A Too-Quick Enthusiasm For The Other

5 A Too-Quick Enthusiasm for
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the Other
North American Womens Book Clubs
and the Politics of Reading
Catherine Burwell
Since the 1980s there has been a rapid increase in the number of women
participating in book clubs (Long, 2003; Sedo, 2002). Such groups have
had a profound impact on the publishing industry. Books chosen for
Oprahs Book Club (now Oprahs Book Club 2.0), for example, regularly
make it to bestseller lists. Book marketing, too, has changed, as publish-
ers now distribute monthly newsletters to book clubs, circulate reading
group guides, and arrange author appearances, while bookstore chains
facilitate their own book groups. Online book discussion and review sites
like Goodreads and BookTalk proliferate. Books specically designed to
cater to book clubs needs and interests have also appeared. The Book
Group Book (2000), for example, begins with a preface by Margaret
Atwood, in which she describes the book club as the graduate seminar,
the encounter group, and the good old-fashioned village-pump gossip ses-
sion, all rolled into one (Slezak, p. xi). Having established their place
within popular culture, book clubs have also become the subject of much
mainstream media commentary, where they have been alternately vilied
for lowering taste through mass consumption and celebrated as a sign of
ourishing literacy.
But book clubs have not only gripped the popular imaginationthey
have also become the object, increasingly, of feminist academic research.
The last few years have seen the publication of numerous books and arti-
cles on womens book clubs, including histories of 19th-century literary
societies (McHenry, 2002; Murray, 2002), ethnographies of contemporary
womens reading groups (Barstow, 2003; Long, 2003; Sedo, 2002), and
analyses of online book discussion (Kiernan, 2011; Sedo, 2011). Each of
these investigations adds to an understanding of the role womens book
clubs play in reformulating reading as a social practice, in disseminating
applicable copyright law.
literary taste, and in reproducing and challenging prevailing cultural dis-

courses. Many of these studies also recognize reading groups as inherently
political; in her decade-long ethnographic study of womens book clubs,
for example, Elizabeth Long argues that practices of reading can never be
divorced from questions of power, privilege, exclusion, and social distinc-
tion (2003, p. 16).
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134 Catherine Burwell
Because womens book clubs represent a relatively new area of research,
there are still many signicant questions to be posed about the politics of
reading that are constructed when women select, discuss, and think about
books in social contexts. I would like to argue here that what is perhaps
most urgently needed at the current moment is a greater probing of North
American book clubs consumption of texts by and about women living in
the Third World. Such consumption is hardly new; consider for example
Longs observation that 19th-century American womens book clubs often
organized their reading lists according to dominant notions of cultural
geography, so that in 1885 the Ladies Reading Club of Houston undertook
a study of Egypt, as, in their own words, it was attracting the attention
of the civilized world on account of the con ict in Sudan (p. 135). More
than a century later, contributions to The Book Group Book include novels
and autobiographies by women living in India, Morocco, China, and Chile
among their favorites. Such works are praised for their authenticity, their
drama, and their exotic locales (Slezak, 2000, p. 340), suggesting that
First World readers continue their troubling hegemonic fascination with
an imagined Other (see also Zine & Taylor, this collection). At the present
moment, such consumption of Third World womens texts is further com-
plicated by numerous other contextual factors, including the War on Ter-
ror, the dominance of neoliberal ideologies, and the rise of a mass book
industry which increasingly targets womens book clubs as a lucrative and
inuential market (Robbins, 2005, p. 4).
This essay, then, asks how we might meaningfully consider the ways in
which women living in Canada and the US think, read, and talk about the
texts of women living in the Third World, and about the implications of
such practices. While there are many possible ways to approach such an
investigation, I want to suggest that one appropriate starting place is an
analysis of the ways in which Third World womens texts are framed and
presented to First World womens book clubsthat is, a consideration of
both the surrounding discursive environment in which the texts are read
and discussed, as well as a more detailed analysis of particular framing
strategies used by reviewers, publishers, and marketers. In order to lend
focus to this project, I concentrate on the popularity and reception of Read-
ing Lolita in Tehran (2003), Azar Nasis well-received and complex mem-
oir about teaching Western literature in revolutionary Iran. In it, Nasi
recounts her experiences rst as a university professor and later as the
teacher of a private class of women who secretly gather in her home once a
week to read and discuss literary classics. Reading Lolita in Tehran is one
of many Iranian womens texts to have been published in the West within
the past few years, but as a text especially concerned with literature and
readingNasis subtitle reads A Memoir in Booksit has been heavily
marketed by its publisher, Random House, to womens book groups. And
the book does seem to have succeeded, with reading groups and otherwise,
for it has not only appeared on numerous book groups current reading
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Womens Book Clubs and the Politics of Reading 135
lists, but received enthusiastic reviews, sold almost one million copies, and
spent 70 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. Given its massive
popularity, it seems a tting place to begin an analysis of the politics of

reception as it relates to womens book groups.
The analysis itself is divided into three parts. In the rst part I provide an
outline of recent studies of womens book clubs. Here, I suggest that while
such studies have made a number of important insights into womens read-
ing practices, they have yet to fully consider the complex practices involved
in reading and discussing difference, and have still to problematize a too-
quick enthusiasm for the other in the aftermath of colonialism (Spivak,
1996, p. 248). In the second section, I take up Amal Amireh and Lisa Suhair
Majajs (2000) assertion that the reading of Third World womens texts
must be located within specic geopolitical discursive environments (for an
example of a pedagogical framework within which such a reading practice
might be cultivated, see Taylor, this collection). Using insights from trans-
national feminism, I attempt to provide an overview of the kinds of readerly
environments that exist in Canada and the US at this moment, especially as
they pertain to the increasingly popular novels, memoirs, and journalistic
accounts being written by women from the Middle East. In the nal sec-
tion, I turn to Reading Lolita in Tehran itself, considering the ways it has
been represented to a hegemonic readership through reviews, advertising,
reading guides, interviews, and editorials. Looking through these myriad
documents, I note the presence of narratives and images which construct for
book club readers an Orientalist and Eurocentric framework through which
to view Nasis memoir (see the interview with Kahf, this collection).
There are, I think, both dangers and possibilities inherent in employing
this kind of reception theory to consider the works of Third World women
writers. The rst danger seems to me a suggestion that Third World wom-
ens texts are always and inevitably appropriated by processes of commodi-
cation and imperialism, that they pose in their narratives no challenges or
resistances to the colonizing gaze of the hegemonic readership. A second
danger lies in overlooking the very real risks that Third World women take
in publishing their work. As Alpana Sharma Knippling writes: For minor-
ity women to write, publish, and be read is itself a minority enterprise, a
risky proposition, bound on one side by its ambivalent mode of reception
by majority readers and on the other by its own internalized pressure to
surpass all conventional standards of writing in order simply to be admit-
ted as a viable literature or cultural production (2000, p. 210). But there
are possibilities too. Reception theory bypasses the pitfalls of an overly
idealized focus on voice and authenticity, in order to attempt to reveal, as

a specically political project, the colonizing gaze of the First World, to
render transparent the interests of the hegemonic readership (Spivak, cited
in Kahf, 2000, p. 167). Such a project is, I believe, worth undertaking, par-
ticularly in the present moment, in which the renewed force of imperialism
converges with an unprecedented commodication of culture.
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READING AS A SOCIAL PURSUIT: STUDIES

OF WOMENS BOOK CLUBS
Many of the scholars who have undertaken studies of womens book

clubs have commented on the initial difficulty they encountered in hav-
ing their research subject taken seriously, and have suggested that this
may be due to the ways in which such book clubs pose a serious challenge
to the valued notion of the solitary reader, or to an inability to take seri-
ously the female amateur reader. Both Elizabeth Long (2003) and Anna
Ivy (2011) have speculated that reading groups may even cause a certain
discomfort for academics, as they inevitably bring into view both the
commercial underside of literature and the scholars position of authority
in the world of reading (Long, p. 11). Yet it is precisely the way in which
womens reading groups destabilize many xed models of readership and
raise questions about the politics of culture that these feminist scholars
value. For, as they have realized, collective reading practices not only call
into question the notion of the individual reader; they also challenge the
private-public divide and rewrite the received linear model of production-
dissemination-reception. In this rst section, then, I want to look more
thoroughly at this body of scholarship, highlighting both its insights and
its current limitations.
Work done on the history of book groups suggests that despite domi-
nant representations of the solitary reader, the practice of collective read-
ing and discussion has a long, varied and distinguished tradition. The
work of Elizabeth McHenry (2002) on African American literary societ-
ies in the 19th and early 20th centuries demonstrates the societies role in
the spread of literacy, the creation of a black press, and the construction
of a black public sphere. Similarly, in her work on 19th-century literary
history, Heather Murray (2002) identies a rich tradition of literary soci-
eties in Ontario which included separate groups of both African Cana-
dian and Euro-Canadian readers engaged in educational endeavors and
in the spread of new information and divergent views. And in her review
of the history of white womens book clubs in Houston, Long uncovers
the role of womens book clubs in cultivating a forum that promoted
womens academic learning and their participation in the public sphere.
These histories, of which I have given only the briefest outline here, are
particularly important, for they show that the very naturalness of con-
temporary womens book clubs and the ease with which they gather and
discuss literature are in fact not natural at all, but the result of these
earlier literary societies which, in many cases, were carved out only with
great effort.
Many of these same studies also provide a pro le of contemporary wom-
ens book clubs. Mainstream media depictions of Canadian and American
book clubs have, on the whole, suggested that their members are mostly
white, middle-class, university-educated women, and it appears, at least
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in the most detailed and ethnographic of these studies, that this may be
true. The most extensive of the studies mentioned, that by Elizabeth Long,
suggests a continuing tradition of both white and black womens reading

groups, although Long herself focuses only on white womens book clubs.
In her smaller scale comparison of womens book clubs and college classes
in New England, Jane Missner Barstow also encounters mostly groups of
white, middle-class women. And in the description of her ethnographic
study of book clubs in Vancouver, DeNel Rehberg Sedo suggests that most
of the groups she met with were comprised of white women. From the com-
bined research, other characteristics of face-to-face book clubs also emerge:
They are made up mostly of women, and given the ways in which they are
often created through networks of friends and acquaintances, their mem-
bers are generally homogenous, sharing similar class standing, age, eth-
nic background, and/or occupation. Encounters with difference, then, are
more likely to occur through textual engagement than through encounters
with other members.
Not only have these recent studies begun to characterize book club
members and book club formation, they have just as importantly worked
to understand the kinds of strategies, practices, and tools that women use
in their reading and discussion of literature. Almost all the studies suggest
that these groups eschew formal literary-critical concepts and ways of
addressing the text. Instead, literature is viewed, in the words of Edmund
Burke, as equipment for living (cited in Long, p. xviii) and addressed
through modes of identication and empathy. This means, most of the
studies suggest, a particular focus on characterstheir actions, their
motivations, their moralityaccompanied by a process of relating
characters and their experiences to the womens own lives. Indeed, as Ivy
(2011) notes, those books most likely to be marketed to reading groups
feature one or more protagonists with whom the reader can be expected
to identify (p. 161).
For most researchers this process of identication is depicted as con-
structive. Long, for example, writes:
As [book club members] read and talk, they are supporting each other
in a collective working-out of their relationship to the contemporary
historical moment and the particular social conditions that character-
ize it. This activity is quite literally productive in that it enables women
not merely to reect on identities they already have but also to bring
new aspects of subjectivity into being. By looking at womens reading
groups . . . one can see people in the process of creating new connec-
tions, new meanings, and new relationshipsto the characters in books
or their authors, to themselves, to the other members of the group, to
the society and culture in which they live. In other words, they are in
the process of remaking themselves in dialogue with others and with
literary texts. (p. 22)
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While the use of identication as a tool to navigate literature may indeed
be productive of new identities and insights, it nonetheless poses several
problems, problems which some of these researchers begin to take up. In

her observations of white womens book clubs discussing Toni Morrisons
Beloved and Ntozake Shanges sassafras, cypress and indigo, Long notes
that while the members inability to connect with Morrisons text led them
to distance themselves from the subject matter, they enthusiastically con-
sumed Shanges work, appropriating all of those elements which spoke to
their own experience as women and overlooking facets of the narrative that
dealt with race and racism. In a similar vein, Barstow provides a critique
of white womens use of the text for whatever emotional gratication and
identication it may bring (2003, p. 9). She notes that white readers of
Morrisons Song of Solomon felt no need to confront the novels depiction
of white racism but rather concentrated their discursive efforts on assimi-
lating difference rather than acknowledging it. In fact, Barstow goes even
further, suggesting that because book club members are so homogenous in
their backgrounds, they differ very little in what they see within the same
text and . . . their interpretations reect shared expectations that exist prior
to the act of reading (p. 12).
Among the questions Barstow hopes to answer through her ethnographic
study are How actively do members engage with the ideas, politics, sensi-
bilities, and historical contexts of what they read? and Are core values of
American culture reinforced or in any way challenged in the process of read-
ing or discussion? (p. 3) This is precisely the kind of probing that research
on womens book clubs now requires. Studies to this point have broken
important ground in asserting that womens book groups do matternot
only because they constitute one of the largest bodies of community par-
ticipation in the arts (Poole, 2003, p. 280) but also because they are sites
of both productive cultural work and the dissemination of literary taste,
places where women now and in the past have sought to acquire cultural
capital. Researchers focus on womens imaginative acts of identication
and narration of the self, as well as female bonding and solidarity, has also
played a role in characterizing the practices used by womens book groups,
and has added signicantly to studies of reading as both a social process
and a social formation (Sedo, 2011, p. 1). However, a more concerted
effort now needs to be made to place book clubs and their reading and
discussion practices in wider and more comprehensive cultural, historical,
and geopolitical contexts.
What such studies have yet to take into account is that while the First
World has long been the consumer of narratives by and about those living
in the Third World, more than ever, international novels and biogra-
phies are aggressively marketed toward women. A Mothers Day display
at a large chain bookstore I visited in the spring of 2005, for example,
encouraged customers to buy Global Fiction for Mom. Under the sign
were stacked novels by authors such as Beatrice Gonzalez, Edwidge
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Danticat, Farnoosh Moshiri, and Orhan Pamuk, each book bearing
a large sticker proclaiming its country of origin, in a marketing move
that fetishizes national difference and packages it for consumption and

capital. Especially notable are the number of memoirs and ctionalized
accounts of life in the Middle East being actively promoted by publishers
and bookstores. At Canadas largest bookstore chain, Indigo, for exam-
ple, Khaled Hosseinis The Kite Runner, Marjane Sartarpis Persepolis,
and Marina Nemats Prisoner of Tehran have all been selected for special
promotion by the chains high-pro le owner Heather Reisman. And book
clubs are often the particular target of just such marketing, as publishers
like Random House and HarperCollins provide reading guides for novels
and memoirs that include Saira Shahs The Storytellers Daughter and
Afschineh Latis Even after All This Time: A Story of Love, Revolution
and Leaving Iran, as well as Reading Lolita in Tehran. Those interested
in the study of womens book groups at this moment in the global circula-
tion of culture must begin to apply insights from postcolonial and trans-
national feminist critics in order to pose a new set of questionsabout
womens consumption of the Other, about international ctions role in
hierarchies of taste, about womens book clubs and the legitimization of
colonial discourses. Promotional copy appearing on the back of Longs
own book makes this need all too clear. Book Clubs, it reads, offers
a fascinating look at the importance of books in womens lives and their
particular affi nity for making reading a communal experience. Elizabeth
Longs work has special resonance in light of the poignant stories coming
out of Afghanistan about women joyously embracing the chance to read
freely again after years of intellectual starvation by the Taliban regime.
Too easily absorbed into imperial narratives, this body of work must con-
sider womens book clubs not only in the context of patriarchal and elite
cultural authority but also in relation to patterns of cultural consumption
in an age of imperialism, militarism, and war.
MAPPING THE CONTEXT OF RECEPTION: THE CLASH

OF CIVILIZATIONS AND GLOBAL SISTERHOOD
Context is central to interpretation, and one way to begin to think about

womens reading practices in an age of war is to locate them within pre-
vailing structures of power. As Henry Giroux has reminded us, meaning
lies not within cultural artifacts themselves, but rather in the ways such
artifacts are aligned and shaped by larger institutional and cultural dis-
courses (2004, p. 10). Such discourses not only play a role in selecting
what will be read, but also help to form the horizon of expectations
(Jauss, 1982) which readers bring to a texttheir prior knowledge about
its content and conventions, their unconscious assumptions, their desired
ends. Thus, in a sense, such discourses teach us how to approach a text.
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Of course, no discourse is all-encompassing , and the multiple discourses
present in a single location may clash, overlap, and even crack, providing
spaces for subversion and resistance. Nonetheless, it is possible, I believe,

to consider Canada and the US at the present moment as particular sites
of consumption (Ghosh, 2000, p. 39) in which responses to texts are
scripted by quite specic social and material practices, political transac-
tions and ideologies. In this second section, I consider the elds of recep-
tion formed by the circulation of the clash-of-civilizations thesis and by
the movement of a discourse of global sisterhood into the mainstream
media (these discourses are traced by both Salah and MacDonald, this col-
lection; they are deconstructed by Salti, this collection). In each case, I try
to suggest ways in which such discourses give shape to textual encounters,
supplying predetermined meanings and funneling modes of reading along
accepted paths.
Although it has a rather long history within both Orientalism (Said,
1978) and the Eurocentric imperial imaginary (Shohat & Stam, 1994),
the clash-of-civilizations thesis in its current form was most recently put
forward by Samuel Huntington in his eponymous 1997 book. The thesis
presents a Manichean view of the world, in which an essentialized and
static Islam constitutes the anti-West, the perennial opponent to Western
values of democracy and individual liberty (Sabra, 2003, p. 8). Although
presenting itself as a work of history, it is in fact largely ahistorical, eras-
ing records of Euro-American colonialism and replacing them with a series
of myths, recycled images, and stereotypes dating back as far as the Cru-
sades. Whereas Huntingtons book has been hailed, since 9/11, as pre-
scient, and his ideas used by the US administration to justify the invasions
of Afghanistan and Iraq, Huntingtons colleague Bernard Lewis has pushed
the inuence of the clash-of-civilizations discourse beyond policy makers
and academics and into the public realm. As the title of his 2002 book,
What Went Wrong? The Clash between Islam and Modernity in the Mid-
dle East, implies, Lewis argues that the events of 9/11 can be explained by
an ideological difference between Islam and the West, between tradition
and modernity. Like Huntington, Lewis bases his argument not on poli-
tics, history, or economics, but on dangerously oversimplied and essential-
ized notions of culture and religion. As Adam Sabra suggests, What Went
Wrong was enthusiastically taken up not only by media commentators but
by an ignorant public, eager for information that might help it to make
sense of the events of September 11 (p. 2), a public who pushed Lewiss
work onto the bestseller lists.
This kind of discourse has not been limited to the US public sphere.
Sedef Arat-Koc (2005) convincingly argues that after 9/11, the politi-
cal right in Canada began a campaign to rearticulate Canadian identity
inside a clash-of-cultures frame, making claims for Canadas place
within Western civilization and aligning Canadian interests with US
foreign policy. As Arat-Koc suggests, it is a campaign that has been largely
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successful. While some channels of the mainstream media did work to
distance Canada from US politics after the declaration of war on Iraq, the
underlying clash-of-civilizations thesis has gone relatively unchallenged,

giving space to a notion of Canadian identity as a Western civilizational
identity (p. 35) and reasserting racial boundaries of belonging. As Jasmin
Zine (2009) argues, multicultural difference within such a context is rep-
resented as a disruptive rather than a harmonizing feature of Canadian
society (p. 151), and Muslim culture in particular is seen as dangerous and
in need of containment.
The wide circulation of the clash-of-civilizations thesis inevitably affects
the ways in which other work from or about the Middle East is approached.
Not only does it prede ne the discursive space in which such works are
received; it also generates particular modes of reading. When heterogeneous
histories are reduced to the myth of an unchanging monolith, single texts
may be perceived as representing the truth about large and diverse popu-
lations. Thus, reading a book about a single Iranian or Afghan woman may
be perceived as enough not only to know these women, but to know
the history of the Middle East and its oppression of women. The clash-
of-civilizations thesis also provides further problems for reading in the way
in which it relies onand circulatesstereotypes. In her detailed analysis
of the ways in which Nawal El Saadawis work has been framed in the
West, Amal Amireh writes: El Saadawi and her Arab feminist work are
consumed by a Western audience in a context saturated by stereotypes of
Arab culture and . . . this context of reception, to a large extent, ends up
rewriting both the writer and her text according to scripted rst-world nar-
ratives (2000, p. 215). Given the gross misrepresentations and stereotypes
about Muslim culture put into circulation by writers such as Lewis and
Huntington and their media and government followers, otherwise thought-
ful and varied texts may nd their narratives and ideas reduced to the
oversimplied staples of the clash-of-civilizations thesisfundamentalism,
totalitarianism, oppression, and tradition.
A second, related discourse which provides scripts for the reception of
Third World womens narratives is that of global sisterhood. Such a
discursive regime posits a sense of solidarity between women based on
assumptions about shared gender, without posing questions about race,
class, imperialism, and power. Related to this notion of global sisterhood
is the discursive construct Chandra Mohanty has called Third World
differencethat stable, ahistorical something that apparently oppresses
most if not all women in these countries, a discourse which she notes
running through much of Western feminist scholarship (1997, p. 257).

Such scholarship, predicated upon assumptions about Western women
as secular, liberated and having control over their own lives (p. 257),
discursively produces the Third World woman as a singular, monolithic
subject, without agency and complexity, and in need of rescue. While one
might predict that these discourses of global sisterhood are limited to
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academic feminism, this is not the case. As Sedef Arat-Koc convincingly
argues, variations of global sisterhood have been popularized in the Cana-
dian and American mainstream press, where the US war in Afghanistan

(and now its invasion of Iraq) is represented and justied as a humanitar-
ian war . . . about saving women (2002, p. 53). Yasmin Jiwani (2005)
identies the presence of such discourses within Canadian media in her
analysis of the Globe and Mail reporting directly after 9/11, in which she
suggests that representations of Muslim women as passive and oppressed
serve to justify Canadian involvementitself framed as moderate and
benevolentwithin the region. Notions of global sisterhood are perhaps
even more obvious in the steady stream of local newspaper stories about
women hosting parties to raise money for Afghan girls schooling, or in
reports which highlight the visits of prominent white women, such as
Laura Bush and Flora McDonald, to Afghanistan (Chiang, 2005; Laura
Bush to Spotlight Plight, 2005).
Amireh and Majaj argue that this issue of the relationship between
First and Third World women is of paramount importance to the study
of reception. Indeed one can say that the history of the reception of Third
World womens texts in the West reects in miniature the history of the
relations between First and Third world women (2000, p. 6). Clearly,
these kinds of repetitive, static imageswhat Arat-Koc calls the medias
stareas well as sentimental narratives about Canadian and American
women helping Afghan women, frame the publishing, marketing, and
reception of even far more nuanced narratives. Amireh and Majaj note
the extent to which marketing pressures exploit . . . the Third World
difference separating First World and Third World women, emphasizing
Third World womens exoticism and difference in the interest not of
transcultural communication, but of prot (p. 6). As well as exploiting
difference, the book industry also plays on First World readers desires for
an abstract, idealized sense of connection with a texts characters, a mode
of reading which clearly appeals to book club readers. Amireh, for exam-
ple, notes the ways in which El Saadawis works are not only depoliticized
through translation for an American audience, but also altered for the
possibilities of identication. Reading that occurs in this spirit of unprob-
lematized global sisterhood not only provides legitimacy and support to
existing and newly rede ned relations of imperialism but also impedes the
possibility of a more critical gaze on regressive political developments
occurring in readers own countries (Arat-Koc, p. 54). Indeed, as I have
tried to map out here, a complex nexus of discourses rooted in Eurocen-
trism, colonialism, and racism mediates the relations between the author,
the text, and the reader, and also intersects with capitalism in decisions
about publishing, editing, and marketing. In the next and nal section
of the essay, I use this map of the discursive terrain as background for a
more focused look at the narratives which frame book clubs overwhelm-
ing enthusiasm for Reading Lolita in Tehran.
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READING LOLITA IN TIMES OF WAR:

PARATEXTUAL FRAMES AND CONTEXTS

OF RECEPTION FOR NAFISIS MEMOIR
The publishing history of Reading Lolita in Tehran reads rather like a

booksellers dream. Writing in the New York Times, Julie Salamon (2004)
reports that Random House acquired the book in 1999, when it was still
only an idea, for a $30,000 advance. Although the publisher intended a rst
run of only 12,000 copies, orders from bookstores exceeded 20,000 copies
before publication, so it increased printing to 50,000. In all, 95,000 hard-
cover copies of Reading Lolita were sold. This early popularity, according
to the Times, was due in part to the events of 9/11, which changed the sub-
jects appeal and its potential audience, as well as to enthusiastic reviews
and Nasis popularity as a commentator on the US invasion of Iraq (Sala-
mon, p. E1). In 2004, the memoir was released in paperback, selling almost
1 million copies and appearing on the New York Times bestseller list for
70 weeks. There is a general acknowledgment that at least a part of these
huge paperback sales was the result of book club readers. Certainly Ran-
dom House worked hard to sell the memoir to book clubs, promoting it on
their online newsletter received by more than 5,000 reading groups, and
even offering to have Nasi call book groups while they were discussing her
memoir. The US bookstore chain Barnes & Noble took a similar marketing
tack, placing Nasis book on their online book club reading list, and giv-
ing readers a chance to discuss the book with Nasi over the course of four
weeks. Nasis own commentaries in mainstream venues such as the New
York Times and the Washington Post, her television and radio appearances,
and her public speaking engagementsat events as diverse as PEN fund-
raisers, the American Federation of Teachers Convention, and the Stratford
Festivalhave made both Nasi and her book minor celebrities. Indeed,
Nasi appeared in one of Audis Never Follow ad campaigns alongside
David Bowie and William H. Macy.
But the extraordinary success of Na sis memoir is only a small part
of the full storywhat is more interesting, and what I attempt here, is to
consider the ways in which Reading Lolita in Tehran, in the context of
the modes of reading, horizons of expectation, and structures of power
examined earlier, has been represented to Canadian and American wom-
ens book clubs. I begin by analyzing the books paratextthe term
Gerard Genette (1997) uses to describe the zone between text and off -
textwhich includes the books cover illustrations and copy, publica-
tion information, and increasingly, reading group guides. This seemingly

marginal text is, as Genette notes, actually quite signicant, functioning
as a zone not only of transition but also of transaction: a privileged place
of pragmatics and a strategy, of an inuence on the public (p. 2). I then
turn to reviews and mainstream media coverage of the memoir. Within
all of these contextualizing materials, I locate the presence of framing
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Account: s3694324
structures that simultaneously promise presumed white readers reassur-
ing familiarity and exotic difference, and that reinforce notions of First
World centrality and superiority.

The same New York Times prole which credited Reading Lolita in
Tehrans early popularity to 9/11 also suggested that world eventsone
presumes not only 9/11 but the aftereffects of war, invasion, and increased
militarismhave made Muslim women interesting to book club readers,
a statement whose troubling truth goes entirely unexamined (Salamon, p.
E1). Certainly Random House, through its packaging and promotion of
the book to reading groups, has played on that interest, exploiting ste-
reotypes of oppression and the scripts of global sisterhood in order to sell
the memoir to a body of readers known to favor narratives about women.
Many such readers related desires for uncomplicated unity and consumable
difference are appealed to in the rst sentences of the hardcovers inside ap,
which proclaims, We all have dreamsthings we fantasize about doing
and generally never get around to. This is the true story of Azar Nasis
dream and of the nightmare that made it come true. The plain language
here calls upon assumptions about common experiencesdreams that are
not fullledbut also implies something unique, and uniquely awful, in
the substance of nightmares. The nal lines of the inside ap go further in
suggesting the fulllment of voyeuristic fantasies, as well as of the desire for
a native informant, by promising that Nasis luminous tale . . . gives us
a rare glimpse, from the inside, of womens lives in revolutionary Iran.
This promise of reassuring similarity and enticing difference is found
elsewhere in the books paratext. Anne Donadey and Huma Ahmed-Ghosh
(2008) argue, for example, that the memoirs title instantiates a notable
binary opposition between Nabokovs licentious West and Tehrans
oppressive theocracy (p. 632). Such a binary reinforces discursive constructs
of clash and rescue, and serves as a marketing strategy for North American
readers. We might also look to the cover, which bears the image of two
young women wearing dark headscarves and absorbed, presumably, in a
book. Such an image is almost predictable, for within a Eurocentric frame,
certain practicesoften related to the bodyare sensationalized and come
to stand in for a culture (Arat-Koc, 2002). In the case of women liv-
ing in the Middle East, it is the burqa or hijab that has become the over-
whelmingand oversimpliedmarker of difference. Indeed, as Elli Lester
Roushanzanir (2004) has written, the image of the mass-media veil that
frequently accompanies journalistic coverage of Iranian politics as well as
popular accounts of life in Iran has become a global icon, functioning not
simply to rationalize government policy but to produce consumers (p. 23).

The back cover, too, promises the possibility of familiarity and titillating,
consumable newness, invoking the known setting of the book club (Any-
one who has ever belonged to a book group must read this book, it intones)
with the fascinating details of essential difference, including fundamen-
talists, tyranny, Islamic morality squads, and blind censors.
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Account: s3694324
In their study of commercially produced book club guides, William
McGinley and Katanna Conley (2001) argue that such guides represent a
new social mechanism through which the modern book industry not only
authorizes preferred books for the reading public, but also preferred
ways of reading and responding to such books. Certainly the reading guide
questions found in the nal pages of both the hardcover and paperback
editions of Reading Lolita in Tehran deserve attention for the way in
which they legitimize particular identities, reading strategies, and political
viewpoints. Similar to those printed in increasing numbers of books, these
questions are in keeping with the memoirs own pedagogies, rarely asking
readers to critique or think against the grain of the text. The 12 questions
might be seen to address three broad categories: the role of literature, wom-
ens oppression, and the effects of living under totalitarian governments.
Questions about the function of literature seem particularly designed with
book club readers and their reading strategies in mind. Indeed, the series
begins with two questions that ask readers to answer questions Nasi put
to her own students, the rst a serious inquiry into why we read, and the
second a personal response about the meaning of Nabokovs imaginary
word upsilamba. Asking readers to discuss the same questions as Nasis
students places them in the role of her students, allowing them the illusion
that they can, as one book club reader wrote in her review of the mem-
oir, walk in someone elses shoes (Morello, 2004). A later question also
responds to book club readers strategies of identication, reminding them
that Nasi teaches that the novel . . . appeals to the readers capacity for
compassion and asking readers whether they agree that empathy is at the
heart of the novel. The question mirrors Nasis own suggestion that read-
ing is ultimately apolitical, an act of the imagination that requires compas-
sion, and is sure to appeal to book club readers.
In keeping with this focus on compassion, a second set of questions
constructs Iranian womens apparent oppression, referring to the practice
of veiling, to the irrelevance of women in the Islamic Republic, and to
women who fall victim to murderous leaders. Such references tend to lead
readers toward a discussion of Iranian women as subjects without choices,
and in the context of earlier questions, suggest that compassion and even
pity are tting responses. The third set of questions highlights Iranian poli-
tics, although it says as much about American preconceptions as Iranian
realities. Questions in this group are addressed to Khomeinis ability to
rob individuals of their identities, to the absolute hatred of fanatics
for Western literature and to the Iranian peoples complicity with the
Ayatollah. (Indeed, the Ayatollahs appearance in 2 of the 12 questions

more than some of Nasis own studentssuggests he is being used as a
familiar and tokenistic gure of fundamentalism.) The nal question closes
the series using the now-established frames of universalism and essential
contrast between East and West, stating that Nasis account of the life
in the Islamic Republic transcends national and geographical boundaries,
ONTARIO
Account: s3694324
and asking book club readers to discuss how the experience of censor-
ship, fundamentalism and human rights, as well as the enjoyment of works
of imagination and the desire for individual freedoms, may be similar in

totalitarian societies and in democracies such as ours.
In many ways, the subsequent book reviews, almost entirely positive,
correspond to the publishers frames, constructing like them an imperialist
gaze that refuses to name itself. In a manner even more direct than Random
Houses own marketing, most reviewers recongure Nasis private class of
seven girls as a book club. This is perhaps remarkable for the fact that the
memoirand even the reading guidedoes not present the class as a club.
The majority of reviewers seemed to overlook the fact that Nasi selected
the participants, led the discussions, and routinely collected work, and even
more importantly, that she identies herself as a teacher, achieving some of
her most vivid writing in passages about her classes and encounters with
students. Instead, characterizations of the class as a club persist, and links
are made between book clubs here and in Iran. Marni Jackson, writing in
the Globe and Mail, for example, reports that like any other book club,
analytical discussions about ctional people soon crossed over into stories
about their own lives and dramas (2003, p. 6), and in the National Post,
John Fraser recommends the memoir for North American book club read-
ers, suggesting that they imbibe it deeply (2003, p. SP11).
But this is often where similarities end. For other than framing the char-
acters in Reading Lolita in Tehran as a group of readers akin to Cana-
dian and American book club readers, most of the reviews stress difference
through an almost obsessive concern with sexuality, disorder, and appar-
ent irrationality. A concern with the body is again evident in allusions to
the veil, rather predictably peppered throughout headlines and lead para-
graphs, but also in an overt focus on matters of sexuality. Two passages
in particular make repeat appearances, one which refers to the Ayatollah
Khomeinis declaration about sex with chickens, and another which refers
to the governments lowering of the age of marriage to nine. This prurient
interest might be summed up in Margaret Atwoods phrase, appearing in
her review in The Walrus (2003), about the weirdness of matters sexual
in Iran. Indeed, a number of the reviewers seem to revel in instances of
weirdness or absurdity, related not only to sexuality but to everyday
life in Iran, and many of them include amazed lists of such matters, as
though absurdity were not a feature of North American life. John Frasers
litany is typical in the way it piles up these details of difference:
We learn such extraordinary and horrible aspects of everyday life in

contemporary Iran. A young brother wakes up from his rst experience
of nocturnal emission and turns to his parents in terror because he has
had an illegal dream. Young women are criticized for eating their
apples too seductively. Mimeographed sections of illegal books
have to be handled as though they are state secrets. (p. SP11)
ONTARIO
Account: s3694324
Picturing Iran as a place of irrationality and weird difference falls within
a long history of Orientalism. Indeed, most of the reviews not only promul-
gate such Orientalist conceptions of self and Other but work to assert
Western superiority. This is most often done by using Nasis own admira-
tion for the Western classics, an element of her memoir which reviewers
enthusiastically embrace. This admiration is exploited not only to argue
for the importance of Western literature, but even to suggest that concepts
such as democracy and freedom are uniquely Western. Heather Hewett, for
example, writing in the Christian Science Monitor (2003), writes, Read-
ing Lolita in Tehran provides a stirring testament to the power of Western
literature to cultivate democratic change and open-mindedness (p. 21),
and Judith Lewis writes in the LA Weekly (2003) that the Western canon,
so free and full of hope, is precious again. Jonathon Yardley (2003) takes
this idea further, to state that everyone realizes the ascendancy of Euro-
American culture. He tells his Washington Post readers that the reading
done by these women also should serve as a reminder that Western culture
generally, American culture specically, is far more admired and treasured
in many Muslim countries than its critics there would have us (and their
fellow citizens) believe (p. C8). This belief in the signicance of American
culture, and its special ability to promote freedom and democracy, is often
contrasted with a presumed absence of such qualities in Iran. Thus, a line
from Nasis nal pages in which she tells a friend that she is thankful to
the Islamic Republic for all the things it had taught meto love Austen
and James and ice cream and freedom is quoted often in these reviews,
in a context that suggests James, ice cream, freedom, and even Austen are
uniquely American, unavailable to a deprived population in Iran.
A nal layer of framing must also be noted in the number of references
to Nasis memoir or to Nasi herself in mainstream political and cultural
contexts. The conservative columnist George Will, for example, quoted
liberally from Nasis memoir when he argued in September 2004 that
Iran. . . . is perhaps the biggest problem on the horizon of the next US
president because it is moving toward development of nuclear weapons (p.
A19). Like many earlier reviewers, he cites Nasis passages about illegal
dreams, blind censors, and lowering the marriageable age, as well as her
statement that what differentiated this revolution from the other totali-
tarian revolutions of the 20th century was that it came in the name of the
past. In an argument that is somewhat convoluted but ultimately makes
the point that Iran will likely generate nuclear weapons, and that there
may be little the US can to do stop this, Nasis text is put to use demon-
strate that Irans regime is not only backward-facing, but mad as a

hatter (p. A19), reinforcing stereotypes about Middle Eastern medieval-
ism and chaos that do much to feed the clash-of-civilizations theory
and the justication for war. For the book club readers who have so taken
to Reading Lolita in Tehran, this militarist and imperialist framing means
that alternative interpretations of Nasis memoir become more difficult to
ONTARIO
Account: s3694324
make, and that connections between Nasis memoir and, say, the award-
ing of the Nobel Prize to Shirin Ebadi are less likely to be heard, whereas
the imperialist interpretations made by George Will and the political elite
sound all too clearly.
CONCLUSION: TOWARD A HISTORICIZING OF READERS
It is imperative, writes Amal Amireh (2000), that we always historicize

not only the writer and her work but also the reader (p. 242). Historiciz-
ing the reader is of course a multistranded undertaking, entailing questions
about what, how, and why readers read, and about the discursive environ-
ments in which such reading takes place. As I have tried to suggest here,
a contextualized analysis of Canadian and American womens reading at
this moment needs to take into account the presence and inuence of wom-
ens book clubs and, just as importantly, the discursive environments in
which such reading and discussion takes place. And as neoliberal narratives
celebrate new global circuits of culture, and suggest that Third World
women are now accessible to the First World reader through international
ction and memoirs, it is important to consider that time, as Ella Shohat
and Robert Stam remind us, may be best thought of as palimpsestic: we
live in many times, not just in the new time of advertising and the media
(1994, p. 131). Palimpsestic time allows us to see that the consumption of
Third World womens texts is hardly a new phenomenon, but one which
must be placed within a larger history of Eurocentrism, imperialism, mili-
tarization, and market forces.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Part of this chapter was originally printed as Catherine Burwell, Reading

Lolita in Times of War: Womens Book Clubs and the Politics of Recep-
tion, Intercultural Education 18:4 (2007): 281296. Taylor & Francis.
Reprinted by permission of the publisher (Taylor & Francis Ltd., http://
www.tandf.co.uk/journals).
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A Too-Quick Enthusiasm For The Other

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5 A Too-Quick Enthusiasm for

literary taste, and in reproducing and challenging prevailing cultural dis-

popularity, it seems a tting place to begin an analysis of the politics of

idealized focus on voice and authenticity, in order to attempt to reveal, as

READING AS A SOCIAL PURSUIT: STUDIES

OF WOMENS BOOK CLUBS

Many of the scholars who have undertaken studies of womens book

suggests a continuing tradition of both white and black womens reading

problems, problems which some of these researchers begin to take up. In

that fetishizes national difference and packages it for consumption and

MAPPING THE CONTEXT OF RECEPTION: THE CLASH

Context is central to interpretation, and one way to begin to think about

spaces for subversion and resistance. Nonetheless, it is possible, I believe,

underlying clash-of-civilizations thesis has gone relatively unchallenged,

running through much of Western feminist scholarship (1997, p. 257).

dian and American mainstream press, where the US war in Afghanistan

READING LOLITA IN TIMES OF WAR:

PARATEXTUAL FRAMES AND CONTEXTS

The publishing history of Reading Lolita in Tehran reads rather like a

tion information, and increasingly, reading group guides. This seemingly

World centrality and superiority.

simply to rationalize government policy but to produce consumers (p. 23).

Ayatollah. (Indeed, the Ayatollahs appearance in 2 of the 12 questions

of imagination and the desire for individual freedoms, may be similar in

We learn such extraordinary and horrible aspects of everyday life in

strate that Irans regime is not only backward-facing, but mad as a

CONCLUSION: TOWARD A HISTORICIZING OF READERS

It is imperative, writes Amal Amireh (2000), that we always historicize

Part of this chapter was originally printed as Catherine Burwell, Reading

Amireh, A. (2000). Framing Nawal El Saadawi: Arab feminism in a transnational

imperialist feminism. Social Justice, 32(4), 3249.

Kiernan, A. (2011). The growth of reading groups as a feminine leisure pursuit:

Yardley, J. (2003, April 10). Deant words. Washington Post, p. C8.

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