Homeland In/Security: A Discussion and Workshop on Teaching Marjane Satrapi's <i>Persepolis</i>

Abstract

One of the great challenges of teaching in the post–9/11 United States is contending with persistent stereotypes and misinformation about Islam, “Arabs,” “Arab Americans,” and the “Middle East” within our student bodies. Since 2003 we have been employing Iranian author Marjane Satrapi’s work in the classroom as a way to begin discussions about race, terrorism, and war, and particularly about how these issues are gendered. Her critically acclaimed graphic novel/memoir Persepolis, which relates how she grew up in Tehran during the fall of the U.S.-backed Mohammad Reza Pahlavi monarchy, the rise of the Islamic regime, and the advent of the Iran-Iraq war, has sold over a million copies worldwide and has been taught in hundreds of classrooms around the nation. Moreover, the animated film version of the book, which won the Jury Prize at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival and was nominated for Best Animated Film at the 2008 Academy Awards, has brought Satrapi’s story to an even larger audience.1 Persepolis has proven to be a useful tool to begin such explorations in courses that range from women’s studies to composition to history to politics, and it has yielded significant results in terms of students’ critical thinking. Our essay shares some of our insights from teaching Persepolis in a variety of classes at the University of Maine at Augusta and at Bates College over the last few years and provides some paradigms that may help others who are considering adopting such a text. It is worth noting that there are few similarities between the student populations at Bates College and the University of Maine at Augusta. The former primarily serves what are usually known as “traditional” college students: generally white, predominantly middleclass eighteento twenty-one-year-olds. The latter serves “nontraditional” generally white students, which means that their ages range from about sixteen to eighty, most of whom are working at least part time, most of whom are women, and many of whom are parents. When we began comparing notes about these two groups, we were sure that these students’ responses to Persepolis would vary considerably, but we have found over the last few years that they are remarkably similar. One of the principal ideas that unites them is a marked sense of “homeland