Reading Reading Lolita in Tehran in Idaho

Abstract

Aneoliberal tion with the Bush administrations military imperialism in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is supported by the many private think tanks, foundations, and university foreign policy centers that have since the 1970s played significant roles in the triumph of neoconservatism in the U.S. government. Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books (2003) is an excellent example of how neoliberal rhetoric is now being deployed by neoconservatives and the importance they have placed on cultural issues.1 For the past few years and especially in the critical period following 9/11, I have argued the importance of studying the long history of U.S. imperialism in order to understand the continuity of our current imperialist ventures abroad with traditional modes of political, economic, and cultural imperialism.2 I have also consistently recognized the need to theorize and interpret new methods of cultural imperialism appropriate to the postmodern economic conditions fundamental to globalizing capitalism. Within these new transnational flows of goods, information, services, research and technology, cultural products, lifestyles, and political institutions, the U.S. nation continues to play a crucial role, despite the apparent postnational character of these phenomena. In the aftermath of 9/1 1, U.S. nationalism has taken on a peculiarly isolationist aura that is at the same time compounded by a deep investment in its own international deployment. The nearly hysterical patriotism legitimating the military build-up for the second Gulf war and our continuing occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan are compounded by a rhetorical emphasis on the United States as the democratic model for the rest of the world.3 Although this emerging mythology cannot be read with complete clarity at this moment, it has certain precedents in nineteenth-century Manifest Destiny, even its late-