Hamid Dabashi Reads the Cover of 'Reading Lolita in Tehran'

Hamid Dabashi, the bravest and the most outspoken Iranian intellectual against the American hegemony in the Middle East, wrote a long, detailed and influential critique of Azar Nafisi's anti-Iranian propaganda-literature, Reading Lolita in Tehran, a few months ago.

But for me, the essence of his amazing essay lies where he discusses the cover of the book. To me, the cover symbolises what the neoconservative marketing machine behind this book has used the book to produce another piece of anti-Iranian material by an Iranian.

If you don't have time to read the entire essay, just read these two paragraphs.

The original picture from which this cover is excised is lifted off a news report during the parliamentary election of February 2000 in Iran. In the original picture, the two young women are in fact reading the leading reformist newspaper Mosharekat. Azar Nafisi and her publisher may have thought that the world is not looking, and that they can distort the history of a people any way they wish. But the original picture from which this cover steals its idea speaks to the fact of this falsehood.

The cover of Reading Lolita in Tehran is an iconic burglary from the press, distorted and staged in a frame for an entirely different purpose than when it was taken. In its distorted form and framing, the picture is cropped so we no longer see the newspaper that the two young female students are holding in their hands, thus creating the illusion that they are "Reading Lolita"--with the scarves of the two teenagers doing the task of "in Tehran." In the original picture the two young students are obviously on a college campus, reading a newspaper that is reporting the latest results of a major parliamentary election in their country. Cropping the newspaper, their classmates behind them, and a perfectly visible photograph of President Khatami--the iconic representation of the reformist movement--out of the picture and suggesting that the two young women are reading "Lolita" strips them of their moral intelligence and their participation in the democratic aspirations of their homeland, ushering them into a colonial harem.