A memoir’s reception is shaped by matching Western expectations
Evidence
Reading Lolita in Tehran tells the story of Azar Nafisi’s spell holding illicit weekly English literature classes for seven young women at her home in Tehran in the mid-1990s. The action takes place in the years just before Nafisi’s departure for the United States in 1997 but ranges back in time to encompass her youthful idealism in the days before the revolution in 1979 and her vulnerable and ultimately untenable position as a university tutor in the Islamic Republic, where free thought and Western ideas are severely curtailed through censorship and periodic purges. As Nafisi reminds us, her story is told with hindsight, over a span of time that includes “off-stage” political events such as the collapse of the Soviet Union and, more immediately, 9/11 and the war on terror. So a book that insistently contrasts the freedoms of the United States—the land of aspiration and fulfillment to which characters look for escape and a model of a better life—with the (particularly gendered) oppression of the Islamic Republic of Iran could expect a warm reception from many readers in the West. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 218
Categorization
- XREF: Sets up how the audience’s pre-existing Islamophobic frame conditions which novels get celebrated — the same dynamic running through the reader’s two focal novels. — connects to: A subtle memoir can prepare American readers to accept a hard line on Iran; A bestselling memoir can reduce a nation to a self-exculpating caricature; The Muslim misery memoir genre gains authenticity precisely by reinforcing Western moral claims — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 67 (+4 more)
- yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: A subtle memoir can prepare American readers to accept a hard line on Iran; A bestselling memoir can reduce a nation to a self-exculpating caricature; The Muslim misery memoir genre gains authenticity precisely by reinforcing Western moral claims — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 67 (+4 more)
Broader Connections
- Western success can mark an exile memoir as suspect native informer
#complicates(0.82) — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 219