Reading Lolita in Tehran follows Nafisi's experience living under the Islamic Republic of Iran until her immigration to the United States in 1997. Nafisi's story and her detailing of the growing political strife in Iran are intertwined with the stories of seven of her female students, with whom she starts a secret underground book club in her apartment shortly after being fired from the University of Tehran. At these book clubs, Nafisi and her students read many of the Western classics banned by the regime; each section of the memoir is divided according to one of the books - The Great Gatsby, Pride and Prejudice, and Daisy Miller, to name a few - and the texts often reinforce some aspect of their own lives, including issues of marriage and men and desires for freedom and the American dream. The title text, Nabokov's Lolita, serves as a metaphor for the regime in Iran; namely, how the government has imposed its own ideological beliefs and visions of reality onto society, stripping Iranians of their ability to create an autonomous identity for themselves.
In many ways, Reading Lolita in Tehran directly speaks to the objectives informing this curriculum. It offers a glimpse into the multifaceted and idiosyncratic lives of multiple women in Iran, challenging the Western tendency to label all Middle Easterners as homogenous. It is also an ode to the liberating power of literature, for many of these women are able to make sense of the regime and imagine the potential for what could be through the narratives they engage with. However, the novel offers a unique lens for thinking about perspective because it has often been criticized for undoing the mission of many diasporic writers, such as Persepolis' Satrapi and Funny in Farsi's Dumas, to reshape the global image of Iran and the Middle East. Nafisi's aristocratic Iranian family and her education in America potentially inform the deficit lens through which she talks about Iran in her memoir, and the decision to structure her memoir around Euro-American novels reinforces the Orientalist idea that the East can only be "saved" by the West. Furthermore, the cover of her memoir - two Iranian women in veils - perpetuates stereotypes of Eastern women as oppressed, but also gives way to questions about the role the literary market plays in controlling how these memoirs are advertised to a Western readership.
What ethical and moral responsibilities must Iranian memoirists consider when writing to a Western audience?
How might a diasporic narrative be damaging to a country's national image?
What is the relationship between Iranian memoirists and the Western literary market? To what extent do Iranians have control over how their stories are commercialized and read?
What factors determine how stories are presented and whose stories get to be told?
Students will recognize how memoirists can inadvertently contribute to their own self-Orientalization; their social positioning/upbringing may bias their perspective and provoke the very Orientalist frameworks that they insist on exposing.
Students will understand that writers don't have complete authority over how their stories are published. They will be able to analyze how different aesthetic choices by American publishing companies (cover art, titles, blurbs) may reinforce the stereotypes diasporic narratives are attempting to resist.
In addition to the resources listed in the lesson plans above, this video can serve as an additional source for classroom discussion or debate. Nafisi reflects on the forms of power and control that are exerted through writing; it's an occasion for people to claim the power they have over themselves and present their own version of reality in order to resist tyrannical forces. However, she contends against academics who believe that writing is a politicized act, stating that "writing transcends its own time, place, and prejudices of the author."
Given the criticism that has been written against Nafisi's use of Orientalist-esque tropes in her memoir, to what extent is her statement true?
Yassmin Abdel-Magied's Ted Talk explores her relationship to her veil, discusses how people’s biases about those who wear the veil are informed by their own positionality/upbringing, and challenges her audience to revise their initial perceptions.
In Reading Lolita in Tehran, Nafisi voices her disdain for the veil, professing that it's a symbol for female oppression and invisibility, and a sign of Iran's backwardness. Nafisi's text should be supplemented by opportunities for students to hear and read other perspectives on Middle Eastern head/body scarves.
How might Nafisi's opinion be widely influenced by her social position and Western education?