Speech and Politics

I think you have to look suspiciously at any friend of Paul Wolfowitz.

What Elliottg said. And btw, her other friend Bernard Lewis is an Armenian genocide denialist, on the record. It’s not that different from being friends with Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld.

The Al-Ahram article: Native informers and the making of the American empire

The ZNet interview: Lolita and Beyond

It’s one thing to have conservative friends; it’s another thing to have criminal friends.

I think another interesting angle to the Franco-Turkish dispute is that Segolene Royal had her first real mis-step of her Presidential campaign on Wednesday when she refused to directly answer a question on whether she supported Turkish membership of the EU. Falling back on the fact that there will be a referendum, but sounding rather Bourbon-like, her dodge was “my opinion will be that of the French people.” So — probably leans in favour of it but knows it’s electorally risky to say so. A little note went in Sarkozy’s book after that, no doubt.

Ditto number 6. As an American, these european laws against certain types of speech strike me as bizarre. I have no doubt that the armenian massacres occurred (my grandmother was a witness), but I will fight to to defend your right to blather nonsense, and my right to mock you for it.

Mewonders if the lady doth protest too much.

It’s not “conversing with people who are politically different from me.”. It’s about whether there’s a carrying of water for some rather notorious war-mongers (and I use the word advisedly and literally). I find Hamid Dabashi’s style over-the-top. But he does raise some interesting questions.

To strip the issue down to the core: Suppose someone in the right-wing think-tank machine saw her book, and said “Hey, here’s a great story about Noble Western Values enlightening the Savage Native Mind. It’ll probably be relatively popular in the current political climate (note – NOT “help pave the way for war we’d like to do”). And it’s by a woman, even better. We ought to help push it.”

What then?

I think the trail to follow would be along the lines of looking into those backers, if any, and the promotion process (“follow the money”). Pointing out (very verbosely) that war-mongers enjoy those sorts of stories, and that then creates a market for those sorts of stories, is rather obvious.

I think that one reason that the Turks deny the Genocide is precisely that it is associated not with the bad old Empire but rather with CUP with Ataturk leading the final stage.

Henry, I’m not saying that what Dabashi is charging is true, I’m suggesting ways it can be refined into something halfway investigate-able.

Can we dispense with the run to abstraction? “… can in principle …”, bleh. If someone is good friends with X, and X has a lot of power and influence, and suddenly, where they had previously been obscure, they write something which becomes both prominent and seems to fit well with one of X’s obsessions … hmmm …

Could be pure coincidence. Could be causality of a pitch to X. Could be causality of push from X. But having the vapors over it, oh-me-oh-my-how-can-you-think-that, seems unreasonable here.

(disclaimer: Of course there’s cases where having the vapors would be reasonable, blah, blah, blah. But given a well-funded PR machine that hypes hack authors, it’s hardly a stretch to wonder if they’d diversify a little to non-hack authors).

In case anyone’s interested, here’s what Nafisi said about “regime change” in Iran back in 2004:

“I do not advocate regime change by use of violence or
foreign intervention; I want the progressive forces in the world to
empathize with the plight of the Iranian people, and to recognize that, for over 25 years, Iranians have resisted a theocratic system through peaceful means.”

http://direland.typepad.com/direland/2004/10/azar_nafisi_rep.html

Thanks for the information, Barry and Maynard

Turkey won’t be ready for EU accession for close to a decade anyway, but will enough of Western Europe be persuadable over the next 10 years?

why the Turks, who of course threw off the last bits of Ottoman empire

Serious question: what’s the common Turkish translation of the English phrase ‘Ottoman Empire’?

I think it’s not a good sign when a professor of comparative literature practices a mode of reading that is 100% incapable of recognizing a distinction between a text, an author, and the complexities of why things happen in the world. Or a mode of reading that is as unrestrainedly reductionist as this.

VS Naipaul has at times lent himself, naively in my view, to the purposes of unsavory people and political projects. Should I then spit on A Bend in the River and declare it bereft of value as a literary work, without any insight?

Prepare the bonfires, if so: there won’t be much literature or writing left if we follow this kind of reductionism. A writer with unsavory friends! With sympathy for bad ideas! With misguided or naive views! Golly. The mind boggles. I have never heard of such a thing.

The logic of reading that Dabashi is offering just in this case alone would have to also include the work of Marjane Satrapi. She doesn’t have the same friends, perhaps, but my god there’s sympathy for the West all OVER her memoirs of life in Iran. I’m sure somewhere in that sympathy, somewhere in the pictures she draws, there’s a hidden battle plan for the destruction of Fallujah.

Naturally, if you’ve read Nafisi’s book, there’s more than a little extra dollop of irony here, since it’s partially a plea for the importance of imagination and the possible pleasures of reading in a non-instrumental way.

Anybody commenting here should, by the way, *also* read the Al-Ahram article that sparked this. Among the many problems I see in it is the remarkably casual shift between asserting that the book has been read sympathetically or used by proponents of an attack on Iran to a flat-out assertion that the content of the book is intended to be read monolithically and simplistically thus AND that the author is a willing, deliberate and programmatic agent of such readings.

But read further, and you’ll see one more thing, which is the underlying manner that a great deal of ostensibly “postcolonial” literary criticism is basically nationalism in disguise, because to Dabishi the greatest sin of Nafisi is that she doesn’t like Iranian *culture*. E.g., this is not so much about whether or not the post-1979 government is or is not repressive. Dabishi isn’t about to be enough of a tool to argue that it is not repressive. This is about diasporic struggles over national identity, and a pretty crude attempt to rough up someone who speaks as a “national” but commits cultural treason against the nation.

Anybody who on this blog, commenter or otherwise, has ever railed against the bullshit cultural nationalism of the American right–the calling out of Sontag et al as traitorously “European”, the argument that any time an American intellectual expresses distaste or disgust for American culture, should recognize what Dabishi is doing here. He is posing the sheer impossibility, in his view, of ever being a native who hates or criticizes his native *nation* (not government, but nation-as-culture, culture-as-nation). In Dabishi’s reading, the moment that a postcolonial subject expresses that perspective, they MUST, inevitably, be a hollow vessel within which lurks the empire. Whereas “Western” subjects still retain the liberal privilege of hating or disliking their nation; they are choosing subjects. This is noxious on a great many levels, not the least of which is the political puppeteering that is going on here. Western subjects choose and so long as they choose to become anti-national, they are good choosing subjects; native subjects must be loyal to their nation or be nothing more than pawns of empire. Two different kinds of human subjectivity here: what could be more faithful to the colonial bifurcation of the world into West and non-West?

Henry,

Dabashi’s tirade isn’t just a “reductive reading” of Said, it’s a defence of his mentor. Here is (probably) the “offending” passage in Nafisi’s book:

One day after class, Mr. Nahvi followed me to my office. He tried to tell me that Austen was not only anti-Islamic but that she was guilty of another sin: she was a colonial writer. I was surprised to hear this from the mouth of someone who until then had mainly quoted and misquoted the Koran. He told me that “Mansfield Park” was a book that condoned slavery, that even in the West they had now seen the error of their ways. What confounded me was that I was almost certain Mr. Nahvi had not read “Mansfield Park”. It was only later, on a trip to the States, that I found out where Mr. Nahvi was getting his ideas from when I bought a copy of Edward Said’s “Culture and Imperialism”. It was ironic that a Muslim fundamentalist should quote Said against Austen. It was just as ironic that the most reactionary elements in Iran had come to identify with and co-opt the work and theories of those considered revolutionary in the West.

P.S. Nafisi’s book rings true (though I have reservations about her interpretation of Nabokov). I don’t know about “Culture and Imperialism”, but “Orientalism” was prescribed reading when I was in Tehran (I left in 1991).

Lolita…Tehran is a fine book, and people should read it. To me it certainly doesn’t seem to espouse the notion that militant solutions solve ideological problems.

…the calling out of Sontag et al as traitorously “European”, the argument that any time an American intellectual expresses distaste or disgust for American culture…

But certainly it’s at least slightly different in the case of Iran vs. the West (represented by Messrs. Wolfowitz and Lewis) – considering, you know, recent colonial past, not to mention the present little clash of civilizations, Western struggle against Islamofascism, terrorism and certain evil states. Not all nationalism is ‘bullshit cultural nationalism’, not all nationalism is the same.

It extraordinary that anyone here has sympathy with Dabashi. He saus that an author is no different from a torturer. Lyndie England was imprisoned for her crimes. A professor who cannot tell the difference between literature and life has no business being a professor; and a professor who argues that a writer deserves prison should be condemned and shunned.

He certainly does come out too strong, way too strong, no question about that; but otherwise his point is not unreasonable. And does he actually argue “that a writer deserves prison”?

He certainly does come out too strong, way too strong, no question about that; but otherwise his point is not unreasonable.

I love this sentence of Abb1’s, but I’m not sure of the referent. Is he talking about Wolfowitz, Le Pen, or Bernard Lewis?

The question of the Young Turks is more complicated than people think. They got their start under the Ottomans around 1906, and Ataturk was not one of them and not friendly with them, and at one point he denounced the Armenian genocide.

One source says, however, that Ataturk committed his own crimes against the Armenians, even though he hadn’t participated in the most major ones.

This is not the kind of question which the internet is much help on, because partisan information overwhelms averything else. But it is true that Ataturk was not a Young Turk in the strict sense.

What is problematic about Reading Lolita in Tehran are a whole range of things, but here are some of the most important:

a) Without exception, Islamists in Nafisi’s book are portrayed as idiotic philistines. They have no sense of the world, no appreciation of literature, nor a sophisticated notion of history. They are just zealots and sophists. I find this really problematic. Certainly there are Islamists (who like Stalinists before them) have not countenanced literature that is not in the service of some greater cause, but frankly, there are also large numbers of Islamists who are not only familiar with Nabokov and Austen, but also with a wide range of Iranian, Arabic, and other “Third World” or Southern literature.

b) Nafisi seems to be wholly innocent of the latter. In the book, the path to civilisation seems to be through accession of European/American novels. The book does not even make the tiniest gestures (except in derision) to the astounding and beautiful modern (or indeed even ancient) Iranian literature.

Finally, i wouldn’t characterise Satrapi (the author of the immensely popular and wonderful graphic novel, _Persepolis_) as “pro-Western”. Her portrayals of even the most rigid and awful functionary manages to preserve some of their humanity, and in a couple of instances, even their sense of humour. Please remember that in orientalists discourses, the ‘other’ is always homourless, superstitutious, and backwards. This is exactly the effect Nafisi reproduces in her work: “Their” supposed innoncence of transcendent and enlightened literature only shows their barabarity, or at the very least opposition to modernity (after all, isn’t the novel the ultimate emblem of modernity? Never mind “men and women and alcohol” mixing – as a perceptive commentator mentions above)…

“In the book, the path to civilisation seems to be through accession of European/American novels. The book does not even make the tiniest gestures (except in derision) to the astounding and beautiful modern (or indeed even ancient) Iranian literature.”

That’s not true. I don’t even like the book, but I remember several passages dealing with Persian poetry.

Furthermore, what Nafisi is trying to do — failing IMO, but trying — is to present Nabokov, Austen, et al as a world canon rather than a Western one. You can certainly argue with her choices, but her point is that these authors are relevant outside the constructed “West” — in particular, they are relevant to the lives of women in late 20th century Iran.

Note that this idea is far from new. Most obviously, this was Ataturk’s discourse; he saw newspapers, neckties and waltzes as emblems of modernization, not Westernization. Like electricity and motorcars, these were markers of advancement towards the universal civilization, not towards alienation or the loss of “Turkishness”.

Arguably he has a point. Do Turks become less Turkish by studying Fitzgerald or James? The Turks don’t seem to think so. Or, to go from the sublime to the all-too-real, the Turks were over the moon with delight a few years back when they won Eurovision with a ska band.

This conflation of western culture with world culture, civilization, or modernity quite obviously is attractive to western conservatives, which is why Ataturk remains “every Tory’s favorite Wog”. But Ataturk himself didn’t see it that way, and I’ll wager that neither does Nafisi. The point of the book is that Iran has closed itself off from what the rest of the world has to offer. You can dislike her confusion of “the rest of the world” and “the western canon” and still agree that she has a point.

Doug M.

Let’s put it this way – the book is certainly being blurbed as Western Canon Enlightens Savage Natives. From the publisher’s PR:

“Every Thursday morning for two years in the Islamic Republic of Iran, a bold and inspired teacher named Azar Nafisi secretly gathered seven of her most committed female students to read forbidden Western classics. As Islamic morality squads staged arbitrary raids in Tehran, fundamentalists seized hold of the universities, and a blind censor stifled artistic expression, the girls in Azar Nafisi’s living room risked removing their veils and immersed themselves in the worlds of Jane Austen, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry James, and Vladimir Nabokov. In this extraordinary memoir, their stories become intertwined with the ones they are reading. Reading Lolita in Tehran is a remarkable exploration of resilience in the face of tyranny and a celebration of the liberating power of literature.”

Thanks for the Der Speigler link, John- it was very useful. Can you (or anyone else?) recommend a good book on the subject or the founding of modern Turkey (preferably a fairly short one, I must say, since I don’t have lots of free time.) Most of my knowledge of the Ottoman Empire comes in the context of the Balkans and I don’t know as much as I’d like about this issue.

Seth – how does your quote cover “savage natives”?

I get the “liberation of literature”, but that’s been a strong theme in Western discourse about literature too – eg Tolkien’s talk about fantasy as escape, or the movie Quill (quite an unusual defence, especially since I’ve read a bit of the Marquis de Sade’s work – which I found so disgusting it left me with a lot more sympathy for censorship) or many English literature lecturers.

Whether literature, Western or otherwise, actually has a liberating power is another question. But those who believe it does, generally consider it as a good thing for members of Western civilisation as well as any other.

See http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/70/roemer70art.htm for an example of an English lecturer taking this approach.

“But on the other hand, it’s very, very, amenable to sort of reading that’s sending Dabashi into his florid flaming.”

[glyph of eyes rolling]

I have an elderly Hungarian acquaintance who was a young woman in the early, Stalinist days of Hungarian communism.

She and some girlfriends used to gather in an isolated apartment, draw the shades, put some jazz records on the victrola, and take turns putting on dresses, hats and scarves.

Following your logic, if she later wrote a memo about it, she could then be accused of abetting CIA death squads in El Salvador. And you and abb1 would say, well, her work is very amenable to that sort of reading.

I’m really not getting this.

Look, I don’t even like the damn book. But its depiction of Iran’s current regime as narrow-minded, mean-spirited, corrupt and repressive is, um, right.

N.B., I could get in my car after breakfast and be in Teheran for a late lunch. We get a lot of Iranians up here. And while the reality is more complex than she depicts, she’s not wrong or lying… modern Iran is a bad place to be a woman, and a horrible place to be a woman who wants to take part in the intellectual life of the greater world.

Doug M.

Yes, Doug, I think you underappreciate the level of antagonism in the current political climate.

You know, I’m pretty sure glamorizing, say, Japanese or German culture (at the expense of the local culture) wouldn’t be taken well in 1941 US, probably not even by US intellectuals. And that’s understandable.

Maybe that’s the “official” reason. But I can’t help thinking that a clever “packaging” person understands that the book will benefit from the patronage (not readership, but patronage) of a certain demographic that’s reflected in Humbert Humbert (not literally in terms of being pedophiles, but more in terms of having more sympathy for him as a character than might be admitted in polite company).

“Yes, Doug, I think you underappreciate the level of antagonism in the current political climate.”

So, because her stuff is popular with the Wrong Sort of People, you support some doofus saying there’s no difference between her and a torturer.

(Oh, sorry… don’t /support/, as such… you just see how it’s, like, totally understandable.)

‘George Bush makes me very angry’ is no excuse for throwing your brain out the window. Nor for condoning mean-spirited stupidity.

“You know, I’m pretty sure glamorizing, say, Japanese or German culture”

Godwin violation. Thanks for playing.

Doug M.

“From this guy’s (not entirely unreasonable)”

Explain to me again what’s reasonable about it.

“Again, had there been no torturer, no soldier, no orchestrated campaign”

The connection between mediocre author Nafisi and convicted torturer England continues to elude me. Maybe I’m just slow, but there it is.

I note in passing that the book was written in the late 1990s, and bought before 9/11. IOW, when it was written, there /was/ “no torturer, no soldier, no orchestrated campaign”.

But the wrong sort of people like her book! So.

“And also should find herself some better friends.”

Shorter abb1: bitch had it coming.

Doug M.

But the wrong sort of people like her book! So.

Doug – I think you have it about right.

My late father was in jail under the Shah and then under Khomeini. He never forgave himself for signing a petition supporting Khomeini’s return from France. He would be appalled by Dabashi and Dabashi’s apologists here.

of a certain demographic that’s reflected in Humbert Humbert (not literally in terms of being pedophiles, but more in terms of having more sympathy for him as a character than might be admitted in polite company).

What demographic?

Whoops. I didn’t mean to suggest that Zurcher was “academic”. Although it is used as an introduction to Turkish history in classes, it’s a readable history not caught up with jargon or academic arguments in any undue way. He’s the one you should start with, probably…

Abb1 – I know Dabashi well. The Wikipedia entry is far too kind, a gushing postmodernist paean, and some of the names it drops for comparison are not people I find entirely congenial. Dabashi strains to see Khomeinism as a manifestation of “liberation theology” and as a bulwark against what Jalal Al-e-Ahmad called “westoxication”. You can read his attack on Nafisi in that light. Many leftists, including my father, welcomed Islamism as the (temporary) vanguard of genuine revolution in Iran. A quarter century later, the Velayat-e faqih is firmly entrenched, Islamism has spread well beyond Iran’s borders, and Dabashi is still making the same excuses.

My father “welcomed” Khomeinism. These days Dabashi merely “explains” it. And sometimes conscripts it as a bogeyman against other bogeymen (me and my “guys”?). I don’t think a conversation between my father and Dabashi would have gone well.

I see ours isn’t going too well, either, so I’ll sign off.