REREADING THE ‘ROGUE STATE’

Abstract

This essay seeks to introduce the US political concept ‘rogue state’ to a postcolonial studies attuned to western military and other interventions in the Middle East. It traces the cultural impact of political and media discourses of women's rights in Iran, discourses attendant on the rogue state typology, and considers how representations of women in the emergent field of anglophone Iranian literature consolidate or contest them. Critically employing Max Saunders' work on ‘autobiografiction’ to assess this field, this essay argues that its dominant genres, Iranian women's autobiographies and anglophone Iranian fiction, have more in common formally than usually assumed. Azar Nafisi's bestselling memoir Reading Lolita in Tehran (2003) and Yasmin Crowther's novel The Saffron Kitchen (2006) reflect such formal overlap particularly well. While representations of women in Reading Lolita are mediated by fiction and obscure Islamic feminist identifications, Crowther draws on autobiographical experience in The Saffron Kitchen to explore, via the topos of migration, Iranian women's ‘multiple belongings’. Crowther's novel, this essay concludes, thus resists the commodified representations to which much of anglophone Iranian literature is indebted, and may act as a model for postcolonial approaches to representations of the Middle East in contemporary culture.