Mehraneh Ebrahimi’s new critical text, Women, Art, and Literature in the Iranian Diaspora, is simultaneously a local and global endeavor, as focused on close readings of three particular artists as it is on political philosophy in the age of twenty-first century Islamophobia and a drone-driven “war on terror.” She begins with the question of what makes a “relatable portrait of the Other” (p. xiii) in the age of “compassion fatigue” (p. xi). Many texts, she claims, discuss women’s art and literature in the Iranian diaspora, but “no critic has approached them from the perspective of their contribution to ushering in democracy and countering the war machine against abstract terror” (p. xiii). Restoring this political agency to her primary texts through the lens of “free play” is precisely what she sets out to do through literary and visual analysis. Engaging with Baudrillard’s notion that “‘it is the world, the globe itself, which resists globalization’”—which Ebrahimi finds “shocking” because it implies “terrorism as a global resistance to globalization”—she counters: “I prefer to avoid generalities” and “[refuse] to accept the term terrorism as a generic title” (p. xiv). Her point here is that positing “blanket Western democracy” alongside other, potentially hopeful, forms of transnational modernism is a false equivalency. This is a strong argument, and well made. It sets her up to introduce the work of Marjane Satrapi, Parsua Bashi, and Shirin Neshat in subsequent chapters outside of the reductive binaries of Westernization vs. nationalism and modernization vs. traditionalism that has characterized too much political discourse about Iran, from within and without, and affected its artists by extension.

Another important launching point for the book is a well-researched critique of the “double-bound term” democracy. She builds on Foucault’s call for parrhesia (truth-telling) within his critique of liberalism and Rancière’s location of dissensus as the source of the political, and ultimately contextualizes the work of the Iranian artists she surveys as “bring[ing] the unknown face of the Other into intimate proximity and foster[ing] a bond between us and them” using “the power of aesthetics to effect change in the world of perception” (pp. xix–xx). Though I wished for a more precise location of “us and them” in Ebrahimi’s telling, this is a refreshing alternative to the sometimes patronizing application of Western feminism, trauma theory, or something like confessionalism to Iranian women’s art and literature, attributing agency and sharp political critique. In addition to Rancière and Foucault, her discussion of ethical encounter with the Other is conspicuously missing Levinas—though she brings in his work later, in her chapters on Neshat.

The preface sets up a radical egalitarian task for the book: to avoid “art-preaching” based in “an elitism that presupposes the ignorance of the population who are unable to recognize the current social challenges” by “look[ing] at how, through free play, an artist dismantles the space allocated to the Other” (pp. xxi–xxii). Since the preface is so explicitly political, Ebrahami sets up the litmus test that all her works must pass: in order to effectively “[call] for an ethical engagement with [the Other],” her sequence of critical frameworks implies, literary works must “intervene in space-timing, hierarchies, and partitioning of the grievable and the visible” while avoiding the “postmodern fear of a message” (pp. xvi, xxii, xxi). Ebrahimi provides more clarity on this when she points out the two specific “traumatic moments” that connect all her primary sources: the Islamic Revolution of Iran and the war on the Middle East in the name of combating Islamic terror” (p. xxiii). I wished the book’s historical framework could be brought up to the moment a bit more (though published in 2019, a footnote mentions that the premise cohered a year before the rise of ISIS to international renown, in 2014). This is, of course, to some extent a difficult wish given the rapidly shifting geopolitical landscape of the Middle East and the fever pitch surrounding terms like “terrorism” and “regime change” in the US political landscape. I do wonder, though, what Ebrahimi would have to say about the myriad developments in Iran’s domestic and international politics in the last five years.

The word “women” in the title also gave me pause. The preface’s critical setup seems to circumvent the role of gender entirely until the very last paragraph, where it is mentioned but not theorized. Why focus on the work of women? The introduction suggests briefly that one motif shared between the works is the “possibility that space politics allocates to the female characters and their embodied resilience, resistance, and revolt” (p. 9). Also, on a different note, that the veil is “a fetish object … a synecdoche that stands in the place of the Muslim societies” (p. 23). Drawing on Randa Farah, Ebrahimi states that “the Western fixation on the veil is drawing attention away from the true sociopolitical needs of Muslim women” (p. 24). She rightly states that “Marjane Satrapi starts with the veil, but moves well beyond it” (p. 25). One might argue, however, that the veil is not the only object of neo-Orientalist obsession—as Farzaneh Milani’s work has demonstrated for over a decade, these fascinations also center on the female body itself, on shame, immobility, and captivity, and neoliberal constructs of “liberation.” Ebrahimi might have said more about this in foregrounding the importance of gender in her work.

The book contrasts the viewpoints of Satrapi, Bashi, and Neshat with the gaze of our “age of the war against abstract terror,” that of the drone (“death-bird”), which “foreclose[s] [the Other] from the fields of sight and sensibility” (p. 1). She repeatedly takes cues from Gayatri Spivak in insisting on “the humanities remembering the sensory being,” and the most earnest statement in the book can be found when she writes in the introduction that this book is about identifying “the potential of literature to change the world” (p. 3). The neologism aestextasy is central for Ebrahimi, in “connect[ing] the three concepts of aesthetics, ethics, and politics, all knotted around the text” (p. 4). This tripartite prism through which “the dangerous Other can be identified as human, as kin, as an extension of the self” draws on Butler in its wish to “break the happy consensus of war machines” and “[intervene] in the pop-terror discourse” (pp. 5, 4). I again felt the absence of Levinas in this larger framing.

“By delving into the question of Iranian Muslim women’s agency and struggle for democracy as portrayed in diasporic visual productions,” Ebrahimi writes, “I untangle [the] ‘hallucinatory confusion’ [cf. Freud] of Islam with sheer terror” (p. 2). In order for this invective to have a strong, clear direction, the master term must be Islam—a redefinition of Muslim, either from the artist’s or the audience’s point of view. Do the chapters that follow take as their central task this “untangling” of Muslim (qua Muslim) identity from terrorist, or fascist, stereotype? They do so in interesting intersectional ways, suggesting that the way these artists portray Islam is inseparable from their portrayal of Iranian history and of their positionality as women.

Ebrahimi frames her intervention among many other critics who have addressed the “post-9/11 Iranian memoir boom” (p. 11): Gillian Whitlock, Nima Naghibi, Julie Rak, and others. One way she distinguishes her argument is by centering the role of the visual. This makes perfect sense in the context of her opening remarks about the (anti-)ethical visuality of modern warfare; in fact, “visual” is such an important keyword that it might have been highlighted alongside gender in the title of the book—particularly given the interesting ways in which gender and the visual intertwine.

Ebrahimi also offers a compelling deconstruction of the term “exile,” challenging the equivalency the word sets up between refugee writer groups such as Armenians in the 1910s and 1920s, Jews in World War II, and Palestinians today, and post-9/11 Iranian memoirs (mostly published, she writes, by “the diaspora coming from wealthy, avant-garde, nontraditional families [who] clung to the sole common denominator between the cause for their displacement from Iran and the cause for their subjugation in the West: Islam!” (p. 19). She makes a strong case instead for the term “ghorbat [غربت ] literature”—defined as “estrangement, with a sorrow that eats or gnaws at one’ (p. 21) instead on the grounds that it “does not connote that one has been forcefully removed from one’s home” and “lacks the political implications that exile carries” (p. 19). This is a rather searing indictment of memoirists like Nafisi, whose use of the term “exile’ she specifically calls out: “Exile connotes a grand accomplishment that resulted in banishment, giving unmerited grace to economic-immigrant authors who wish to access a wider audience” (p. 22). While I agree with the criticism of neoconservative-leaning voices like Nafisi, and the paratextual and narrative demonization of Iranians and Muslims that can devastatingly result from this kind of exilic self-positioning, the vilification of “economic immigrants” in the current US political climate gives me pause. The focus on dissensus is briefly discussed in each chapter of the book, but given how central it is to the introductory framework, more could have been done to fully explore how Satrapi, Bashi, and Neshat each engage in a critique of “democracy” and enact ethical dissensus from this ghorbat positionality.

With her ethical imperative established and introductory connections between political philosophy and ghorbat literary production made, the next question Ebrahimi must answer regards the selection of her primary texts and genres. Why focus the first half of her book on graphic narrative? To contextualize her chapters on Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis and Parsua Bashi’s Nylon Road, Ebrahimi draws on a wide spectrum of sociological and ethical debate between comics critics including Edward Said, Charles McGrath, Marianne Hirsch, Nima Naghibi and Andrew O’Malley, Scott McCloud, and eventually Hillary Chute. Building on her introduction, Ebrahimi makes a strong case that, in particular, the graphic memoir is “one of the most appropriate media for reimagining an Other that can be identified as human, as kin” (p. 29). Some key formal elements of the genre that enact this ethical intervention, of which she provides many, are: “the contingency of the visual and the verbal planes”; “the movement from the center to the margins and back”; defamiliarization, estrangement, and refamiliarization with “grave events”; formal parallels to “the fragmentary nature of human memory”; a “contemplative ‘aporetic’ quality”; and the “[demand for] interactive personal ‘closures’” (pp. 29–30).

In Persepolis, the book contends, Satrapi’s “attention to the playfulness of the medium” presents an “ethically balanced narrative” and a “Foucauldian subjugated knowledge below the hearts and homes of the people,” establishing “simplified dichotomies and then “complicat[ing] and confus[ing] them” as she “transfixes the audience with the trauma of the Other” through her simple graphic style’s “relatable face of the child avatar” (pp. 6, 7). Ebrahimi argues that Persepolis is driven by a “range of affective resilience” (p. 38). Her analysis covers some well-trodden ground in Satrapi criticism, such as the childhood perspective of the narrator (which, in Ebrahimi’s framework, “opens space for doubt, double-checking, and dissensus—the very stuff of democracy” (p. 40). Her analysis of how Satrapi avoids painting all Islamic authorities with a single brush—“Satrapi distinguishes between true religion and a fake empire of the revolutionary guards who boast of religion yet repel people from any religious beliefs” (p. 53) echoes my own (PMLA, Reference Ostby2017).

The Foucauldian framework is reasserted to address some new, often overlooked aspects of Persepolis. One of these is the importance of Siamak and Mohsen, who represent “fighters for freedom” neglected by official historical accounts: “the graphic witness account,” she writes “revives these subjugated knowledges” and “creates an affective, intimate fracture in the dominant, universal narrative of war, revolution, and exile” (p. 38). Another is the “elitism” of which she accuses Chute, who argues that the text is a site where its author “‘literally reappear[s]—in the form of a legible, drawn body on the page—at the site of her inscriptional effacement … retracing … ethical repetitions (of censored scenarios)’” (pp. 59–60)—“Why,” Ebrahimi retorts, “would Satrapi need to ‘reappear’ … ? … the argument is offensive to women authors of Iranian diaspora, who have strong voices … Considering any woman of Iranian or Islamic background as subaltern—who may or may not learn to speak—is reminiscent of what Spivak calls ‘sanctioned ignorance’” (pp. 60–61). The critique of Chute’s argument is bold and impressive, a long-overdue assessment of how neo-Orientalism and elitism converge in ethical theories of transnational life narrative from Iran.

Overall, Ebrahimi adds valuable insights to a robust body of criticism on Persepolis, though a few questions are curiously curtailed. She quickly dismisses any comparison of Satrapi’s aesthetic to Persian miniatures without considering specific points or examples: “such a classification is based on a lack of knowledge regarding Persian art history movements, as well as … general lack of visual literacy” (p. 62). Finally, her points about specific phrases (such as the nuances of Uncle Anoosh’s dismissal of Iran’s “half-illiterate population”) might be more convincing if she considered the text in its original French (or Bashi’s text in its original German—her examination of Neshat’s work is not grounded in language).

Ebrahimi’s chapter on Bashi’s graphic memoir Nylon Road has two main foci: the author’s autocritical gaze and the crucial role of paratext in representing cultural alterity. She contrasts a deft reading of the Swiss cover design, which conveys Bashi’s “aversion to catchy book covers that surf the waves of cultural stereotypes,” and her subtle incorporation of siyah mashgh calligraphy on her avatar’s leg as a tattooed expression of “empowering transgression” that “positions her in the place of both the subject and the object of study” (p. 70). By contrast, Ebrahimi argues, “the American choice … complies with an Orientalist reading of the phenomenon ‘Iranian woman’,” reinforcing stereotypes in myriad ways (p. 71). She reads the memoir itself, in which the unnamed protagonist is repeatedly haunted by and must debate with younger versions of herself, as an example of “ethical autocritique, or an episodic self-questioning” where “ethics [is] primarily a technology for self-correction” (pp. 7, 83). Of all her three authors, she is ultimately harshest on Bashi’s work, claiming that it “loses sight of aesthetic appeal in presenting the intimate personal story of oscillation between East and West” (p. 13). In her reading, the memoir misses the chance to engage in Rancière’s notion of politics as “a reportage, a redistribution of the tribune to vent a dissensual argument, to break new ground, to say something against the quiet consensus” because of its (beautifully executed) focus on graphic self-interrogation, its “push to police a reconciliation” that “prevents the [ethical] break” (p. 65).

Structurally, the book is somewhat asymmetrical—while the first half of the book concentrates on Persepolis and Nylon Road as standalone works, the second half is an impressively thorough and thoroughly admiring survey of Shirin Neshat’s whole career. As Ebrahimi turns to photography, leading into a sustained reading of Neshat’s Women of Allah series, she ponders how “the medium relays affect, awakens a response, and possibly reproduces the hegemonic discourse” (p. 87). At times, her statements about the visual are too general: “I wonder whether photographs still hold a degree of authenticity that aids them in bringing humans closer to one another … audiences have lost faith in finding truth in images” (p. 88). Nonetheless, her theorization of the ethics of visuality is deeply researched, ranging from Pseudo-Longinus and Kant to Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag, Cathy Caruth, and Sharon Sliwinski. Again, Rancière provides the key insight for Ebrahimi to examine photography, as he did for her analysis of graphic memoirs, particularly his observation that “the regimes of making present define the contours of the politics of aesthetics” (p. 91). Chapters 3 and 4, whose primary texts are Women of Allah and the feature film Women Without Men (adapted from the Shahrnush Parsipur novella), establish Neshat’s career as a kind of extended intertextual homage to the work of Forugh Farrokhzad. It is gratifying to see Ebrahimi’s sustained engagement with the frequent condemnation of Neshat’s work as self-Orientalist or “native informant” (Spivak’s term, which Ebrahimi finds “problematic”). She makes a helpful distinction between Neshat’s self-positioning as an artist and her work on its own terms: “Her speech seems contradictory to her artwork. What she says fortifies the very binaries that she dismantles in her work” (p. 104). The ultimate assessment of the artwork is quite uncritically admiring, as she traces motifs from the corporeal to the calligraphic to the arboresque: “[Neshat] brings the Other into a face-to-face encounter in such a way that one enters into an ethical discourse”; “the aesthetic language of her artistic work since 1995 sings an unworldly, reworlding song” (p. 107).

Beyond her initial framing of film as “political free play” in the preface (p. xii), Ebrahimi does not say much about the ethical imperatives that are specific to cinema as opposed to photography. She instead suggests that Neshat’s work spans a visual spectrum—“dynamic and def[ying] easy categorization” (p. 108), and that this fluidity is related to its ethical intervention. This implication could be more explicitly theorized. In Neshat’s art, Ebrahimi identifies “a poignant, poetic minimalism that functions through allusions, elision, and collage” and a “curious, not judgmental” gaze, creating a “third space that breaks with simple, policed representational regimes and heralds a multivalent and playful aesthetic configuration” (p. 9).

Towards the end of her second Neshat chapter, Ebrahimi makes a very odd assertion: “Although recent scholars from the Middle East and India, such as Sara Ahmed, Farzaneh Milani, and Hamid Dabashi, have tried to write an alternative history for the women of the global South, the works of visual artists, entangled with a long tradition of poetry and prose, accomplish much more in a single stroke or visual shot” (p. 156). Two problematic moves are made here: the sweeping and largely inaccurate categorization of the work (and, in Ahmed’s case, heritage) of three very different scholars, and the false equivalency drawn between the objectives of scholarship vs. art. This point stands out as an unfortunate non-sequitur in an otherwise sophisticated and rigorous work, and it is an odd thing to arise from her seemingly unquestioning admiration for Neshat’s oeuvre.

Ebrahimi’s introduction momentarily veers into a sadly necessary polemics when she writes that “the Islam of the 9/11 terrorists and the Islam advocated by the Iranian government are completely different entities. No Iranian is associated with suicide bombings anywhere in the world, much less with the attacks of 9/11” (p. 14). Reading, this I heaved a deep sigh, wishing it did not have to be written, and that the section it appears within did not have to be titled with the obvious statement that Iran is in fact “A Heterogeneous Political Entity” (p. 14). This choice in itself, and the brief, basic twentieth-century history lesson that follows, surely suggests that the intended audience for this work is beyond the field of Iranian Studies, and perhaps even beyond the scholarly community. This is an ambitious, sharply political argument about the urgent stakes of representation that maintains a laser-sharp focus on detail when discussing the individual works in both their textual and visual registers. Despite some inconsistencies and imbalances along the way, the book ends by sustaining the power and high stakes of its original argument: “When wars are fought over images,” Ebrahimi reminds us, “diasporic visual literature … may be able to change our gaze and help us to imagine a new landscape of what is possible” (p. 166).