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The recent proliferation of memoirs by Iranian and Iranian American women coincides with an increased U.S. focus on Iran as part of the Bush administration-dubbed axis of evil and the military actions in Afghanistan and Iraq, which have been justified by some as humanitarian acts of liberating those living under Islamic or authoritarian regimes.1 The most successful of such recent memoirs, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books, by Azar Nafisi, was released in the United States in late March 2003, the month of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. It has been read by the U.S. and other Western press as a humanistic portrait of the intimate lives of Iranian women in the context of the daily oppression of the Islamic Republic. Nafisi's experience of teaching canonical Western literature in postrevolution Iran is understood to show how the universal values of these works allow Iranian women a space in which to experience moments of liberation, providing an alternative liberation narrative. The highly uncritical and positive reception of this memoir can be understood in terms of how the work reiterates, in a modified form, the Orientalist tradition. While Nafisi challenges a wholly monolithic understanding of contemporary Iran, she ultimately reframes the predominant Orientalist binary-of the West as modern, rational, and dynamic and opposed to an East that is static, irrational, and antimodern-into one of promodern Iranians versus antimodern Iranians. Nafisi's representation of women as victims of state violence in Iran becomes a key component of asserting this binary, opposing a monolithic and barbaric Iranian state to the democratic ethos that she argues is implicit in the (Western) novel and appreciated by her female students. Women's status as victims becomes opposed to religious men's complicity with or support of the state, and women invested in modernizing are opposed to these men, who are presented as seeking a return to a mythic Islam. Although Nafisi seeks to deterritorialize the desire and possibility of democracy and freedom, her association of such conceptions solely with Western cultural sources maintains the flexible positional superiority of the West, which is indicative of Orientalist thought (Said 1979). Furthermore, reviewers' readings of Nafisi construct her as providing an authentic and representative portrayal of Iranian women's desires and interests and thereby seeming to provide an objective authentication of the Orientalist framework. Among recent memoirs by Iranian women, Reading Lolita in Tehran has distinguished itself by its commercial success and critical acclaim. As of October 2005, the memoir had sold more than nine hundred thousand copies in the United States (NationalSales) and was approaching its second year on the New York Times best sellers list (Paperback Best Sellers, 2005). Rights have been sold for a movie (Weaver 2004) and for its publication in twenty-two countries (Salamon 2004).2 Between its release and October 2004, at least fifty-eight reviews, interviews, and articles that discuss the book or its author were published in U.S. and other Englishlanguage Western newspapers, magazines, and trade publications.1 In this essay I analyze the processes of reception, reading, and rearticulation of the memoir through these articles and reviews. The memoir describes Nafisi's experience as a professor of Englishlanguage literature in Iran from the time of the 1979 revolution until 1997, when she and her family emigrated to the United States. From a prominent secular family, Nafisi left Iran at thirteen, studying in Europe and the United States, and returned to Iran as a professor following the overthrow of Mohammad Reza Shah. She currently teaches at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, where she is also the director of the Dialogue which seeks to promote-in a primarily cultural context-the development of democracy and human rights in the Muslim world (Dialogue Project, 2005). …
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