Creating the Modern Iranian Woman: Popular Culture between Two Revolutions

Abstract

lectuals isolated from the rest of society, which took power via a bloody coup. People who stood up against both the Soviet forces and the PDPA government, and who lived and worked during a time of heavy censorship and fear in the communist era, especially in Kabul, are submsumed under the blanket category of “jihadi fighters.” When discussing Hosseini’s novel, The Kite Runner, Ivanchikova asks, “Why does Hosseini— a debut novelist seeking to break into the post-9/11 NATO-centric literary market—as well as the film director who further condenses the message for greater effect—resort to such gaudy anti-Sovietisms? Is it because one might expect that, in NATO-centric contexts, the audiences are well primed to see the Soviets as evil?” (65). Ivanchikova does not consider that Hosseini himself, as an Afghan American writer, may have had an anti-Soviet stance. The author also understands the communist era in Afghanistan as one of women’s advancement and economic justice, where women were relieved “from traditional customs and gender roles that relegated their lives to the private domain” (93). This is a problematic assumption, as the socialist era only benefited a small subsection of urban women in Kabul. Furthermore, gender policies under the PDPA were imposed from above and did not resonate with the majority of the Afghan people, as they were deemed insensitive. In her discussions and analyses of post-2001 cultural production, Ivanchikova portrays Afghanistan’s contemporary political history through the lens of either the United States or the Soviet Union. Yet being critical of one imperial power in Afghanistan does not mean promoting and whitewashing the atrocities of another. More engagement with Afghan sources and working carefully with the multiplicity of perspectives on the ground are necessary to avoid depicting and reproducing incomplete and inaccurate understandings of contemporary Afghan history, to which we are too often witness in Anglophone scholarship. The country’s forty-year political history is long, complex, and requires rigorous and careful analyses. Overall, Ivanchikova is successful in helping us (those in the US Anglophone context) understand the representational “matrices that persist and still structure our perceptions” (236). The book makes a contribution to the field of comparative literature and media studies and does diversify work within these areas of study.