Readers in Northeast Florida may be interested in catching Azar Nafisi speak at the University Center of the University of North Florida at 7:30PM on Monday, March 3rd. Nafisi’s bestselling memoir Reading Lolita in Tehran recounts the Western literature course that Nafisi taught in secret to a small group of Iranian women in her house in the late 90s, and engages the events of the Islamic Revolution, the Iran-Iraq war, and the conservative cultural revolution that led to the necessity of keeping such a course on the down-low. My wife didn’t finish the book; I didn’t start it. My wife said it was good though; she told me she can’t remember why she quit reading it. How’s that for a book review? (I highly recommend Hamid Dabashi’s highly-critical and thoroughly engrossing critique of the book, “Native informers and the making of the American empire,” in which he refers to Reading Lolita in Tehran as “the locus classicus of the ideological foregrounding of the US imperial domination at home and abroad” — read the whole essay here.)
Nafisi’s lecture, “The Republic of the Imagination,” is part of UNF’s ongoing “Distinguished Voices” series (great name, by the way, guys. Lot of thought and creativity put into that one). The next speaker in the series is pretty-boy news analyst and frequent Daily Show guest Fareed Zakaria. Get free tickets for any of the lectures in the series here.
Biblioklept 