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2. PHD Thesis / Tesis PHD
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Title:	Neo-Colonialism As An Imperialistic Project: A Critique Of Three Iranian Diasporic Memoirs
Authors:	Esmaeil Zeiny Jelodar (P53639)
Supervisor:	Noraini Md. Yusof, Associate Professor Dr.
Keywords:	Neo-Colonialism Neo-Colonialism As An Imperialistic Project Three Iranian Diasporic Memoirs Iran-Biography-History and criticism
Issue Date:	30-Sep-2013
Description:	Memoir is a recently acquired tool of expression for Iranian women in exile especially since the Islamic Revolution of 1979. This thesis explores three Iranian diasporic memoirs which have won many international awards and were on bestseller lists for quite a long time. Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran, Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood and Marina Nemat’s Prisoner of Tehran are chosen for this research as they are aligned thematically by the theme of veiling, Islam and Iranians. These issues which offer exotica to the West are criticized vis-à-vis the theoretical framework that revolves around the main theme of postcolonialism. The framework is eclectic as it makes use of five different theorists: Hamid Dabashi, Gillian Whitlock, Frantz Fanon, Homi K. Bhabha and Ziauddin Sardar. The concepts that are applied for the framework of my analysis are Dabashi’s ‘native informer’, Whitlock’s ‘soft weapon’, Fanon’s ‘mental assimilation’ and ‘inferiority complex’, Bhabha’s ‘stereotypical representation’, and Sardar’s ‘postmodernism’. The theoretical framework that is used to criticize the memoirs functions successfully at revealing the fact that these authors play the role of a native informer by presenting a scratched depiction of Iran and Iranian Muslim as the Other, in which myth, truth and personal interpretation of the reality are interwoven very closely, leading to a type of portrayal which is based more on selected and missing realities. By marginalizing themselves in Iran and by aligning themselves with the Western readers, they have adopted a Western perspective in representing these issues. My findings unveil the fact that these three writers’ discourses create justification for ‘war on terror’ under the name of women’s rights and expose the ways the memoirist’s constructions of her native country serve as a Western imperialistic project by pandering and catering to the West. This research displays that the authors’ adherence to a neo-colonial Western framework in writing their narratives helped in furthering the imperialistic agenda of the West. The implication of this study exhibits that in today’s postcolonial world, colonialism is still prevalent but works differently. As an imperialistic project, these three writers use the Iranian psyche, culture and religious world to perpetuate the cliché anti-Islamic and anti-Iranian sentiments, instances which reinforce the binary opposition of the West/East.,PhD
Pages:	275
Call Number:	DS271 .J438 2013
Publisher:	UKM, Bangi
Appears in Collections:	Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities / Fakulti Sains Sosial dan Kemanusiaan

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