Making connections (from whole cloth)

A Collision of Prose and Politics (from the Chronicle of Higher Ed.)

A professor of Iranian studies and comparative literature at Columbia accuses Azar Nafisi, author of Reading Lolita in Tehran, of saying nasty things about the Iranian regime because she's "a prop for American imperialism", "reminiscent of the most pestiferous colonial projects of the British in India", "the personification of the native informer and colonial agent, polishing her services for an American version of the same project."

His insistence that anyone who fails to sing the praises of current Iranian cultural practices (such as raping teenage girls so that they can beheaded, hanged, or shot the following day without violating a Koranic rule against executing virgins) is therefore a tool of the big bad CIA is no more convincing that the shrieking of the right-wing US pundits that anyone who fails to vote straight-ticket Republican is an "enemy of America".

Believe it or not, some people do observe and comment on matters of culture and literature and yes, even politics, for their own sake, not for the sake of promoting some political faction's nefarious schemes. Pretending that they do so only to serve a political paymaster is a cheap and shoddy rhetorical trick, usually resorted to by people who have some other agenda to promote, but don't have the evidence or the logic to directly criticize the target of their attack. And so they paint an invented connection between that target and some conveniently despised straw man. It's sort of like using Photoshop to insert Adolf Hitler or Josef Stalin into a photo of someone you dislike, and then pretending that the obloquy deserved by one should therefore be transferred to the other.

As it happens, Mr. Dabashi's real complaint seems to be Ms. Nafisi's choice of reading matter. Or, as he puts it, "seeking to recycle a kaffeeklatsch version of English literature as the ideological foregrounding of American empire." (I think I must be missing something. F. Scott Fitzgerald and Vladimir Nabokov, sinister propaganda agents of the CIA?)

In other words, she failed to make her students read books in HIS area of academic specialty. Boo hoo. If applied here in the US, his insistence that teaching literature from other cultures amounts to hostile political propaganda would result in, well, the elimination of his own job.

Isn't this a matter better suited for bitch-sessions around the faculty lounge, rather than a purportedly serious publication?