The higher learning
More on Dabashi’s article. I’ve gritted my teeth and read it all now. It’s bad all the way through – it doesn’t take a surprise turn for the better on page 7 or 10.
One thing he wants us all to get is that literature is crucial to empire; in fact it pretty much makes it happen and keeps it going. Without literature – none of it would have happened. Therefore people who teach comparative literature are immensely important. Right? Right.
From Edward Said to Amy Kaplan and Gauri Viswanathan, we now have a sustained body of scholarship, extended from the US, through Europe, to India and by theoretical implication all around the colonised world, a persuasive argument as to how the teaching of English literature has historically been definitive to the British, and now by extension American, imperial proclivities.
Ooh, all the way from one person to two more people, we now have a ‘sustained’ body of scholarship about how – mmph – the teaching of English literature has historically been definitive to imperial proclivities. Hahahahahahahaha! Oh, that’s a good one. (As for what it means, well, don’t press these questions. Surely you know what being definitive to proclivities means, don’t you? All sophisticated scholars know that.)
The publication of Azar Nafisi’s [RLT] is the most cogent contemporary case of yet another attempt at positing English literature yet again as a modus operandi of manufacturing trans-regional cultural consent to Euro- American global domination. [geddit? manufacturing consent] The factual evidence of the connection of Azar Nafisi to the US leaders of the neoconservative movement [he means she has some neocon friends] and her systematic deprecation of Iranian culture,…glorifying instead a canonised [ooh, canonised – she’s one of those canon people – that’s bad] inner sanctum for an iconic celebration of “Western literature,” [eww] are additional factors in placing her squarely at the service of the predatory US empire–the service delivered via the most cliché-ridden invocation of the most retrograde Oriental fantasies of her readers in the United States and Europe.
Right. She has neocon friends and she writes a book about reading in a small private group, and that places her squarely at the service of the predatory US empire. Case proven; take her away.
I find it prophetic, were it not so obscene, that in the space of the front and back covers of [RLT] we have an updated pedophiliac Orientalism documented so succinctly: on the front cover the picture of two veiled Iranian teenage “girls” and on the back the endorsement of Professor Humbert Lewis of Orientalism himself.
That’s the first of three times he does that – he calls Bernard Lewis Humbert: either Humbert Lewis or (throwing caution to the winds) just plain Humbert Humbert. Because? Well, he hates him; isn’t that a good enough reason?
And now he buckles down to some serious abuse.
The cover of [RLT] is an iconic burglary from the press…In the age of “the end of history,” as Azar Nafisi’s fellow neocon Francis Fukuyama has theorised it…Here again, Azar Nafisi proceeds to crop the picture she portrays inside her book in a fashion similar to the visual burglary she and her publisher commit on its cover–stealing a part of truth to tell a bigger lie.
Nafisi is not in fact a neocon. She has neocon friends; she’s not a neocon herself. But Dabashi feels entitled to go from innuendo about her ‘connections’ to simply calling her something she isn’t – in the very same breath ranting about a cropped picture and burglary, stealing, and a bigger lie. He’s a nasty piece of work.
Decades into a sustained struggle against the domination of Eurocentric curriculum in the US academy, fighting to restore democratic dignity to the world literary scene, Nafisi once again pushes the clock back for about half a century by a singular and exclusive praise for the Eurocentricity of the literary imagination. Promoting the racist cause of a singular literary canon in the United States and Europe goes hand in hand with denigrating, dismissing, or ignoring the existence of non-Euro-American literary and cultural traditions. No one will ever know, reading [RLT], that Iranians, like all other nations, have a literature of their own…
Okay stop right there. What’s on page 6 of RLT? “We read Persian classical literature, such as the tales of our own lady of fiction, Scheherezade, from A Thousand and One Nights…”
Oh never mind that, she’s still trampling the democratic dignity of the world literary scene, and by golly she’s certainly still promoting a racist cause, because that’s an automatic fifty points for Dabashi, even if it doesn’t happen to be true.
But joining the neocon takeover of the democratic institutions of the US by a band of militant renegades, and thus helping build a literary canon for a predatory empire, is an entirely different matter. In the former project you restore dignity and hope to a nation and its cultural resistance to imperial domination; in the latter you seek to steal such dignity and hope from them.
Well he’s already told us, or ‘demonstrated’ as he keeps asserting of scholars he approves of, that Nafisi (or her publisher) is a burglar who steals bits of pictures; clearly she steals everything that’s not nailed down.
Nafisi has never taught at any liberal arts college or university in the US. She is entirely ignorant of or indifferent and hostile to the decades of struggle that racialised minorities and women’s and minority studies have endured to make a dent in the vacuum-packed curricular terrors of the white establishment. At a time when the entire nation is engaged in a radical debate about the necessity of curricular diversity, Azar Nafisi joins ranks with the worst reactionary elements singing the praise of the “Western masterpieces.” After decades of consistent struggles, native-Americans, African-Americans, Latin-Americans, Asian-Americans, feminists, and scores of other denigrated and disenfranchised communities, have successfully engaged the white male supremacist canon of the US higher education…
Translation: Nafisi is not a hotshot at Columbia like me, so it’s an outrage that people bought her book. She’s entirely ignorant, unlike brilliant erudite but radical me, and she’s hostile to minorities, unlike radical anti-racist wonderful me (did I mention I teach at Columbia?) and she’s in cahoots with the curricular terrors of the white establishment (what terrors? You know what terrors!) and she is not one of the Good People who have fought a bloody war with the white male supremacist canon (those canon wars, they’re the worst). She’s clueless and out of it because she doesn’t realize that the entire nation is engaged in a radical debate about the necessity of curricular diversity – how can she not know that? Because she’s evil, and I’m good. Stern, but good. End of translation.
Imagine taking a class with that guy.
It is a truth universally acknowledged that Jane Austen was definitive to British imperial proclivities…
Too bad though that poor Mr Dabashi has been forced to teach in “the predatory US empire”.
Who knew that evisceration could be so beautiful?
Well done, Ophelia…
Simper.
Thank you, David.
For what it’s worth, “Rana” on the CT thread (now scrolled off-screen), who lived in Tehran until 1991, thinks Nafisi’s book “rings true”. About Dabashi, she says (from the CT thread):
“I know Dabashi well. The Wikipedia entry is far too kind, a gushing postmodernist paean, and some of the names it drops for comparison are not people I find entirely congenial. Dabashi strains to see Khomeinism as a manifestation of ‘liberation theology’ and as a bulwark against what Jalal Al-e-Ahmad called ‘westoxication’. You can read his attack on Nafisi in that light. Many leftists, including my father, welcomed Islamism as the (temporary) vanguard of genuine revolution in Iran. A quarter century later, the Velayat-e faqih is firmly entrenched, Islamism has spread well beyond Iran’s borders, and Dabashi is still making the same excuses.”
Also (on the CT thread) there’s “Doug M.”:
“N.B., I could get in my car after breakfast and be in Teheran for a late lunch. We get a lot of Iranians up here. And while the reality is more complex than Nafisi depicts, she’s not wrong or lying… modern Iran is a bad place to be a woman, and a horrible place to be a woman who wants to take part in the intellectual life of the greater world.”
Here’s his blunt response to a comment that seeks to justify Dabashi’s attack on Nafisi by noting her friendship with orientalist scholar Bernard Lewis.
“Abb1: ‘[Nafisi] should find herself some better friends.’
Shorter Abb1: Bitch had it coming.”
Yeah. See Jonathan Rose’s terrific book The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes.
Thanks for those, Lynn.
The idea that ‘the entire nation is engaged in a radical debate about the necessity of curricular diversity’ is hysterical. Americans I know don’t seem to be debating it. Maybe Dabashi doesn’t know ‘the entire nation’ very well.
Sounds like taking one of his classes would be extremely entertaining, as long as you weren’t looking for a decent final grade – I expect he’d want to exact some form of revenge on any undergraduate who had the temerity to rip his arguments to pieces…I mean, it’s not as if he’s making it difficult or anything… :-)
Lovely demolition OB. Brightened up my morning just a smidgeon. Cheers for that!
:-)
Gladja liked it!
Me, I think taking a class with him would be entertaining for only about five minutes; then the homicidal irritation would become irksome.
Oh, I’m guessing that would irritate the bejesus out of him. He would probably write an article for the college rag calling me a neocon comprador intellectual bent on egging the Bush admin on to nuke Iran and probably Pakistan and Indonesia as well; then, calming down a little, he would call me a liar and a thief and a burglar; then he would call me a neocon comprador elitist Westernizing kaffeedrinking Orientalist uncredentialed imperialist colonialist canon-hugging racist illiterate Eurocentric bad word. Then he’d do it all again, then a few more times, just to make sure.
But fun though that would be, it wouldn’t be worth it, nor would the public disagreeing with him. I know people like him – posturing vituperative macho more-radical-than-thou types. They make me feel ill. I can barely stand to read him; the real thing would be a nightmare.
This article really brightened up my mood. Then I looked at his aforementioned Wikipedia article and that ruined everything. Oh well.
I was interested particularly in the fragment “She is entirely ignorant of or indifferent and hostile to…”
Which is she? Is she ignorant or is she indifferent/hostile? How can you be both indifferent and hostile to something at the same time? I may be being horribly ignorant (or pedantic) here, but that seems a rather basic error to make, particularly when it is in a published article. And to attack someone in such intemperate terms seems particularly out of place when you don’t even seem to know exactly what they are guilty of.
And of course, all this is particularly embarrassing when you are any kind of academic (especially one at Columbia).
I beleive the phrase for creeps like Dabashi is:
“Traison des clercs”
“How can you be both indifferent and hostile to something at the same time?”
Indeed. And he does a lot of that kind of thing – most glaringly in the interview, where he bouncingly declares “Of course I do not mean “recruitment” literally. How would I know if she was or was not recruited to do anything? I am not privy to any such information” then promptly goes on to say “As you rightly document this, I am not “suggesting” anything. I am saying that chapter and verse people like Azar Nafisi have been actively involved in asking the United States officials for what inside the Beltway they call “regime change”—and now there are reports that she and her ilk—people ranging from Abbas Milani and Moshen Sazegara to Amir Taheri, Roya Hakakian and Ramin Ahmadi—are actually on a frequent flier program to and from DC, with regular visits to the White House, the State Department, and Almighty only knows what other doors Elliott Abrams (“the Neocons Neocon”) is opening for them.”
Well which is it?!
And, exactly: the guy is not just an academic, but one at Columbia. It’s all extremely embarrassing.
I’m a little late to this particular party but I have to add the following comments:-
Dabishi is evidently influenced by Edward Said. Said is an elegant and restrained writer – “But we must be as fastidious as possible,” he says in Culture and Imperialism. What would he have made of all this boorish flailing about by his disciple? The highly educated Professor Frankenstein appalled at the lurching monster, I would guess.
That bit about the picture of the girls on the cover – well, he reads a lot more than I ever did, but then of course reading more and more from less and less is his job. So he compares them to pictures that are obviously erotic in intention, of the harem woman of fantasy doing the dance of the Seven Veils, and says that is how they are supposed to be seen. Input needed from heterosexual men – is that how you saw (or “saw” as a post modernist would write) them? As for me, they were two young women from Teheran and Iran, a city and a country much in the news, which does not belong in my mind to an exotic Orient but in the realistic worlds of modern politics and modern totalitarianism in Muslim dress.
PS I tried to get hold of Nafisi’s book but I’m glad to say there are long waiting lists at my local libraries.
Yeah. Said’s influence has been malign in a lot of ways (see Ibn Warraq’s article on the subject here at B&W), but part of the reason he has that influence is that he did indeed write well; his epigones, not so much.
Dabashi’s frenzy over the cover was really ludicrous – embarrassing. He’s an embarrassing guy. I really do wonder what his colleagues at that place near Riverside Drive make of him.