Middle East Media and Book Reviews Online Volume 1, Issue 1 | Page 74
2/2/2016
Middle East Media and Book Reviews Online
Motlagh’s provocative discussion of Pirzad’s text, including her innovative reading of Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of “minor literatures” in
connection with Pirzad’s deployment of Armenian to estrange the Iranian reader, leaves this reader wishing for a more direct critical assault on the
nationalistic aspects of Iranian literary modernity than is offered in this book. For, as the very term “Persophone” implies (see pp. 10, 120), the
commonplace restriction of modern Iranian literature to the nation-state that bears that name is itself a trope worth calling into question.
For the social sciences, Iranocentrism may be justified on intellectual grounds, given the pervasive transformations wrought by the Iranian nationstate. But neither Motlagh nor her scholarly peers—Najmabadi, Mir-Hosseini, and Osanloo—have reflected extensively on their self-selected
empirical constrictions. It is as though, having set themselves the task of calling into question the category of the nation-state, due to the work it
performs on women’s bodies, these scholars nonetheless prefer to work within a national framework defined by the boundaries of modern Iran. And
yet, Persian is the language of literary culture and daily life across much of Central Asia, including Afghanistan and Tajikistan, and was also
relevant to the construction of South Asian modernity. These are criticisms of a field more than of this specific book. I raise them here only because
Motlagh’s literary acumen and conceptual powers make her perspective all the more needful and relevant to the entire Persianate ecumene. Her
study of Iranian modernity ought to revise our conceptions of literary modernity generally.
In sum, this elegantly written work is necessary reading to scholars engaged in Islamic feminism, the history of modern Iran, and Persian literary
culture. Only two errors were noted, the first on p. 135, which reproduces the same paragraph twice, and the second on p. 142 (endnote 7), where
the publication date assigned to Tayyeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North is 1972. Salih’s novel was first published in 1966.
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