Western success can mark an exile memoir as suspect native informer

Evidence

In a spirited demolition of Nafisi and her book, Hamid Dabashi has noted Nafisi’s connections with noted neoconservatives—some of whom, including Bernard Lewis, Fouad Ajami, and Paul Wolfowitz, were advisers to or even members of the Bush administration. Dabashi sees Nafisi as a “native informer of the worst kind, a voice putatively from the troubled country of Iran but in fact an intellectual carpetbagger who provides the “public illusions that empires need to feed themselves.” Nafisi, he asserts, engages in the systematic denigration of Iranian culture in favor of advancing the literary glories and cultural superiority of her Western sponsors. Despite hailing from only a small body of privileged émigrés, Nafisi is taken to be the authentic voice of oppressed Iranian womanhood. … Yet, says Dabashi, perhaps the text’s greatest sin is its evacuation of history: “What is impossible to miss is the almost total absence of any sort of Iranian context.… There is not a single word as to why millions of people poured into streets and risked (and often lost) their lives to topple one of the most savage military dictatorships in modern history. It is as if the sole purpose of the 1979 revolution had been to inconvenience Nafisi.” — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 219

Categorization

• DEFINE: “Native informer of the worst kind” is a key critical term: a privileged émigré whose account displaces full historical context and serves imperial needs.
• ADDENDUM: Directly relevant to using Hamid and Naqvi as evidence: The distinction here between a work that evacuates history and one that embeds it is exactly the contest-vs-reinforce sharp edge Morey is developing.
• XREF: The ‘native informer’ and ‘evacuation of history’ critique transfers to asking whether The Reluctant Fundamentalist or Home Boy similarly strip Pakistani/Iranian domestic context for Western legibility.