Representing Post-Revolutionary Iran: Captivity, Neo-Orientalism, and Resistance in Iranian-American Life Writing

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 these representations of post-revolutionary Iran.

The book provides new perspectives on 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 Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi. Hossein Nazari places these texts in their social and political contexts, tracing their origins within the trope of the America captivity narrative as well as teasing out and critiquing neo-Orientalist tendencies within. 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.