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Article Excerpt
To mistake sound bites for deep thought, politics for action, reality shows for creative entertainment; to forget the value of dreams; to lose the ability to imagine a violent death in Darfur, in Afghanistan, in Iraq; to look at this as passing news: Are these not indications that now--more than ever we need the courage and integrity, the faith, vision and dreams that these books instilled in us? Is this not a good time to worry with Bellow's hero in The Dean's December about what will happen if a country loses its poetry and soul?... In this day and age when politics are paramount, belligerence the order of the day, and questions of culture take second seat to power, I'd like to propose that there is such a thing as the Republic of the Imagination. It is a country worth building, a state with a future, a place where we can truly know freedom.
--Azar Nafisi, "The Republic of the Imagination" (BW 10)
With all due respect to President Bush, the people of the world do not have to choose between the Taliban and the US government. All the beauty of human civilization--our art, our music, our literature lies beyond these two fundamentalist, ideological poles.
--Arundhati Roy, Power Politics (130)
Traditionally, the concept of the nation has played a central role in regulating the academic study of literature: most institutions organize literary study in terms of national languages and cultural traditions; literary texts are frequently interpreted as expressions of national identity; and critics routinely invoke some concept of the nation to explicate, categorize, and evaluate literary texts. For example, Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities advocates a particularly strong connection between literature and nationalism, going so tar as to reconceptualize the nation itself as an "imagined political community" forged less in some shared history of blood and soil than in the cultural crucible of national languages and literatures, which make it "possible for rapidly growing numbers of people to think about themselves, and to relate to themselves and others, in profoundly foundly new ways" (6, 36). Focusing specifically on Third World contexts, Fredric Jameson's "Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism" argues even more emphatically that "[a]ll third-world texts are necessarily ... allegorical, and in a very specific way: they are to be read as what I will call national allegories" because "the story of the private individual destiny is always an allegory 'of the embattled situation of the public third-world culture and society" (69). In short, critics regularly identify a strong interrelationship between nations and cultural narratives: not only does the concept of the nation influence how we interpret and teach cultural texts, but cultural texts also play a significant role in articulating, expressing, and even producing the "imagined political community" of the nation itself As Kwame Anthony Appiah explains, "intellectuals everywhere are now caught up ... in a struggle for the articulation of their respective nations, and everywhere, it seems, language and literature are central to that articulation" (53).
While I appreciate these critics' diverse attempts to explain the material, political significance of literary texts as cultural forces that shape the development of nationalist ideologies, I question the usefulness of relying so exclusively--and, in Jameson's case, so absolutely--on nationalism as a privileged conceptual framework for interpreting cultural narratives. In our rapidly globalizing world, contemporary cultural critics now largely reject the nation as a privileged locus for understanding and interpreting culture, and they have begun advocating instead a wide range of new transnational cultural models, ranging from Homi Bhabha's notion of "cultural hybridity" (The Location of Culture 4) to concepts such as "traveling cultures" (Clifford 17), "diasporic public spheres" (Appadurai, Modernity at Large 4), "postnational narratives" (Pease 2), "discrepant cosmopolitanisms" (Robbins 181), and "Global Souls" or "offshore beings" (Iyer 21, 22). (1) Since the publication of his seminal anthology, Nation and Narration (1990), many critics have embraced Bhabha's project of using poststructuralist and postcolonial critical methods to deconstruct the "impossible unity of the nation as a symbolic force," to explore the "particular ambivalence that haunts the idea of the nation," and to interrogate the nation-state's "transgressive boundaries," "'interruptive' interiority," and "in-between spaces" ("Narrating the Nation" 1, 4-5). Turning away from the "problematic unity of the nation to the articulation of cultural difference in the construction of an international perspective," Bhabha and other postnational critics now call into question simplistic nationalistic assumptions of a one-to-one, isomorphic relationship between geopolitical and cultural cartographies, preferring instead more complex models of hybrid cultural identities, diasporic cultural traditions, and postnational imagined communities less constrained by the narrow, policing jurisdiction of the nation-state ("Narrating the Nation" 5). (2) While this recent postnational turn in critical theory should not obscure the various ways in which nation-states continue to exert significant kinds of cultural, economic, and geopolitical influence, postnationalist critics have argued persuasively that the nation can no longer be simply assumed as an inevitable or unproblematic framework for cultural analysis.
In this paper, I will explore how several contemporary Iranian American novels--Nahid Rachlin's Foreigner (1978), Majid Amini's The Sunset Drifters (1989), Famoosh Moshiri's Against Gravity (2005), and Salar Abdoh's The Poet Game (2000)--increasingly turn away from the narrow jurisdiction of the nation-state to explore a more expansive and more complex sense of how Iranian American experiences are shaped by a wide range of transnational influences and contexts. The characters represented in these novels not only frequently cross and/or precariously straddle the national boundaries between Iran, the United States, and several other European, South American, Southeast Asian, and Middle Eastern countries, but they also explore the complex forms of cultural hybridity that permeate these nations from within--including competing economic and political ideologies, alternative minority cultural traditions and political agendas, and various exilic and diasporic experiences that do not fit nicely into the neat, tidy national boundaries established by state bureaucracies. Ultimately, I argue that contemporary Iranian American literature provides a clear and compelling example of the recent postnational turn in contemporary critical theory. Because the diasporic Iranian American subjects depicted in these novels hold complex, hybrid "commitments and attachments" that are "more pressing, more continuous, and sometimes more distracting than the nation-state can afford," these characters live individual and collective lives that are "often at odds with the projects of the nation-state" (Appadurai, "Sovereignty without Territoriality" 42). Instead of forcing their postnational, diasporic characters to conform to the narrow, unimaginative political ideologies of one nation-state or another, contemporary Iranian American writers have begun arguing that we should fight to establish and defend what Azar Nafisi describes as the more expansive "Republic of the Imagination," a "country worth building, a state with a future, a place where we can truly know freedom" beyond the fundamentalist ideological jurisdiction of the nation-state.
More importantly, not only do I argue that contemporary Iranian American literature exemplifies critical theory's recent postnational turn, but also that it critically interrogates the concept of the postnational itself, raising difficult and complex...
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