Whitewashed: America’s Invisible Middle Eastern Minority
Whitewashed: America’s Invisible Middle Eastern Minority
复制标题
粉饰：美国看不见的中东少数民族
DOI：
--
复制
发表时间：
2010
期刊：
影响因子：
--
通讯作者：
Therese Saliba
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Therese Saliba
事实上，美国的每一位学者，更不用说阅读大众，对伊朗都知之甚少（事实上，伊拉克的情况更是如此，这解释了那场灾难的部分原因）。我会把这本书推荐给美国的每一位学者，特别是社会科学和人文科学的学者。作为一个在伊朗经历了500年社会变革历史的人，他通过种族、阶级和性别的棱镜来看待社会运动，看到这么多我不了解这个国家的东西，真是大开眼界。在本书中，“性政治”至少指三件事：（1）争取男女平等的斗争，（2）争取男女同性恋权利的斗争，（3）性别与社会运动、文化自由的关系，以及伊朗的革命。珍妮特·阿法里的成就是煞费苦心地记录了伊朗200年历史上性政治的复杂性，并向我们展示了对其令人惊讶的、喜忧参半的记录的新看法。作者最终提出，性政治与政治有着密切的联系（可以说是）。她远远超越了现有的关于“性别与伊朗”的文献（其中一些确实非常好），到目前为止，这些文献主要关注女性，几乎完全关注异性恋问题。作为一位出色的伊朗历史学家，她的第一本书是1905- 1911年宪法革命的历史，她深入而创造性地挖掘了各种原始材料的档案，并用几种语言梳理了大量的二手文献。作为一个有成就的理论家，她与凯文安德森合著了一本精彩的书，福柯和伊朗革命：性别和伊斯兰教的诱惑，她同时对这些材料进行了高度原创的理论和概念解释，包括福柯的“爱的伦理学”，詹姆斯斯科特的“隐藏的成绩单”;弗洛伊德，弗洛姆和马尔库塞的精神分析见解;从西蒙娜·德·波伏娃到钱德拉·莫汉蒂，从丹尼兹·坎迪约蒂到米努·穆阿莱姆，她都掌握了西方和第三世界的女权主义理论。这本书还配有80幅珍贵的插图，包括17世纪展示同性恋场景的绘画，19世纪的黑白白色照片和国王后宫和其他场所的素描，1905年宪法革命到21世纪初动荡的政治漫画，过去40年女性杂志的图像，伊朗革命及之后妇女参与的政治海报和照片，以及伊朗性政治各方面许多关键人物的肖像。16页的导言，提出了问题，并预览了过去两个世纪的主要特点，仅是值得这本书的价格。虽然书名告诉我们，这是一本关于现代伊朗性政治的研究，但在第一部分，我们看到了100页关于“前现代实践”的深刻背景，这为过去世纪的发展提供了一个合理的基线。这些页面集中在19世纪的模式，意义，以及围绕婚姻（包括爱情和离婚）的实践，性，法律，宗教，以及各种形式的抵抗。一个转折点发生在礼萨沙阿的独裁现代化统治期间，他在1921年英国人煽动的政变中夺取了权力，并于1925年加冕为国王，从而开始了巴列维王朝。这将包括他自己，直到1941年，和他的儿子，穆罕默德礼萨沙阿巴列维（我们简称为“沙阿”）谁将被废黜，看到君主制本身废除的过程中，1978年至1989年的革命。在这些章节中，Afary继续涵盖上述所有主题，并开始记录随着伊朗的发展，
Virtually every academic in the United States, not to mention the reading public, knows too little about Iran (the fact that this is even truer for Iraq explains part of the reasons for that catastrophe). And I would recommend this book to every academic in the United States, especially in the social sciences and humanities. As someone who has undertaken a 500-year history of social change in Iran, who sees social movements through the prism of race, class, and gender, it was eye-opening to encounter so much that I did not know about the country. ‘‘Sexual politics’’ refers in this book to at least three things: (1) the struggle for women’s equality with men, (2) the struggle for gay and lesbian rights, and (3) the relationship of gender to social movements, cultural freedoms, and, in the case of Iran, revolutions. Janet Afary’s accomplishment is to document painstakingly the complexity of sexual politics across 200 years of Iranian history, and to present us with a new take on its surprising, and mixed, record. The author ultimately makes the case that sexual politics is intimately (as it were) connected to politics tout court. She goes far beyond the existing literature (some of it very good indeed) on ‘‘gender and Iran,’’ which has focused till now predominantly on women and almost exclusively on heterosexual matters. As befits a superb historian of Iran—her first book was a history of the 1905–11 Constitutional Revolution—she digs deeply and creatively into the archives for primary materials of all kinds and combs an extensive secondary literature in several languages. As an accomplished theorist who has coauthored with Kevin Anderson a wonderful book, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism, she forges a highly original theoretical and conceptual interpretation of this material at the same time, on a scaffolding that includes Foucault’s ‘‘ethics of love;’’ James Scott’s ‘‘hidden transcripts’’; psychoanalytic insights from Freud, Fromm, and Marcuse; and a command of both Western and Third World feminist theory from Simone de Beauvoir to Chandra Mohanty, Deniz Kandiyoti to Minoo Moallem. The book is further graced with 80 valuable illustrations, including seventeenthcentury paintings showing homoerotic scenes, nineteenth-century black-and-white photos and sketches from the shah’s harem and other sites, political cartoons from the Constitutional Revolution of 1905 through the turmoil of the 2000s, images from women’s magazines of the last 40 years, political posters and photographs of women’s participation in the Iranian Revolution and after, and portraits of many of the key players on all sides of sexual politics in Iran. The 16-page introduction, which presents the issues and previews the main characteristics of the last two centuries, is alone worth the price of the book. Although the book’s title tells us that it is a study of sexual politics in modern Iran, we are treated in Part One to 100 pages of deep background on ‘‘Premodern Practices,’’ which sensibly provide a baseline for the developments of the past century. These pages focus on nineteenthcentury patterns, meanings, and practices around marriage (including love and divorce), sexuality, law, religion, and resistance in its many guises. A turning point occurs during the authoritarian modernizing reign of Reza Shah, who seized power in a 1921 coup abetted by the British, had himself crowned king in 1925, and thereby started the Pahlavi dynasty. This would consist of himself until 1941, and his son, Muhammad Reza Shah Pahlavi (known to us simply as ‘‘the Shah’’) who would be deposed and see the monarchy itself abolished in the course of the 1978–89 revolution. In these chapters, Afary continues to cover all the topics above, and begins to document the changes in gender relations and social and cultural norms as Iran moved