Western canon promotion can function as imperial cultural service

Evidence

There is another, not so hidden agenda behind Reading Lolita in Tehran. Decades into a struggle against the domination of a Eurocentric curriculum in the American academy—what is, in effect, a fight to restore democratic dignity to the world literary scene— there appears an Iranian former professor of English literature singing the glories of “Western classics”. Ignorant of, indifferent to, or opposed to projects for introducing progressive programs of comparative literature in the United States and Europe, or else dutifully performing a task for her neoconservative friends, Nafisi proclaims the “Western classics” the sole source of salvation for a Muslim nation. No one will ever know from Reading Lolita in Tehran that Iranians, like all other nations, have a literature of their own, that they are survivors in terms native to their own perils and promises, and that in the very same period that Nafisi was saving the souls of her seven students, Iranians were producing a glorious cinema that has captured the awe and admiration of the world, thus wresting the terms of their own dignity back from the tyrannical class that is now in charge of their destiny. — Hamid Dabashi, Brown Skin, White Masks, 401

Categorization

• SEED: An essay could trace how post-9/11 publishing markets rewarded diaspora voices who condemn their home regimes while ignoring native cultural production.