturbs us”, recalling the Russian Formalists’ emphasis on the aesthetic function of ostranenie, strategic “estrangement”, as an integral part of literature’s ability to subvert the automatizing processes of modernization (129). [171] To be sure, her repeated claims that we must read the novels she assigns (either in her classes or her book) are irrefutable, but the sleight-of-hand comes when she argues that the Islamic and Leftist students refuse to read. There is a rhetorical slippage between her suggestion that these students are simply bad students for not doing their homework or they are not reading according to Nafisi’s hermeneutic protocols. Such debates over “close reading” should remind us of similar disputes within the academy during the culture wars when the entrenched method of literary explication de texte was under considerable pressure and its academic defenders fought back by claiming that other approaches “failed” to “read the text”. [172]

Nafisi recalls her “radical” past as a college protestor against the U.S. involvement in Vietnam and later as a graduate student participant in the Islamic Students Confederation at the University of Oklahoma, citing her research on Mike Gold’s leftist fiction and journalism. Like other recent “converts” to more moderate, even conservative, political positions, Nafisi attributes her early enthusiasm for leftist politics to a naive idealism. She credits her students at the University of Tehran, especially the young women repressed under the religious patriarchy of the Islamic Republic, for reviving her own passions for Western canonical writers identifiable with “what we generally label as culture […] one domain where ideology played a relatively small part” (39). These Iranian women students had “a genuine curiosity, a real thirst for the works of great writers, those condemned to obscure shadows by both the regime and the revolutionary intellectuals, most of their books banned and forbidden. Unlike in pre-revolutionary times, now the ‘non-Revolutionary writers,’ the bearers of the canon, were the ones celebrated by the young: James, Nabokov, Woolf, Bellow, Austen and Joyce were revered names, emissaries of that forbidden world which we would turn into something more pure and golden than it ever was or will be” (39).

These sentiments sound like thinly disguised warnings to U.S. readers that neglect of our “great writers”, the “bearers of the canon”, by the advocates of “political correctness” may well result in a totalitarianism in the U.S. analogous to what Nafisi finds in the Islamic Republic. “Be careful what you wish for”, Nafisi frequently reminds her leftist and Islamic fundamentalist students, and that monitory tone seems directed as well to U.S. readers, who given the English-language text and its publication by Random House constitute the largest percentage of Nafisi’s readers. Reading Lolita in Tehran can be read productively with John Ellis’s attack on cultural studies and assorted other “new” approaches in his Literature Lost: Social Agendas and the Corruption of the Humanities (1998). [173] What makes Nafisi’s approach more appealing and less obviously reactionary than Ellis’s denunciation of anti-literary approaches is her neo-liberal feminism, which she positions carefully apart from the radical “postmodernist feminism” she consistently condemns in her journalism.

Not only do her women students in Tehran find radical potential in these non-ideological writers of the Western canon, but the canonical texts themselves are read with a keen eye for the emancipatory possibilities offered their women characters. Thus Humbert Humbert projects onto Lolita all of his aesthetic passions, his love of beauty, and the high cultural, European ethos he finds so absent in meretricious America. Yet Humbert is, like the immoral characters in Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, “careless” with other people, treating them with a “cruelty” that includes the murder of Lolita’s mother and his kidnapping and rape of Lolita herself (43). Responding to recent criticism of Nabokov’s Lolita as a narrative that verges on and for some participates in a culture of pedophilia, Nafisi defends Nabokov by condemning Humbert’s misguided aesthetic sense and reading within the novel a subtle “sympathy for Humbert’s victims”, especially the victimized “child”, Lolita (42, 43). Lolita thus becomes a rather improbable proto-feminist narrative, which Nafisi subtly links with the situations of her young Iranian women students, each of whom as young as nine years’ old “would have been […] ripe for marriage to men older than Humbert” under the laws of the Islamic Republic (43). Although we are warned repeatedly not to confuse Humbert Humbert with the Ayatollah Khomeini or other representatives of the Islamic state, Nafisi draws exactly this analogy on repeated occasions. Nafisi’s conclusion is that Nabokov motivates our compassion for Humbert’s victims (and our condemnation of Humbert’s misuse of his considerable aesthetic powers) in order to teach us “the first lesson in democracy: all individuals, no matter how contemptible, have a right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” (42). Of course, Nafisi’s claim about Nabokov’s moral purpose is profoundly political, even if we agree with it, and it is recognizably part of the “classical liberalism” often touted by neo-conservatives. It is no coincidence that the Bush Administration’s foreign policy of “regime change” and military occupation was legitimated in Bush’s second inaugural address with his appeal for the U.S. to “take up the cause of liberty […] to seek and support the growth of democratic movements in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world”. [174]

Nafisi interprets her two other canonical authors, Henry James (Part III) and Jane Austen (Part IV), in much the same fashion as she reads Nabokov and Fitzgerald as champions of liberal individualism and its democratic protections. James and Austen have been traditionally read from a wide variety of feminist perspectives, unlike Nabokov and Fitzgerald, so the narrative order gives the reader the impression that the feminist themes of Parts I (Lolita) and II (Gatsby) are becoming more explicit, even working out a progressive sequence, even though we are moving backwards historically. It is also interesting that Nafisi begins her book with two sections devoted to novels whose protagonists—Lolita and Gatsby—exemplify their authors’ liberal ideals, whereas the last two sections deal with authors—Henry James and Jane Austen—who embody Nafisi’s models for liberal individualism. [175]

James’s Daisy Miller and Catherine Sloper and Austen’s Elizabeth Bennet have long attracted interesting, divergent scholarly interpretations of what each character tells us about changing gender and sexual relations in nineteenth-century America and England. Although she cites very little recent scholarship on James and Austen, Nafisi claims to have selected these particular heroines to demonstrate how “the novel, as a new narrative form, radically transformed basic concepts about the essential relationships between individuals, thereby changing traditional attitudes towards people’s relationship to society, their tasks and duties” (194). Nafisi’s theoretical claim about the novel is profoundly political, insofar as she claims for the genre the power for social change. Although she mentions Ian Watt’s influential Rise of the Novel (1963), she does not draw on his argument that the novel helped legitimate middle-class socioeconomic authority, especially by placing special emphasis on bourgeois individualism (236). Instead of analyzing bourgeois individualism in the novel, as Watt does, Nafisi stresses how Daisy, Catherine, and Elizabeth “come from a long line of defiant heroines”, who “create the main complications of the plot, through their refusal to comply” (194–195). Tempting as it would be to suggest that this genealogy of “defiant heroines” extends from Daisy Miller to modern feminists, like Gertrude Stein and Virginia Woolf, to the radical artists and intellectuals of second- and third-wave feminisms, Nafisi explicitly rejects this heritage by claiming these protagonists are “more complicated than the later, more obviously revolutionary heroines of the twentieth century, because they make no claims to be radical” (195).

Nafisi’s disavowal of virtually the entire tradition of twentieth-century women’s writing and political activism is not as bizarre as it seems when we recall how vigorously she rejects “postmodernist feminism” in her journalism. For Nafisi, Daisy Miller, Catherine Sloper, and Eliza Bennet are not feminists, but rather courageous individuals who defy social conventions through their imaginations and thus empathy for different people (333). Daisy Miller can flirt with both Winterbourne and Giovanelli, relying on her sexuality, rather than avoiding it, as Nafisi suggests both western-style feminists and the repressive Islamic Republic require, even if Daisy’s iconoclasm means her ultimate social exclusion, even symbolic death. Catherine Sloper rebels against the hypocrisy of her suitor, Morris Townsend, the sneakiness of her Aunt Penniman, and the tyranny of her father, Dr. Sloper, affirming in her truculent spinsterhood her moral rigor and honesty (225). Eliza Bennet insists upon courtship and marriage on her own terms, rather than those dictated by her class, her family, or the broader standards of social respectability. Each character individuates herself in the course of the narrative, achieving the specific sort of identity that liberal democracy at its best makes possible for everyone, regardless of race, class, gender, or sexual identifications.

It is this “ideal democracy”, especially as it is embodied in idiosyncratic and thus individual characters, that Nafisi argues the greatest novels offer us. Interestingly, Nafisi’s male confidante, her “magician”, delivers this message toward the end of Reading Lolita in Tehran, but only to remind Nafisi of her own words. [176] It is a strange ventriloquism:

These sentiments express clearly liberal “aesthetic dissent” by stressing the “revolutionary” power of the imagination to preserve “the personal” and the “private” from contamination by the “political” (237). When Mr. Nahvi, one of her Islamic fundamentalist students, criticizes Austen as a “colonial writer”, noting that “Mansfield Park was a book that condoned slavery”, she is at first dumb-founded, because “I was almost certain Mr. Nahvi had not read Mansfield Park” (289). What her student has been reading, she claims to learn on a subsequent trip to the U.S., is the “revolutionary” work of “Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism”, reminding her readers once again how dangerous it is when students don’t “read the text in the original”, instead relying “on some pseudo-philosopher to tell them what it says” (236). Sad, indeed, Nafisi opines that “reactionary elements in Iran had come to identify with and co-opt” Said’s radicalism, and her moral for the U.S. reader seems quite clear (290). Yes, right and left do meet in their extremes—another truth that must be universally acknowledged.

What Nafisi values in these literary texts is their ability to transcend politics and offer social and personal ideals uncontaminated by ideology. And yet there is plentiful evidence from the authors she has chosen how their own and other literary works are deeply invested in the political and ideological conditions of their production. Nafisi is following Daniel Bell’s conservative argument that liberal democracy is “beyond ideology” and Francis Fukuyama’s contested claim that laissez-faire capitalism in its global stage has taken us to the “end of history”. [177] What Nafisi adds to these neo-conservative arguments is her claim that “great” literature provides us with the role models—either the authors or their heroes and heroines—that will lead us beyond the impasses of political conflicts resolved usually by force and violence. It is, after all, the imagination which Nabokov’s Cincinnatus employs so skillfully at the end of Invitation to a Beheading, thus causing by verbal magic “the scaffold and all the sham world around him, along with his executioner, [to] disintegrate” (77). Nafisi makes passing reference to other writers who might approach this same literary “greatness”—Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston from African American culture, a handful of Persian titles, including A Thousand and One Nights, Iraj Pezeshkzad’s My Uncle Napoleon, and Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis—but the overall impression of her book is that Western Civilization, especially in its British and U.S. variants, has provided the largest number of aesthetically triumphant testaments to this universal model for democratic individualism. [178]

Is Azar Nafisi part of a neo-conservative conspiracy to co-opt neo-liberal rhetoric for its own purposes, including the manipulation of “culture” as a weapon in the ongoing war for the “hearts and minds” of Americans and the citizens of those states we hope to convert to our forms of democracy? The extrinsic evidence of her position as Director of the Dialogue Project at SAIS, her support from the Smith Richardson Foundation, and her participation in the public relations’ campaigns of SAIS to promote the United States as the “protector” of the Free World is compelling. The intrinsic evidence of Reading Lolita in Tehran is even more convincing, suggesting not that Nafasi has fallen into the conservative “traps” readied these days for unwitting liberals, but that she actively participates in the agenda of an overtly “depoliticized” cultural study that is in fact profoundly political. My purpose is not to pose as a cultural “whistle-blower”, some policeman for Political Correctness. Nafisi is free to write what she wishes and advocate whatever retrograde and fallacious aesthetic ideas she chooses.

Nafisi’s second memoir, Things I Have Been Silent About: Memories of a Prodigal Daughter (2008), relies primarily on Persian and Middle Eastern literary texts in its account of Nafisi’s family life and education in Iran, as the “Suggested Reading List” at the end of the book indicates. [179] Three of the four part divisions of the book use epigraphs from Emily Dickinson’s poetry (the fourth is a quotation from the émigré writer, Joseph Brodsky) and there are frequent references in this memoir to the importance of Western literature in Nafisi’s life and work, especially after the 1979 Revolution. She briefly recounts why she “started writing about Vladimir Nabokov partly because of my students’ enthusiasm for his works”, as well as her own sympathy with Nabokov’s “preoccupation with exile, a firm belief in the portable world of the imagination, and the subversive power of the imagination” (Things, 289). Although she details her personal and political activities at the University of Oklahoma, Norman while an undergraduate and then graduate student, including her participation in anti-Vietnam War demonstrations and membership in the Confederation of Iranian Students, opposed to the Shah, Nafisi only refers in passing to her doctoral dissertation on Mike Gold’s fiction and the 1930s Left. Nevertheless, she tacitly links her participation in anti-government, anti-Shah demonstrations in the U.S. with her work on her doctoral dissertation: “I turned the living room of our rented apartment [in Washington, D. C.] into my office, and as soon as I woke up and showered I would take my coffee back to bed and read the news about Iran. One corner of our bedroom was soon filled with old coffee-stained copies of The Washington Post and The New York Times. Some mornings I would go to the Library of Congress, where I spent delicious hours looking through old microfilms of The Masses, The New Masses, and other publications from the thirties for my dissertation” (Things, 212–213).

Things I Have Been Silent About ends with her departure with her husband, Bijan, from Tehran for Washington, D. C. in 1997, although the last two chapters (30 and 31) deal with her mother’s death in 2003 and her father’s death in 2005. Little mention is made of her two-year “fellowship […] at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies” (Things, 294). In short, she remains silent about the ways in which she came to be associated with SAIS, the terms of the fellowship, the faculty at SAIS (or elsewhere) who supported her application, and her professional reasons, beyond simply her husband, Bijan’s work in Washington, D. C., for doing research at an institution designed to train diplomats and intelligence officers. Things I Have Been Silent About does not answer questions about how a scholar with a Ph.D. in English literature, as well as experience teaching Persian and world literatures in Iran, should be of interest and herself interested in the School of Advanced International Studies.

Things I Have Been Silent About does address in great detail her father Ahmad Nafisi’s political career, culminating in his position as Mayor of Tehran, his arrest and imprisonment by the Shah, and his eventual exoneration and release by the Iranian court. Nafisi also recounts in detail the personal difficulties between her mother, Nezhat, and father, as well as Nezhat’s position in the Iranian Parliament until she was forced to resign after the 1979 Revolution. Nafisi’s account of her family history is indeed a fascinating story of how upper-class, politically moderate Iranians, like the Nafisis, found themselves historically tossed between the extreme regimes of the Shah and the Ayatollah Khomeini. It makes perfect sense to me that Azar Nafisi would want to write about the complexities of this history, especially as it is represented in a single family, in order to explain the human consequences of both regimes.

Yet such family and macropolitical histories are not the center of her best-seller, Reading Lolita in Tehran, the book she tells us she was completing when on January 2, 2003, her mother died in Tehran (Things, 304). By then, Nafisi’s “two-year fellowship” at SAIS had evolved into an appointment as “visiting professor”, then into “director of the Dialogue Project at the Foreign Policy Institute of Johns Hopkins University” (Things, endpaper). Things I Have Been Silent About is another volume in the melancholia experienced by families and individuals caught between colonial and postcolonial societies. Reading Lolita in Tehran is a narrative of recolonization, in which the exiled subject embraces new conquerors. The larger issue is the extent to which “culture” has undergone a paradigm shift from the “property” controlled by those Spirow Agnew, Richard Nixon’s Vice President, dubbed “effete intellectuals” or the “tool” of those “tenured radicals” (Roger Kimball) and “feminazis” (Rush Limbaugh) attacked by conservatives in the heyday of the culture wars to a resource of the new imperialism. Some time after Nixon’s disgrace in the Watergate Scandal and his voluntary resignation to avoid Impeachment and likely conviction on those charges, neo-conservatives in the United States organized to retake the “liberal media”, not just by creating competitive, alternative media but by co-opting the idea of “liberalism” itself and along with it the very concept of “cultural critique”. Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran re-legitimates Western cultural texts as forerunners of the political revolution and regime change in Iran that the George W. Bush Administration openly advocated, especially in its identification of the Islamic Republic of Iran as part of a global “Axis of Evil”.

Although Barack Obama’s Administration has softened the diplomatic rhetoric, military action against Iran remains an “option”, especially in response to Iran’s growing nuclear threat. President Obama’s repeated invocation of the “American Dream” and the uniqueness of the “American experience” helped him achieve wide popularity with the electorate, but such nationalism also helps sustain the illusion that the “West is the Best”. The conservative Tea Party movement has flourished in part as a consequence of the Obama Administration’s determination to chart a middle course. The greatness of America is its tolerance of everything and anything. In view of the conservatives’ strategic battle for cultural power I have analyzed in this chapter, I am not confident that the Obama Administration’s meliorism and nationalism are capable of responding effectively to the cultural politics of neo-conservatives.

I first began reading Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran in Idaho, where Kristin and I spend most of our vacations. High in the Rocky Mountains, in the tri-state border region of Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming, we are often told by our neighbors that we are in “God’s country”. Fiercely independent ranchers fight the hated Bureau of Land Management, National Forest Service, and National Park Service, imagining that these federal agencies are determined to erode the ranchers’ freedoms. In stores and restaurants, bearded frontiersmen, or at least their late modern simulations, pay cash for everything, drive pick-up trucks outfitted for any possible emergency, and pride themselves on their abilities to field strip and rebuild anything from an agricultural pump to a handgun and to hunt and “dress” in the woods a grizzly bear, elk, or moose—all of which can still be hunted in that region. Suspicious of strangers, especially California “tree-huggers”, the locals tend to be profoundly religious, openly racist, and incurably sexist. To be sure, Idaho is hardly a match for the repressive regime of the Islamic Republic of Iran, but “God’s country” is certainly as fanatically political and ideological in its fantastic commitment to its version of “liberal individualism”. Reading Reading Lolita in Tehran in Idaho is an object lesson to the attentive cultural critic that we face our own dangers in the U.S. of a growing intolerance and political extremism that have more similarities with the extremism Nafisi criticizes in the recent politics of Iran than most Americans are willing to recognize. It is even more troubling that such political extremism openly employs cultural materials and academic disciplines to achieve its ends.