Abstract:
Following a brief discussion of Chinua Achebe's THINGS FALL APART, this essay examines the newly burgeoning genre of "oppressed Muslim women" narratives. For each of the texts under consideration--Jean Sasson's PRINCESS, Latifa and Shékéba Hachemi's MY FORBIDDEN FACE, Azar Nafisi's READING LOLITA IN TEHRAN, and Suzanne Fisher Staples's SHABANU: DAUGHTER OF THE WIND--Ahmad examines its claims toward authenticity and also notes the places in which those claims are undermined. Ahmad focuses on how the texts at once generate and challenge essentialized misreadings, misreadings that then proliferate within a prevailing interpretive field that posits feminism and multiculturalism as irreconcilable goals. The emphasis in the essay is on reader reception as well as content: whereas some of the texts responsibly recognize and depict local specificities, that nuance often disappears as readers situate texts within a "clash of civilizations" discourse. Ahmad considers as well the effect of publishing apparatuses like covers, appendices, and reviews, which can encourage a reductive and simplistic reception. The essay concludes with an emphasis on interpretive and pedagogical practices that discourage reductive ethnographic readings.
In his 1977 essay "An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's HEART OF DARKNESS," Chinua Achebe tells of receiving a letter from a high school student
in Yonkers who upon reading Achebe's novel THINGS FALL APART "was particularly happy to learn about the customs and superstitions of an African tribe." Among other problems of preconception and ethnocentrism, Achebe here points to the damaging habit of approaching fiction as a transparent, practically invisible conveyance for ethnography. Beyond the student's failure to consider the engrained behaviors of "his own tribesmen in Yonkers, New York," as Achebe puts it, there lies an even more basic fallacy: the idea that a novel can serve as a reliable container
for "customs and superstitions." Since 1977, if anything, this reductive ethnographic reading practice has become more prevalent, to the point where college syllabi, Amazon bulletin boards, and professional book reviews alike exhibit a hermeneutic division of labor that allows Western representations to be ironic and complex and reads "third-world" and "minority" writing as exclusively mimetic.
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