Reading Nafisi in the West: Feminist Reading Practices ... - CiteSeerX

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Catherine Burwell, Hilary E. Davis, Lisa K. Taylor

Reading Nafisi in the West: Feminist Reading Practices and Ethical Concerns ABSTRACT

Iranian women’s memoirs have become increasingly popular in the West. Certainly the most popular of these has been Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran. But in a world in which Muslim women are increasingly the subject of neo-Orientalist fear and fascination, Reading Lolita in Tehran cannot be read as neutral. We begin this paper by analyzing the ways in which discourses such as “the clash of civilizations” and “global sisterhood” shape the reception of Nafisi’s autobiography. We then examine how the autobiography is being taught, providing both a framework for problematizing current approaches to the text and a case study centred on teaching Reading Lolita in Tehran to a group of preservice teachers. We argue for a continuing interrogation into our own pedagogical practices and desires. RÉSUMÉ

Les mémoires de femmes Iraniennes deviennent de plus en plus populaires dans l’Occident. Entre eux, le plus connu est Reading Lolita in Tehran par Azar Nafisi. Néanmoins, vu le contexte dans lequel les femmes Musulmanes sont plus en plus construites (ou vues) comme le sujet de la peur et de la fascination néo-Orientaliste, c’est impossible de lire Reading Lolita in Tehran comme un texte neutre. On

commence cet article avec une analyse des façons dans lesquelles la circulation des discours publics — comme « Le Choc des Civilisations » de Samuel Huntington et le féminisme impérialiste — ont construit la réception de l’autobiographie de Nafisi. Puis on examine quelques façons dans lesquelles on enseigne ce texte, et on propose un cadre pour problématiser ces approches pédagogiques populaires. On examine une étude de cas d’un cours pour de futurs enseignants dans lequel l’approche est basée dans le cadre théorique propos comme une exemple d’une interrogation r�������������������������������������������������� é������������������������������������������������� flexive de nos pratiques et désirs pédagogiques. ¤

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Iranian women’s memoirs and fiction have become increasingly popular reading material in the West.1 Certainly the most popular of these texts has been Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran (2003). A contemplation on Nafisi’s experience living and teaching classics of Western literature in revolutionary Iran, this rich literary work topped the New York Times bestseller list for more than ninety weeks, sold more than one million copies and received enthusiastic reviews from critics across the West.2 It has also been marketed to both book clubs and teachers with the addition of a reader’s guide at the end of the book and a teacher’s guide available online (Random House 2006). The book is appearing on course syllabi across North America in the disciplines of women’s studies, international relations, English studies and anthropology, with course titles such as “Understanding Totalitarianism,” “Understanding Culture and Cultural Difference” and, of course, “Women and Islam.”3 In the introduction to their anthology Going Global: The Transnational Reception of Third World Women Writers (2000), Amal Amireh and Lisa Suhair Majaj argue that practices of reading must be placed within historical and political contexts. At a time when the renewed forces of imperialism converge with an unprecedented commodification of culture, it becomes necessary, in Gayatri Spivak’s words, “to render transparent the interests of the hegemonic readership” (qtd. in Kahf 2000: 167). This means paying particular attention to the specific geopolitical discursive landscapes in which Reading Lolita in Tehran is being so enthusiastically taken up, situating the text within the resurgence of Orientalism which has allowed for the circulation of Islamophobic discourses. In a world in which Muslim women are increasingly the subject of neo-Orientalist pity, fear and fascination, Reading Lolita in Tehran can hardly be read as a neutral text. Indeed, in the context of the U.S.led war on terror, the invasion and occupation of Iraq, and recurrent suggestions that the U.S. government is contemplating war on Iran (Hersch 2006), we need to ask exactly how this book is being read by students, teachers and feminists across North America. The question challenges us to problematize our reading choices, our pleasures and our chosen pedagogies. And for those teaching texts such as Reading Lolita in Tehran, it means asking probing questions about the kinds of imaginaries and desires we bring to a text, and the identifications we find there.

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This paper had its origins in a conference panel in which six feminist scholars came together to contextualize Reading Lolita in Tehran within the traditions of feminist antiracism education, feminist philosophy and Iranian feminist cultural politics. We bring together here three of those papers, written from our disciplinary and embodied locations as white antiracism feminists. In part one, Burwell, writing within a cultural studies framework, sets the stage by mapping the current context of reception for Nafisi’s memoir, examining the circulation of the “clash of civilizations” thesis and the appearance of a discourse of “global sisterhood” within the mainstream media. In part two, Davis undertakes a philosophical discussion of the ways in which Reading Lolita in Tehran is being taught, revealing the tendency towards problematic readings based on empathetic identification and reading for knowledge, and then outlines a framework for self-subversive, self-reflexive reading practices. Finally, in part three, Taylor, drawing together Burwell’s call for geopolitically situated readings and Davis’s reading strategies framework, reflects on her own pedagogical experiences teaching Nafisi’s memoir to a group of preservice teachers in a small Canadian university. Each section is presented here in the writer’s own voice, as she contemplates the possibilities of ethical reading practices in an age of war. Together, the three pieces present a multidisciplinary argument for the ongoing explication of reading practices and pedagogies that challenge complacent reading and problematize “a too-quick enthusiasm for the other in the aftermath of colonialism” (Spivak 1996: 248).

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Mapping the Current Context of Reception: The Clash of Civilizations and Global Sisterhood One way to begin to think about reading practices in an age of war is to locate them within prevailing structures of power, for, as Henry Giroux has reminded us, meaning lies not simply within cultural artifacts themselves, but also in the ways such artifacts are “aligned and shaped by larger institutional and cultural discourses” (2004: 10). Such discourses not only play a role in selecting what will be read, but also help to form the “horizon of expectations” ( Jauss 1982) which readers bring to a text—their prior knowledge about its content and conventions, their unconscious assumptions, their desired ends. Thus, in a sense, such discourses teach us how to approach a text. Of course, no discourse is total, and the multiple discourses present in a single location may clash, overlap and even crack, providing spaces for subversion and resistance. Nonetheless, it is possible, I believe, to consider Canada and the United States at the present moment as particular “sites of consumption” (Ghosh 2000: 39) in which responses to texts are scripted by quite specific social and material practices, political transactions and ideologies. In this opening section, I (Burwell) consider the fields of reception formed by the circulation of the “clash of civilizations” thesis and by the movement of a discourse of “global sisterhood” into the mainstream media. In both cases I suggest ways in

which such discourses give shape to textual encounters, supplying predetermined meanings and funnelling modes of reading along accepted paths.

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Although it has a rather long history within both Orientalism (Said 1978) and the Eurocentric “imperial imaginary” (Shohat and Stam 1994), the clash of civilizations thesis in its current form was most recently put forward by Samuel Huntington in his 1997 book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. This thesis presents a Manichean view of the world, in which an essentialized Islam “constitutes the anti-West, the perennial opponent to Western values of democracy and individual liberty” (Sabra 2003: 8). Though presenting itself as a work of history, it is in fact largely ahistorical, erasing records of EuroAmerican colonialism and replacing them with a series of myths, recycled images and stereotypes dating back as far as the Crusades. While Huntington’s book has been hailed, since 9/11, as “prescient,” and his ideas used by the U.S. administration to justify the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, his colleague, Bernard Lewis, has pushed the influence of the clash of civilizations discourse into the public realm. In What Went Wrong? The Clash Between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East implies, Lewis argues that the events of 9/11 can be explained by an ideological difference between Islam and the West, between tradition and modernity. Adam Sabra suggests that What Went Wrong was enthusiastically taken up not only by media commentators but by “an ignorant public, eager for information that might help it to make sense of the events of September 11” (Sabra 2003: 2). The influence of such discourse has not been limited to the United States. As Sedef Arat-Koc (2005) convincingly argues, after 9/11, the political right in Canada began a campaign to rearticulate Canadian identity within a “clash of cultures” framework, in the process making claims for Canada’s place within “Western civilization” and aligning Canadian interests with United States foreign policy. As Arat-Koc suggests, it is a campaign that has been largely successful. While some channels of the mainstream media worked to distance Canada from U.S. politics after the declaration of war on Iraq, the clash of civilizations thesis has gone mostly unchallenged, giving space to a notion of “Canadian identity as a Western civilizational identity” (Arat-Koc 2005: 35) that represents a reassertion of racialized myths of Canada. This wide circulation of the clash of civilizations thesis inevitably affects the ways in which works from or about the Middle East are approached. Not only does it predefine the discursive space in which such works are received, it also generates particular modes of reading. When heterogeneous histories are reduced to the myth of an unchanging monolith, single texts may be perceived as representing “the truth” about large and diverse populations. Thus, reading a book about a single Iranian woman may be perceived as enough to “know” not only these women, but also the history of the Middle East and its “oppression” of women. The clash of civilizations thesis provides further problems for reading in the way in which it

relies on and circulates stereotypes. Amal Amireh points to “how Arab feminist work [is] consumed by a western audience in a context saturated by stereotypes of Arab culture and ... this context of reception, to a large extent, ends up rewriting both the writer and her text according to scripted first-world narratives” (2000: 215). Given the broad generalizations that collapse Arab, Muslim and Middle Eastern cultures within the polemics of war and terror, otherwise thoughtful and varied texts may find their narratives and ideas reduced to the oversimplified staples of the clash of civilizations thesis: fundamentalism, totalitarianism, oppression and tradition.

issue of the relationship between First and Third World women is of paramount importance to the study of reception. Indeed one can say that the history of the reception of Third World women’s texts in the West reflects in miniature the history of the relations between First and Third world women. (6)

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A second, related discourse which prewrites scripts for the reception of Third World women’s narratives is that of “global sisterhood.” Such a discursive regime posits a sense of solidarity between women based on assumptions about shared gender, without posing questions about race, class, imperialism and power. Related to this notion of global sisterhood is the discursive construct Chandra Mohanty has called “Third World difference”—“that stable, ahistorical something that apparently oppresses most if not all women in these countries”—which she notes runs through much of Western feminist scholarship (1997: 257). Such scholarship, “predicated upon assumptions about Western women as secular, liberated and having control over their own lives” (ibid.), discursively produces the “Third World woman” as a singular, monolithic subject, without agency and in need of rescue. While one might predict that these discourses of “global sisterhood” are limited to academic feminism, this is not the case. As Arat-Koc (2002) argues, variations of global sisterhood have been popularized in the Canadian and American mainstream press, where the U.S. war in Afghanistan and its invasion of Iraq are represented and justified as “humanitarian war ... about saving women” (53). Yasmin Jiwani (2005) notes the presence of such discourses within Canadian media in her study of The Globe and Mail reporting directly after 9/11, where she suggests that representations of Muslim women as passive and oppressed serve to provide justification for Canadian involvement—itself framed as moderate and benevolent—within the region. Notions of global sisterhood are perhaps even more obvious in images of Afghan women unveiled and supposedly liberated (Arat-Koc 2002), in local newspaper stories about women hosting parties to raise money for Afghan girls’ schooling (Calgary Herald 2005), or in reports which highlight the visits of prominent white women, such as Laura Bush and Flora McDonald, to Afghanistan (Chiang 2005). Amireh and Majaj argue that this

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Clearly, these kinds of repetitive, static images—what Arat-Koc calls the media’s stare—as well as sentimental narratives about Canadian and American women helping Afghan women, frame the publishing, marketing and reception of even far more nuanced narratives. Amireh and Majaj note the ways in which marketing pressures emphasize “Third World women’s ‘exoticism’ and ‘difference’ in the interest not of transcultural communication, but of profit” (2000: 6). As well as exploiting difference, the book industry also plays on many North American women readers’ desires for an idealized sense of connection with a text’s characters.4 Amireh (2000) notes the ways in which Nawal El Saadawi’s works are not only depoliticized through translation for an American audience, but also altered for the possibilities of identification. Reading that occurs in this spirit of unproblematized global sisterhood not only “provides legitimacy and support to existing and newly redefined relations of imperialism” but also impedes the possibility of a more critical gaze on “regressive political developments” occurring in the reader’s own country (Arat-Koc 2002: 54). Indeed, as I have tried to map out here, a complex nexus of discourses rooted in Eurocentrism, colonialism and racism mediate the relations between the author, the text and the reader, and also intersect with capitalism in the context of decisions about publishing, editing and marketing. While such discourses cannot erase the creative and critical resistances posed by texts, authors, ethical readers and committed teachers, they nonetheless provide frameworks for textual encounters which emphasize acts of identification, knowing and pity, and which necessitate, as Davis argues in the next section, pedagogical strategies for prompting dislocation and uncertainty.

Embracing Strangeness and Wonder: Philosophical Considerations when Reading and Teaching Reading Lolita in Tehran As Burwell has outlined, the current geopolitical context already channels two modalities for approaching Middle Eastern women’s texts: reading for global sisterhood and reading to make sense of “the enemy”within the clash of civilizations. Parallel to these two modalities, I would suggest that Reading Lolita in Tehran is being read and taught in one of two ways: (a) via empathetic identification, where the reader stands in the shoes of the protagonist and feels what she is feeling—in this case Nafisi, her students, and the other Iranian women she discusses; and (b) as a transparent lens which reveals the “truth” of post-revolutionary Iran and Muslim women. Both of these approaches to the text are problematic not only politically, but philosophically. Empathetic identification is problematic because it is inherently egocentric, while reading for understanding problematically assumes that the text offers a truth about the world which is complete and objective rather than partial and constructed, and thus fools readers into thinking they can “know” the Other and the world/culture/nation from which they write.

Empathetic identification implicitly perceives the Other through assumed similarities with the Self, erasing difference while promising to honour it. Both empathetic identification and reading for truth are not simply parallel to the discourses of global sisterhood and the clash of civilizations, but actually occur within these discursive regimes, forming part of the “horizon of expectations” ( Jauss 1982) which North American readers bring to these Iranian womenauthored texts. Readers, as a rule, draw upon their knowledge and experience of previous texts in order to make sense of new texts as they encounter them. According to Wolfgang Iser (1971, 1978), readers seek to “normalize” texts, reducing differences they encounter to samenesses with themselves.5 Drawing upon reception theory, Cornel Sandvoss explains this as an aspect of all ideational activity to align the Otherness encountered in the text, its alien elements, as closely with our past experience as possible. If we are successful, the text is normalized and ‘appears to be nothing more than a mirror-reflection’ (Iser 1971: 9) of the reader and his or her schemes of perception. (Sandvoss 2007: 29)

The exercise and cultivation of empathetic imagination is defended by Nafisi herself throughout Reading Lolita in Tehran as one of the justifications for teaching and reading literature (2003: 249). According to Nafisi it is only through imagining the experiences of others that individuals truly cultivate a moral stance towards individuals and the world around them.6 Ideally, according to Nafisi, reading fiction estranges us from ourselves and the complacency of our day-today existence, transporting us into the world and lives of Others in order to see the “Truth” of their situations (224). Unfortunately, empathetic identification doesn’t necessarily lead to an estrangement of self, but rather to a reassertion of the reader’s epistemic and moral position. One can argue that empathetic identification is inherently egocentric (Boler 1999; Davis 1995).7 We may think that when we empathize we see and feel through the eyes of another, but in fact what we are doing is reducing their Otherness to what is familiar and “known” about ourselves. This isn’t a question of boundary confusion—as we read, we continue to realize that we are distinct from the character with whom we identify; we do not think we are actually the character in the text (Nussbaum 2001: 327-28). Rather, what I am talking about is our patterns of “noticing and un-noticing” (Bogdan 1992: 231; Morgan 1989: 60) as we identify with characters. This is to say that empathetic identification sees only the samenesses and commonalities (some true, others fanciful) between the reader and textual Other while overlooking key differences (say of power,

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This suggests that North American women approach the texts of Nafisi and other Iranian women authors from within dominant discourses, reading for oppressed and/or resisting heroines with whom to empathize and identify and/or “exotic others” who will reveal to them truths about a foreign world and culture.

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privilege, location and differing cultural values and history). Thus, even if wellintended, empathetic identification is actually unethical; it is a one-sided venture, neither symmetrical nor reciprocal. Further, it gives us the false impression that we “know” and “understand” the Other—and behind this, that we truly know ourselves.

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In literature and other classrooms, empathetic identification with characters is often used as a means for readers to learn about the experiences of the Other. In introducing the study of literature, for example, the Ontario English Curriculum, Grades 9 and 10 (2007), states that “As a creative representation of life and experience, literature raises important questions about the human condition, now and in the past. As students increase their knowledge of accomplished writers and literary works, and vicariously experience times, events, cultures and values different from their own, they deepen their understanding of the many dimensions of human thought and human experience” (16, emphasis added). This is echoed in the writing assignments outlined in the teacher’s guide for Reading Lolita in Tehran, many of which prompt readers to make parallels between their lives and those of Nafisi and her students.8 In addition, as noted earlier, many post-secondary educators currently position Reading Lolita in Tehran as a resource in “understanding totalitarianism” and “understanding culture and cultural differences” (see note 3). Here empathizing, or seeing and feeling through another’s eyes, is an imaginative faculty which is grounded on the assumption that literature is transparent—a window onto another culture—masking both the constructed nature of the text and the partial perspective of the reader. Memoirs, like all texts, reveal only the partial perspective of their author. Texts (both fictional and nonfictional) and our imaginative readings of them are partial due to the unique situatednesses of both authors and readers, of which we are only partly conscious; texts and readings are also constructed intentionally by author biases and interests. That Reading Lolita in Tehran is a memoir or autobiography lends the text even more legitimacy and promise to non-Muslim readers as a source of “truth” about women and Islam. While I don’t want to suggest that empathetic identification always involves “reading for enlightenment,” or vice versa, I will suggest that in the literary memoir these modes of reading inform and reinforce one another. We assume that the author of a memoir is telling us the “truth” and further, if their position is one which is culturally, racially, or ethnically Other to us, we may believe that they have a more legitimate claim at revealing this “truth” because they have an “insider’s knowledge” via experience (Narayan 1988: 31-47). In trusting an Iranian woman author such as Nafisi, the “good feminist” intends to exercise what Uma Narayan calls “methodological humility” and “methodological caution” as a way of letting “the Other be Other” (ibid.). Much is unnoticed and left out of these readings, however, because both the text and our reading of it offer only partial perspectives. Our readings notice and don’t

notice according to our embeddedness in discourse and the tangible worlds of our existence. Although there are more (for rereading our readings can be an infinitely regressive act), I will discuss only two misreadings of Nafisi’s memoir, both focusing on women’s activism in Iran and North America.

Reading for enlightenment and empathetic identification not only misrepresents the Other, but also misrepresents the Self. Just as we assume the Other (Iranian women, Muslim women) has been transparently revealed to us, we assume that we are transparent to ourselves and capable of full self-knowledge. In actuality, our readings of Nafisi’s text overlook many “facts” about women’s situation in North America, specifically the erosion of women’s rights in North America over the past two decades. These include: attacks on abortion rights and the availability of birth control, abstinence (mis)education in public schools, and the current attempt by the Bush administration to dilute Title IX, the U.S. federal law which prohibits gender discrimination in education. (We can add to this list the rise of religious fundamentalism and neo-conservativism, the slow decline of the left in both the U.S. and Canada, and the loss of individual civil liberties in the name of “security”). So, as the Western feminist identifies with the rebellious Iranian women in Nafisi’s story, she simultaneously tells herself how much better (i.e., freer and thus morally superior) life is in North America for women. But this reading rests on a false position of moral superiority.

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In the first misreading, North American feminists may identify with Nafisi and her students through her accounts of the disciplining of the female body via the veil and Iran’s morality police which are punctuated by the resistance of individual women who appear in her memoir. Private acts of rebellion such as Nafisi’s refusal of the veil when teaching and the dramatic story of her friend, Laleh, who is chased throughout the university by a guard demanding that she cover her hair (Nafisi 2003: 160-63), appeal to Western liberal feminist sentiments which emphasize individual autonomy, rights and freedom rather than collective action, as well as shared assumptions about gender, drawing from the discourse of “global sisterhood” which overlooks differences of class, race and imperial power. Unfortunately, both the text and these identificatory readings leave much about Iranian women “unnoticed,” instead re-emphasizing merely what is known and celebrated about women’s resistance in the West (the independent heroine)9 while perpetuating Western stereotypes of Arab women.10 Nafisi’s emphasis on individual and private acts of rebellion overlooks the rich and diverse history of women’s activism in Iran—from the Babi movement’s support of women’s emancipation in the 18th century to women’s collective protest against the veil on International Women’s Day of 1979 as well as the current reformist work of Islamic feminists and the outspoken criticism of the limits of Khatami government reforms in secular women’s publications such as Zanan.11

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Knowing all this, our challenge as educators is the following: How should this text be read and taught? If one goal of literature education is estrangement of self, how do we prompt such dislocations in readers who are comfortable in their “easy identifications”? In the final section of this paper, Taylor reports on a multicultural literature education classroom which prompted students to read beyond their “horizons of expectation” by asking students to reread and interrogate their readings via “self-subversive self-reflection” (Felman 1987: 90)

Teaching Reading Lolita in Tehran in a Preservice Class

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This section reports on a narrative study of my experience teaching Reading Lolita in Tehran to a class of preservice teachers in a small Anglophone liberal arts university in Quebec. The readings explored locations, experiences and perspectives significantly different from our own in ways structured by continuing 12 histories of colonialism, racism, Orientalism, classism, homophobia and ablism. Conscious of the geopolitical dynamics outlined by Burwell, the pedagogy of the course I report on here offers students a variety of models or lenses of reading for estrangement and self-subversive self-reflection. This narrative study sprang from questions concerning the risks entailed in teaching this text in a fairly homogeneous white Judeo-Christian setting, and possible pedagogical strategies which might interrupt both exotifying, anthropological readings as well as passive, self-serving empathy (Boler 1999; Davis 1995). Based on a review of student response logs and field notes from class discussions, I explore the kinds of textual engagements enabled by the strategies through which I stage my students’ engagement of reading across social difference.13 The majority of the almost 250 students in our four-year BEd program are white,14 Canadian-born Anglophones aged 19-24 from ethnically homogeneous communities.15 Confirming much antiracism research (e.g., Levine-Rasky 2002; Sleeter 2001), my documentation of this course suggests that Canadian-born, white-identified preservice students tend to bring a poverty of cross-cultural experiences or analysis of structural discrimination and privilege, with notions of multicultural education as a fairly straight-forward program of well-intentioned liberal colour-blindness, “open-mindedness” and stereotype correction ( James 1995; Sleeter 2001; Sleeter et al. 2004; Solomon 2000). My experience also confirms research suggesting that for white women undergraduates, gender tends to eclipse all other forms of social difference and that discourses of global sisterhood figure prominently in their projection of personal gendered experiences, concerns and worldviews as a common, unifying connection to all women (Levine-Rasky 2002). The course in which I teach Reading Lolita in Tehran challenges future teachers to explore the complexity of critical multicultural education through an expanded language arts curriculum as they experiment with and observe themselves in

different strategies of reading across social difference and disparity. The reading strategies or “lenses” I progressively introduce and model for students are: Lens 1. Proliferating and diversifying identifications Lens 2. Situating ourselves as readers and learning to read our own readings symptomatically Lens 3. Reading like a writer Lens 4. Learning to listen, learning to witness Lens 5. Reading as a social justice teacher

The design of these second and third moments of the reading engagement reflects feminist anticolonial approaches to response-based criticism. This approach presumes a complex, dynamic reader who acts not as a sovereign, universal subject, but observes, historically situates and intervenes in her responses to the text as a member of a dialogic reading community (Schweickart 2004; Amireh and Majaj 2000). For many young readers (including many course members), this involves moving from an initial response of “I don’t like this book,” “I can’t relate” or “this book is boring,” to reading that response as a text itself, reflective of our own embeddedness in discursive topographies of power/knowledge and cultural authority. The lenses structure the second moment into a symptomatic rereading of students’ first response (Felman 1987: 23-24; Britzman 1998) which treats it as a point of embarkation for launching an investigation into the situated textuality of the reading encounter, the discursive construction of these texts and ourselves as readers. As students compare responses, discussion focuses less on notions of meaning as pregiven than on our active processes of meaning making (Davis 1996: 473). Staging our responses and feelings as reflective of the larger “structures of intelligibility” (Britzman 1998) and “horizons of expectations” ( Jauss 1982) that shape our engagement of the novel, I ask students to identify and sit in the points

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The central course assignment—writing a reading response journal as we read the five course novels/memoirs—folds and doubles readers’ engagement of each text into several moments within this process (Bogdan et. al. 2000). The first journal response, written individually by students as they read the first half of the book, documents their initial reactions to the text and their experimentation with forming diverse, unexpected, ambivalent or complex identifications with characters. In the second moment, as students listen to each other’s responses in literature circles and class discussions, they are challenged to reread and contextualize their responses. Student presenters and the instructor introduce activities and supplementary texts aimed at situating ourselves and the particular social and material practices, geopolitical transactions and ideologies articulated within the reading engagement, and at historicizing relations of colonization, marginalization and resistance within which we find ourselves implicated as readers. In the third moment, course members finish reading the book and write a response entry which rereads their first reading through any of the five lenses listed above.

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of friction, dislocation and ambivalence they are experiencing, not as products of the text itself but of our embodied engagement of it (Felman 1987: 80). In its design, this activity presumes a certain recursivity rather than a teleology or hierarchy of literary experience and literary literacy. Following Bogdan (1992) I assume readers’ direct responses to novels are not pre-critical, “stock” or “wrong” but rather, a form of situated knowledge essential to the affectively and critically engaged dialectical process of “extension, reflection, deepening, and possibly strengthening” of interpretation (Bogdan et al. 2000: 498). Class discussions explore our initial responses to the book as our only path into it, and consider the richest basis upon which to excavate the ways in which we interact with the text and draw insights into our own locations, the literary techniques used to engage us (Lens 3), and even our own investments in the value of literature and goals of reading. The aim is “to transform student reading so that it becomes multilayered, meta-cognitive, and passionately engaged” (Bodgan et al. 2000: 498), not to “correct” initial responses.

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Each time I teach this course, a student articulates her frustration at hitting a wall in her desire to identify with different characters, as she grapples with the distance and disparities she is coming to appreciate between her world, that of the characters and even the author.16 As the pedagogy increasingly troubles unproblematic identification, the fourth lens asks students to consider what other approaches we might take to listening to this story. It demands that we accept responsibility for the affective genealogies and social performativity of our readings, that we first ask how to listen before rushing to identify, and that we prepare to read as witnesses rather than as consumers. Responding to literature in ways that explicitly integrate analytical and personal stances clearly breaks with the academic traditions in which my students have been schooled. The case study reported below confirms the two dominant modalities of reading identified by Davis. The first is animated by the desire for an apparently seamless psychic union with characters (referred to below as “Reading for Empathetic Identification”), while the other modality is one of absolute difference and discovery, of reading Persepolis as history or documentary of all Iranian lives (termed “Reading for Enlightenment” below). To the extent that my students approached the memoir as a fictional text, their reading was motivated by a powerful desire to feel their way into the characters. To the extent that they approached it as a non-fictional text set in a society demonized through the “clash of civilizations” discourse, my students’ readings were overburdened by their anthropological and historical curiosity towards this unfamiliar world. The modalities described by Davis reflect my students’ initial interpretations and desires. However, as I trace in the examples below, rereading their journals through the five lenses allowed some students to take up these frustrated desires as a place of estrangement and ethical reflection.

Thwarted desires for empathetic identification figured prominently in my students’ responses to Reading Lolita in Tehran as they struggled to “relate to” the characters. “It’s hard for me to empathize with these women because I am able to walk freely down the street, in a public area, and be myself … my main struggles between both novels is that I have never gone through what these women are [sic] or have gone through” (Suzanne). After class discussions took up the question of what it means to “relate to” another and what might form the bases of such a relation, students began to experiment explicitly with more complex modes of identification (Lens 1). For example, one student challenged herself to imagine an oblique or unexpected commonality of sentiment with Mahshid in Reading Lolita, a character with whom she apparently shared very little:

The student carefully explores, not what she presumes to be the same feeling, but a dimension of her belief system which might play a central role in her life similar to that played by the character’s sense of spirituality. Reaching the limits of global sisterhood’s discursive dichotomies of veiled unfreedom/unveiled liberation, she challenges herself to seek not sameness/difference but resonant investments and complex identifications which shift the terms of identification. Taking up the second lens was vital to several students’ exploring the embeddedness of their reading investments within imperialist imaginaries of global sisterhood, Third World difference and the clash of civilizations circulating in our context of reception, and mapping the identificatory desires these horizons of expectations and investments inspired: My “gut feeling” was that she was oppressed by the veil.... For these women, they were fighting their oppressors in a different way than I could understand.... In my family I was always taught to fight for what I believed in.... I have also been raised a feminist.... Often times, this aspect of my upbringing can actually hinder me from understanding things from a different perspective. (Erica)

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I was particularly interested in the [student of Nafisi’s] who chooses not to remove her veil (327). She mentioned that she didn’t know what she would look like without it. My immediate reaction to this passage was a feeling of anguish, and I could also feel my passion for this topic mounting. My “gut feeling” was that she was oppressed by the veil. Regardless of her faith she should not have no [sic] sense of identity without it. I then began to challenge myself on this thought. I was thinking there must be an aspect of my life, or faith, that I consider an integral part of my identity, one that I may not be able to envision myself without. I then came up with my sense of spirituality. I have never been truly devoted to one religion but I have an undeniable sense of spirituality, or feeling of connectedness to both the earth and the universe. When I try to envision my life without this aspect of my life, it seems almost impossible to do so. One thing I can say for sure, is that I would be emotionally unstable. (Erica)

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Another student explored the contours, limits and potential violence of taking up a reading modality of empathetic identification, as she interrogated her expectations that “good” fiction should offer full textual transparence and emotional access: I realize that I use the feelings I share with characters to identify with their situation. I have a lot of trouble seeing the importance of a situation if I cannot picture how I would feel in that situation. I try very hard not to impose my own values or interpretations on the stories I read but I do give a lot of power to the ability of a book to make me feel as though I was [sic] in the book. (Sylvie)

As this student is prompted to problematize the geopolitical location and structures of feeling (Williams 1977) from which she constructs her empathetic modality of reading, her confidence in this form of knowing as an interpretive tool gives way to what Felman describes as more critically self-subversive selfreflective questions (1987: 990). As she observes, her egocentric and colonizing empathy “un-notices” and evacuates the responses of the other:

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The only drawback to relating to the books in this manner is that I am imposing the conditions of my feelings on those incidences where the characters go through similar experiences. I just assumed they would feel like I do or did. This limits the way I view the people of the world, or even the way I see the people in others [sic] imagination. (Sylvie)

This student recognizes the peril in her empathetic project: if only through feeling that she is able to take a character’s suffering seriously, the goals of multicultural education through literature seem to depend upon this fraught gesture of selfaffirmation, emotional projection and erasure (Boler 1999; Davis 1995). My students’ desire for instrumental knowledge about Iranian culture and history sprang not simply from feminist Orientalist imaginaries (Paydar 1995, cited in Bahramitash 2005b) and the moral panic of war, or from modalities of “reading for enlightenment” inherent in every reading engagement across social difference, but also from the particular anxieties and preoccupations of preservice teachers. Teacher education programs consistently promote knowledge as content to be mastered and taught, or as the basis “to understand and teach children of different cultures” (Britzman 1998). As we identified a pattern in journal responses shared in class of reading course novels “anthropologically” and situated this desire within our geopolitical context of reception, a space was opened to speculate on other approaches to “new” knowledge. Readers observed that it was particularly easy to surrender critical, accountable judgement to such a learned memoirist as Nafisi. This desire for enlightenment was undermined, however, by the explicit partiality and situatedness of texts read alongside Nafisi’s. For example, in Persepolis—Marjane Satrapi’s graphic memoir of growing up during the Iranian Revolution—the promise of “truth” held out by the autobiographical genre was betrayed by the unreliability of the child narrator. This led one student to seek the

voices of other Iranian women characters in Reading Lolita in Tehran in order to problematize and intervene into his own uncritical reading for “truth”: I made the mistake of reading [Persepolis] like I would read a comic. I was reading in a loose manner and not attempting to put the events unfolding in perspective. As I read moments from Reading Lolita it allowed me to revisit Persepolis and go over sections of the text that I had given the least of my attention to during the first read.... This let me ponder a quote from Reading Lolita … Mitra discusses the feelings we have as we read texts that are “different” to what we have experienced in the past: “Is it not sinful to feel pleasure when reading about something so terrible? Would we feel this way if we were to read about it in the newspapers or if it happened to us? If we were to write about our lives here in the Islamic Republic of Iran, should we make our readers happy?” (44). These were similar thoughts that went through my mind as I read Persepolis. Am I giving this text the respect it deserves? Am I allowed to smile and laugh at a comedic moment or should I not? These questions circled my head during the entire reading. (Stuart)

The most difficult aspect for me was making sense of the events that were shaping Marji’s life. My knowledge on the Iranian Revolution was very limited. Research for the presentation assisted me in coming to terms with these issues; however, the difficulty was still there. Marji described some of the events in such detail that as a reader I was reading it very quickly and wondering whether I just missed something or not.... It made me realize I was concentrating too much on the events and not Marji and her thoughts and experiences. The story is told from her point of view. She is relating to me how she felt and what she did during these times in her community. I was not giving myself enough chance to listen to her and what she was saying. (Stuart)

In this quotation, the concern for greater contextual knowledge is experienced ultimately as unsatisfactory and self-defeating, to the extent that it distracts from the testimonial demand for a specific form of attention or listening: I was looking past her words and attempting to seek out the information I was not receiving. During the late stages of the reading I began to picture her plight in more detail, and this is what allowed me to feel more empathy and discover a desire to learn more about the life she had lived. (Stuart)

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Comparing his patterns of response to the two texts, and incited by Mitra’s returned gaze, this student confronts the ethical implications of his own consumerist reading practices. In his rereading, he draws from Lens 4 (learning to listen) to navigate the tension in his curiosity between the desire to satisfy an ethically suspect appetite and the obligation to do justice to the character’s account:

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As this student problematizes his patterns of noticing and unnoticing, of “loosely” ignoring and seeking, he shifts his reading focus to consider how he might listen to the emotional truth or intention of her account; his subsequent “desire to learn more” is expressed in relation to this attention to the particularity of her telling. In this example, dissatisfaction with “history” leads this student back to empathy out of a sense of obligation to the perceived authorial demand that listeners attune their ears to the emotional rather than the “factual” truth of her account. The impulse does not necessarily exceed his articulated dichotomy of history/empathy, but locates his reading in the intermediary tension where each modality troubles the voyeuristic, egocentric desires of the other.

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Rereading our readings through the five lenses initiated a recursive practice of estrangement, then, in which “one can begin to study where one’s meaning breaks down … where identity is not the primal scene of reading as repetition but, instead … as a relation” (Britzman 1998: 92-94). In the pedagogical space opened up by this practice, many students were able to speculate on the limits of different reading modalities and the desires animating them. This opened up their initial instrumental reading modalities to critical dialogue, rendering these practices points of departure rather than arrival. This story of pedagogy is far from triumphant, however. My analysis of the entire class set of journals suggests that reading is always a voracious process of selfmaking. Within the teleological evaluative structure of teacher education, every new agenda, including that of self-subversive, self-reflexive and testimonial reading practices, is recruited to larger narratives of self-improvement, enlightenment and professionalization. This returns our attention to the complex dynamics of literary reception and the recursivity of our own pedagogical interventions into these. It reminds us of the resiliency of discursive fields within which our own pedagogy is situated, and the imperialist mythologies (Young 1990) which animate our readers’ desires for enlightenment, pity and positional superiority (Said 1978), and it underscores the importance of interrogating our own pedagogical desires and ventures.

Conclusion In concluding, we want to reiterate that reading transnational women’s texts can never be a neutral exercise, but rather demands a critical rethinking of the interpretive and pedagogical frameworks prevalent in classrooms. Such a rethinking requires that we pay close attention to the current circulation of Islamophobic discourses—including global sisterhood, Third World difference, and the clash of civilizations—that frame how Middle Eastern women’s narratives are edited, marketed and read within a North American context. It also requires that we name and interrogate the modes of reading through which we approach

such texts. As Davis’s theoretical framework and Taylor’s case study demonstrate, reading for empathetic identification and reading for enlightenment both reduce and misrepresent the Other, reproducing an imperialist gaze. Asking students to identify and problematize their own interpretations through a careful process of reading and rereading which models multiple lenses has the potential to prompt moments of estrangement and to reveal to the reader her own historical location, her erasures, her desires, the limits of her readings. This potential for more ethical engagements with literary texts prompts us to encourage further investigations into current literary education, and into the development of practices that interrupt imperialist longings and proliferate “self-subversive self-reflexive” readings and critical dialogue. Notes

1. Note for example the success of Roya Hakakian’s Journey to the Land of No (2004), Firoozeh Dumas’s Funny in Farsi (2003), Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis 1 and 2 (2003, 2004) and Azadeh Moaveni’s Lipstick Jihad (2005).

3. A brief Google search yields the following sample of courses: “Women and Islam” at the University of Wyoming, Fall 2004 ; “Anthropology in the Modern World” at Washington University in St. Louis, Fall 2005 ; “Conflict and Gender” at George Mason University, Fall 2005 ; “Understanding Totalitarianism,” two lectures focusing on Reading Lolita in Tehran in “Media, Culture, and Globalization,” at NYU .

4. See for example Elizabeth Long’s (2003) and Jane Missner Barstow’s (2003) excellent work on reading strategies employed by women’s book clubs.

5. This is not to say that readers can’t or don’t resist “preferred” or dominant readings. Nonetheless, as reception theorists suggest, there appears to be a strong pull towards the familiar—our deeply embedded patterns of reading, identification and making sense of the world. These can be unlearned of course and new modes of reading can replace them, as we argue later. 6. There are at least two layers of empathy in Nafisi’s text—first, the empathy which her students feel with the heroines of the novels they read and, second, the empathy felt by North American readers who identify with Nafisi and her students. At the beginning of Reading Lolita in Tehran, Nafisi proclaims the necessity of the reader’s imaginative empathy, writing I need you, the reader, to imagine us, for we won’t really exist if you don’t. Against the tyranny of time and politics, imagine us the way we sometimes didn’t dare to imagine ourselves: in our most private and secret moments, in the most extraordinarily ordinary instances of life, listening to music, falling in love, walking down the shady streets or reading Lolita in Tehran. And then imagine us again with all this confiscated, driven underground, taken away from us. (6)

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2. See for example: Margaret Atwood (2003), “Resisting the Veil: Reports from a Revolution,” in The Walrus; Michiko Kakutani (2003), “Book Study as Insubordination under the Mullahs,” in The New York Times; and Mona Simpson (2003), “Book Group in Chadors,” in The Atlantic Monthly.

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This quote is an explicit plea for the reader to identify with Nafisi and her female students on the basis of their samenesses and an appeal to “universal” human activities. Nafisi then asks the reader to empathize with a woman (whom she’s established is just like the reader) who has had all this “taken away from her.”

7. I borrow my definition of empathy from Susan Feagin (1996) who, in Reading with Feeling: The Aesthetics of Appreciation, defines it as a simulation in which the phenomenological quality of the emotional experience is the same for both the empathizer and the Other with whom one empathizes. In colloquial terms, empathy is “sharing the feelings of another” and is distinct from compassion, pity and sympathy. Empathy is most frequently confused with sympathy, which can be described as a “feeling for” the Other rather than a “feeling with” (83, 100).

8. Random House’s teaching guide for Reading Lolita in Tehran suggests the following writing assignments: “Nafisi narrates the incident of Sanaz’s arrest and punishment although she and her friends are completely innocent. Was there ever a time when you felt yourself to be a victim of injustice?” or “Nafisi begins with an explanation of a return to her home where she felt strange. In an essay please describe Nafisi’s experience and then relate it to an experience that you have had. Have you ever felt out of place at home? Why?” Other assignments encourage the student to produce research papers on the Iranian Revolution and the Iran-Iraq War using Nafisi as one of their sources. See http:// www.randomhouse.com/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9780812971064&view=printtg TOPIA 19 80

9. Further, Nafisi’s memoir and its heroine narrative(s) follow “the Eurocentric tradition in autobiography [which] is based on the concept of the individual self set in opposition to others” (McWilliams 2000: 271). 10. Mohja Kahf (2000) identifies three stereotypes of Arab women: (a) the victim of gender oppression; (b) the escapee of an oppressive culture; (c) the pawn of Arab male power (149).

11. I realize I risk essentializing these vastly different faces of the Iranian women’s movement, but what I wish to highlight here is that this history of women’s collective activism in Iran is left out of Nafisi’s text. See Afkhami (2004); Ettehadieh (2004); Bahramitash (2004); Price (1996); Keddie (2000); Moghadam (2002). 12. The main texts students read for this class include one short story, one memoir and four novels (Maguire 1994; Haddon 2003; Kingsolver 1988; Nafisi 2003; Morrison 1994; Maracle 1992).

13. In the study (2006-2006), response logs were collected from all class participants and coded through discourse analysis. The analysis also integrated notes recorded from class discussions of student logs, cited below without dates. 14. I use the term white not as an absolute identity, but as a contextually specific position of power and status vis-à-vis racialized groups constructed through modernist discourses of racial purity, moral authority and legal entitlement to naturalize white ethnicity as an authoritative and neutral, unmarked norm (Fine, et al. 1996; Frankenberg 1993; LevineRasky 2002; Roediger 1991). 15. The current student population in the program can be categorized in the following manner: 11.7 per cent are Francophone, less than 3 per cent are Allophone (speaking neither French nor English as their mother tongue), 35.6 per cent are from outside Quebec and less than 10 per cent are visible minority. Over two years, I have taught seven sections of the course discussed in this article, with class size ranging from 25–55. Visible minority students have numbered 1-4 per section.

16. Alongside Reading Lolita in Tehran, we read Persepolis (Marjane Satrapi’s graphic novel recounting her childhood during Iran’s Islamic revolution), Roksana Bahramitash’s

(2005a) article “Revealing Veiling and Unveiling” which meditates on the many meanings of veiling in different international settings, and texts on Iranian history (classical as well as 20th century), and we view the documentary Under One Sky: Arab Women in North America Talk about the Hijab (Kawaja 1999). References

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