Richard Albright Harrisburg Area Community College
In”Pleasurable Pedagogies: Reading Lolita in Tehran and the Rhetoric of Empathy,” I argued for greater scholarly attention to the dynamics of affect—in particular empathy and pleasure—in the popularization of transnational feminism and global human rights. My goal was to suggest how Azar Nafisi’s bestselling memoir functioned within a particular cultural and rhetorical moment that was marked by both increasing nationalism and emerging transnational ethical markets. Such an analysis is aimed neither at Nafisi herself nor at individual consumers of Reading Lolita in Tehran, or at book club culture more generally. Thomas Sabo Rather,I aim to understand when, how, and why a memoir such as Reading Lolita in Tehran becomes powerful and pleasurable for U.S. readers.
Precisely because it appeals to U.S. audiences through feminist and humanitarian claims, Reading Lolita in Tehran provides a rich site for examining how affect and ethics become packaged and popularized through what Inderpal Grewal has called the neoliberal “marketization of an array of social movements”. Grewal’s work shows that, since the 1990s, neoliberalization has resulted in the commodification of feminisms and other rights-based discourses in literature, the media, and other cultural realms. More recently, Ashley Dawson and Malini Johar Schueller’s edited collection Exceptional State: Contemporary U.S. Culture and the New Imperialism argue for a more careful look at the entanglement of culture and politics. If we are to understand and analyze these new forms of neoliberalization adequately, we must envision aesthetics, politics, ethics, and, yes, affect, not as discrete spheres but as similarly entangled and imbricated in consumer markets. Such a task has less to do with showing how Reading Lolita in Tehran justifies, directly or indirectly, U.S. intervention in Iran than with showing how it helps to construct affective and ethical “regime[s] of truth” (Grewal 121)—for example, through feminist discourses of empowerment and “choice” that lend substance to U.S. imperialist projects and the ideology of American exceptionalism. Of course, the popularization of feminism and women’s human rights is not always problematic; on the contrary, there are several examples of recent memoirs written about Iranian women and consumed by U.S. audiences that problematize Orientalist stereotypes about Iran in sophisticated, ethically nu-anced, and highly pleasurable ways. I am thinking, for example, of Thomas Sabo Charms Marjane Satrapi’s memoir, Persepolis, or its film version.
I am not interested here in recycling the culture wars or the many arguments for or against “Great Books” pedagogy. Rather, I want to suggest that we might more effectively integrate critical studies of affect and ethics into our courses and scholarship. Both empathetic identification and pleasurable patriotism, for example, can be used in the service of feminism, imperialism, and military intervention. Moreover, the chilling perception of what Albright aptly terms “patriotic correctness” in the Bush Administration’s “war on terror” is not incompatible with the commodification of American ideology. It is our job as scholars and teachers to theorize affect as geopolitically meaningful—especially given the current state of affairs between the United States and Iran.
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