Nafisi’s memoir frames Iran and America as straightforward freedom-oppression opposites

Evidence

Nafisi instead deals in much more straightforward polarities. The most insistent of them is the juxtaposition of freedom and oppression. The former is enshrined in the United States, a country representing the future and a talismanic space whose allure is spread by the emergence of satellite television and the stories told by visiting relatives who now live there. The latter is the provenance of the Islamic Republic of Iran, life denying, backward, and unfree, where existence is a daily round of harassment, propaganda, and anti-American sloganeering. The role of the canonical Western novels that Nafisi shares with her students is to create small pockets of freedom: she contrasts “the open spaces the novels provided and the closed ones we were confined to.” — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 222

Categorization

• XREF: This is exactly the polarity critique Morey develops against Hamid and Naqvi’s more ambivalent handling — central to the reader’s hinge work. — connects to: A bestselling memoir’s one-dimensional Iranian characters helped legitimize a tough US line on Iran.
• ADDENDUM: Relevant as contrast-material for the immodesty piece: the illicit dressing in Nafisi functions as coded resistance, unlike the moral-panic dress anxieties in that essay.