Women in the Literary Marketplace: The Anglophone Iranian Novel and the Feminist Subject

Abstract

This chapter turns to anglophone Middle Eastern literary production as an increasingly important site for the discursive and representational worlding of the region. I focus on the anglophone Iranian novel, and orient my discussion around questions of gender after the Iranian Revolution of 1979. After an overview of diasporic Iranian literary production in the context of geopolitical tensions with the West, I then delve more deeply into representations of gender. I argue that the massive popular and critical acclaim by which Azar Nafisi’s memoir Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books was met was based on its conformity to and reproduction of the “rogue state” idea of Iran, and its related disavowal of any form of feminism – especially Islamic feminism – other than the secular-liberal or universal. Yasmine Crowther’s and Marjane Satrapi’s (graphic) novels The Saffron Kitchen and Persepolis work against the cosmopolitan literary and political ideals to which Nafisi’s text subscribes, and instead plot trajectories of feminist agency in Iran rooted in and taking their contours from a sense of multiple belonging in nation, religion, family, and profession. They thus bring important Iranian perspectives to bear on the contemporary discussion of Islamic feminism in literature and culture.