Monday, October 30, 2006
Miss Kelly picks up on a Boston Globe story featuring Columbia Professor Hamid Dabashi's attacks on Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books author, and fellow Iranian, Azar Nafisi. (see previous: Peretz on Dabashi and Said's Columbia Legacy): Dabashi Calls Iranian Author a Neocon Tool
Whew! Give me a second to catch my breath. Dabashi and two other other American Muslim scholars quoted in the Globe article criticized Reading Lolita in Tehran for not presenting the "full context" of the Iranian revolution, and for omitting the "Islamic strands of feminism in Iran." What nonsense! Azar Nafisi wrote a memoir about her experiences teaching literature during and after the Iranian revolution. It's a memoir, not propaganda for Islamists. If you've got a story to tell, write your own damn book.
These are the same people who bitch that Campus Watch dares criticize them, yet Dabashi himself is quite clear -- he's enslaved his scholarship -- his literary criticism -- to his politics, rendering it suspect and necessary to always read through the lens of his agenda...that renders a study of his politics and biases not only interesting, but essential.
