Constructing Alterity: Colonial Rhetoric in Betty Mahmoody's Not Without My Daughter

Abstract

As far as literary representations of the Islamic Republic of Iran in the West are concerned, although Betty Mahmoody’s bestselling Not Without My Daughter (1987) has been called “the most popular book ever published in the US about Iran” [Milani, Farzaneh. 2008. “On Women’s Captivity in the Islamic World.” Middle East Report 38 (246): 40–46, 43], it has received scant critical attention. Hence, as the first major discursive analysis of the text, this essay illustrates how Mahmoody’s so-called memoir draws extensively on the tropes of colonial discourse to portray post-revolutionary Iran. To this end, this study employs David Spurr’s [1993. The Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing, and Imperial Administration. Durham, NC: Duke University Press] theorizations of the tropes of debasement, affirmation, negation and bestialization to analyze Mahmoody’s construction of the Iranian Other. It also investigates the cult of Iranian domesticity, the question of linguistic sovereignty, and images of Iranian “mobs” in the text. Taken together, these colonial tropes and the overall context of the narrative construct a clash-of-civilizations narrative by pitting the “civilized” white US woman against her “primitive” Iranian counterparts in whose land she is “trapped”.

• affirmation
• colonial discourse
• debasement
• Iran
• negation
• Not Without My Daughter

Notes

1 The figures come from Mahmoody’s second book, For the Love of a Child (Mahmoody and Dunchock 1992, 245).

2 It seems that Mahmoody’s insistence on the erroneous figure for the population of Tehran (26, 67, 154, 248) is meant to evoke in the reader a sense of alarm and apprehension. According to the Atlas of Tehran Metropolis, the city’s population at the time was less than six million (http://www.atlas.tehran.ir/Default.aspx?tabid=264/).

3 I have discussed some such myths and fabrications in the section titled “Propagandizing Captivity” (2016, 25) in my discussion of NWMD as an American captivity narrative.