Postcolonizing Europe? An International Workshop // May 10-12, 2010

Jiska de Ligt (Utrecht) - Reading Lolita Anywhere: Literary Texts as Cosmopolitan Practices
In a recent lecture, curator and museum director Charles Esche proclaimed that it was time to let the gaze of critical theory turn to the West, and to look at the position of the West now that ‘the Rest’ seems to finally be ‘on the rise’ (Zakaria). He suggested that a cosmopolitan attitude could help one to rethink the narrative of the West ‘away from its own hegemonic’ (Esche 2010). Esche is currently involved in an art and research project named ‘Former West’. ‘Former West’ does not stand for the end or dead of the West, but for the crumbling and fading of the imagery and narrative of the West in an age of postcolonialism and postcommunism, This paper seeks to study the possible value of literature for cosmopolitan thinking, taking Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books as a case study . It will connect Charles Esche’s ideas concerning the ‘Former West’ project to the cosmopolitan act of creating estrangement from one’s own culture as it is described by Paul Gilroy in his book Postcolonial Melancholia and to Henk Oosterling’s theory on inter-cultural experience and interpret them all in the light of literature.
Thus, this paper attempts to present literature as a tool for re-imagining the position of the West (Esche) and inverting the narrative of center and periphery, by re-imagining the world as having multiple or no centers. Moreover, it attempts to show how literature, by inviting its readers to estrange themselves from their own culture and history (Gilroy) and empathize with something or someone other than themselves, has the capacity to take its readers along in an inter-cultural experience (Oosterling) that lasts as long as the experience of reading lasts.
Nafisi’s memoir will be used as a test case for my interpretation of literature’s capacity to evoke cosmopolitan thinking by means of estrangement. I will show how Reading Lolita in Tehran supports my claims about the cosmopolitan powers of literature in a way that no theory could. As my analysis will show, it is through the imagery of Iran and the imagery of the West Nafisi’s work puts forward, as well as through its interpretation of some English and North American literary classics and its general observations of the workings of literary fiction, that this book invites its reader to join in an inter-cultural experience of estrangement which is inherent in the memoir both on the level of the story and outside the story, there where the text addresses the reader.

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