TEHRAN – A book launch celebration of “Representing Post-Revolutionary Iran: Captivity, Neo-Orientalism, and Resistance in Iranian–American Life Writing” will be held at the National Library and Archives of Iran in Tehran on Monday evening.

Written in English by Hossein Nazari, an assistant professor at the University of Tehran, the book was published in 2022 by Bloomsbury Publishing plc, a British worldwide publishing house of fiction and non-fiction.

Nazari, who holds a Ph.D. from the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, will attend the book launch celebration.

Asemeh Qasemi, a sociology professor at the Islamic Azad University of Tehran, and Zeinab Qasemi, a North American studies expert, will deliver speeches during the event.

A description published by Bloomsbury reads, “The publishing of Memoirs of diasporic Iranian-American authors are a unique and culturally powerful way in which Iran, its politics, and people are understood in the USA and the rest of the world.” 

“This book offers an analysis of the processes of production, promotion and reception of the representations of post-revolutionary Iran.

“The book provides new perspectives on some of the most famous examples of the genre such as Betty Mahmoody’s ‘Not Without My Daughter’, Azar Nafisi’s ‘Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books’, and Fatemeh Keshavarz’s ‘Jasmine and Stars: Reading More Than Lolita in Tehran’. 

“Hossein Nazari places these texts in their social, historical and political contexts, tracing their origins within the trope of the American captivity narrative, teasing out and critiquing neo-Orientalist tendencies within, and finally focusing on modes of discursive resistance to neo-Orientalist narratives. 

“The book analyzes the structural means by which stereotypes about Islam and women in the Islamic Republic in these narratives are privileged by news media and the creative industries, while also charting a growing number of ‘counterhegemonic’ memoirs which challenge these narratives by representing more nuanced accounts of life in Iran after 1979.”

The book has received international acclaim. John Carlos Rowe, an associate professor of the humanities at the University of Southern California, USA, wrote, “Hossein Nazari’s critical account of three Iranian-American women’s memoirs is an important study of neo-Orientalism and its negative consequences for geopolitics, feminism and comparative religions.”

“Until we stop using Islamic cultures for our own Western purposes, there will be little mutual understanding. More than an astute work of literary criticism, this book is also a lesson in political wisdom,” he added.

Photo: Front cover of Iranian scholar Hossein Nazari’s book “Representing Post-Revolutionary Iran”.

MMS/YAW