Reading Iranian Memoirs in Our Time of Total War

[Mohammad Maljoo <mmaljoo@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

In the last three years, memoirs by Iranian women now living in the West
have rocketed up the bestseller lists in the United States. Firoozeh Dumas,
Marjaneh Satrapi and, most famously, Azar Nafisi have contributed to a
literature of long standing that interrogates the status of women in
relation to the Iranian nation-state. The memoirs have great intrinsic
merit, but it cannot be a coincidence that they began flying off the shelves
of US bookstores at a time as the US-led "liberation" of Afghan women was
underway.

Negar Mottahedeh, professor of literature at Duke University, reads these
popular books against the backdrop of Iran's inclusion in George W. Bush's
"axis of evil." Mottahedeh's essay, "Off the Grid: Reading Iranian Memoirs
in Our Time of Total War," is now available in Middle East Report Online:
http://www.merip.org/mero/interventions/mottahedeh_interv.html





Middle East Report Online is a free service of the Middle East Research
and Information Project (MERIP).

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