Azar Nafisi
Azar Nafisi,
Ph.D. (
Persian: آذر نفیسی) (born December
1955) is an
Iranian academic and writer who currently resides in the
United States. Nafisi's bestselling book
(Reading Lolita in Tehran|Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books) has gained a great deal of public attention and been translated into 32 languages.
Biography
Nafisi is currently a Visiting Fellow and lecturer at the Foreign Policy Institute of
Johns Hopkins University’s
School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) in
Washington, DC.She is the daughter of
Ahmad Nafisi, a former mayor of
Tehran, and
Nezhat Nafisi, who was among the first women to be elected to the
Iranian parliament. Nafisi is married to Bijan Naderi, and has two children, Negar and Dara.Born in Iran, Nafisi was sent to school in
Lancaster,
England at the age of 13.
(1) She moved to the United States in the last year of her high school career. She received a Ph.D in
English and
American literature at the University of Oklahoma. She also holds an honarary doctorate from Bard College. Nafisi returned to Iran in 1979 where she was a professor of
English literature at the
University of Tehran. She taught at the University of Tehran, the
Free Islamic University, and
Allameh Tabatabaii before her return to the United States in 1997 — earning national respect and international recognition for advocating on behalf of Iran's intellectuals, youth and especially young women. She was expelled from the University of Tehran for refusing to wear the mandatory Islamic veil in 1981, and did not resume teaching until 1987.
(2)Having witnessed the
Iranian revolution and the subsequent rise to power of the
Ayatollah Khomeini, Nafisi soon became restless with the many stringent rules imposed upon women by her country's new rulers. She appreciated the freedom that women in other countries took for granted, and which women in Iran had now lost.In
1995, finding herself no longer able to teach English literature properly without attracting the scrutiny of the authorities, she quit teaching at the university, and instead invited seven of her best female students to secretly attend regular meetings at her house, every Thursday morning. They studied literary works considered controversial and even dangerous to read in post-revolutionary Iranian society such as
Lolita,
Madame Bovary and
The Great Gatsby, as well as novels by
Henry James and
Jane Austen, attempting to understand and interpret them from a modern Iranian perspective.Nafisi left Iran on
June 24,
1997 and moved to the United States, where she wrote
(Reading Lolita in Tehran|Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books), a book where she shares her experiences as a woman living and working under the regime of the
Islamic Republic. In the book, she declares "I left Iran, but Iran did not leave me."
Criticism
In 2006
Columbia University professor
Hamid Dabashi compared
Reading Lolita in Tehran to "the most pestiferous colonial projects of the British in India," and asserted that Nafisi functions as a colonial agent. He then classed Nafisi with the U.S. soldier convicted of mistreating prisoners at Abu Ghraib. "To me there is no difference between
Lynndie England and Azar Nafisi."
(3) (4) (5) (6) (7) (8) Critics such as Dabashi have accused Nafisi of having close relations with
neoconservatives. In the acknowledgements she makes in
Reading Lolita in Tehran, Nafisi writes of
Princeton University historian
Bernard Lewis as
"one who opened the door". Nafisi, who opposed the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, rejects such accusations as "guilt by association," noting that she has both "radical friends" and "conservative friends."
(9)Works
- Nafisi, Azar. "Images of Women in Classical Persian Literature and the Contemporary Iranian Novel." (In the Eye of the Storm: Women in Post-Revolutionary Iran). Ed. Mahnaz Afkhami and Erika Friedl. New York: Syracuse University Press, 1994. 115-30.
- Anti-Terra: A Critical Study of Vladimir Nabokov’s Novels (1994)
- Nafisi, Azar. "Imagination as Subversion: Narrative as a Tool of Civic Awareness." Muslim Women and the Politics of Participation. Ed. Mahnaz Afkhami and Erika Friedl. New York: Syracuse University Press, 1997. 58-71.
- "Tales of Subversion: Women Challenging Fundamentalism in the Islamic Republic of Iran" in Religious Fundamentalisms and the Human Rights of Women (1999)
- Reading Lolita in Tehran (2003)
References
-
[BBC 2004 Interview with Nafisi Retrieved August 11, 2006]
-
[The Steven Barclay Agency is Azar Nafisi's Official Agent for Speaking Engagements]
-
[Reading Lolita at Columbia]
-
[Thomas S. Hibbs on Reading Lolita in Tehran on National Review Online]
-
[The attack on Reading Lolita in Tehran. - By Gideon Lewis-Kraus - Slate Magazine]
-
[ Boston Globe , Women and Islam, by Cathy Young, The Boston Globe , October 23, 2006 [weblink]weblink ]
-
[ A Collision of Prose and Politics; A Prominent Professor's Attack on a Best-Selling Memoir Sparks Debate among Iranian Scholars in the U.S., by Richard Byrne, - Chronicle of Higher Education, October 13, 2006 weblink - weblink ]
-
[ Native Informers and the Making of the American Empire, by Hamid Dabashi, Al-Ahram Weekly, June 1, 2006 -weblink ]
-
[Richard Byrne, "A Collision of Prose and Politics]
External links
Critical
آذر نفیسیAzar Nafisiアーザル・ナフィースィーAzar NafisiAzar Nafisi
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