Bridges Across Cultures Florence, Italy 2015

Bridges Across Cultures Florence, Italy 2015 Select Conference proceedings in collaboration with Voces Del Caribe ISSN: 2169-6179 2 In 2015, H.J. Manzari and Amparo Alpañés from Washington & Jefferson College, together with Stefano U. Baldassari and Nienke Scholten from ISI Florence, and Angela Tumini from Chapman University, came together to organize the second Bridges Across Cultures: An International Conference on Arts and Humanities. The conference was held in Florence, Italy, from July 2nd-5th, 2015 at the historical Palazzo Rucellai. The "Bridges" conference originated as a vision and an opportunity for academicians and professionals from various arts and humanities-related fields from all over the world to come together and learn from each other. Over the years, the conference has served as a meeting place for scholars and experts with cross- disciplinary interests related to arts and humanities to interact with members within and outside of their own particular disciplines. This edition is indebted to W&J's Emily Sterk who served as copy editor and made innumerable contributions to these ACTAS. It is my hope that the reader will be able to discover new and creative perspectives from which to study some traditional academic topics from the cross- disciplinary lens while reading the articles here presented. It is our wish to spark the reader's intellectual curiosity, and hopefully, to stimulate the reader to join the conversation. H.J. Manzari Pittsburgh August 2017 BridgesAcrossCultures2015 3 Table of Contents “A Secret Language of our Own”: Intertextual Encounters in Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran -Zeynep Z. Atayurt-Fenge 5 Post Colonial Identity of Installation Art in Nigeria: Visual Migrations and Cultural Hybridization -Otonye Bille Ayodele Jolaoluwa Lawal 21 Propositions for a Lasting Peace and Security in the Niger Delta: A Visual Perspective -Harrie U. M. Bazunu 40 Sexual Pleasure in the Sonnet Tradition and in the Dark Lady Sonnets -Camilla Caporicci 68 The Howard Beach Killing: an Incident Revisited by The New York Times -Marie-Christine Michaud 85 When Harry met Sally and Sammy and Rosie get Laid: The U.S. and U.K. City in Thatcher- Reagan Era Movies -Douglas Muzzio 110 James Barry’s Compulsion for Antiquity -Daniele Niedda 137 Urhobo Wood Sculpture: A bridge between the Pre-colonial Period and the Twenty-first Century -Ese Odokuma 152 Space and Civil War in Contemporary Brazilian Cinema -Ana Paula Pacheco 173 Robert Graves and Aggelos Sikelianos: Apostles of a New Religion -Dionysious Psilopoulos 186 BridgesAcrossCultures2015 4 An Italian jurist in Shakespeare’s England: Alberico Gentili’s theories on the London stage -Cristiano Ragni 206 Analyzing through the Rawlsian Framework the Creation of Social Justice in Post-Colonial India -Sucharita Sen and R. Krishnaswamy 237 Folk Dance Conservation: The Case Study of Fon Long Nan -Praparsri Sripradit 258 «The Italian branch of India»: Gabriella Kuruvilla’ s literary work torn between the two identities -Nikica Mihaljević and Dr. Gordana Galić Kakkonen 276 BridgesAcrossCultures2015 5 “A Secret Language of our Own”: Intertextual Encounters in Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran Zeynep Z. Atayurt-Fenge The Iranian-American author and academic Azar Nafisi’s first book, a critical study of Vladimir Nabokov’s novels, was published in 1994. Titled Anti-Terra: A Critical Study of Vladimir Nabokov’s Novels, the work was inspired by her doctoral studies. Several years after the publication of this critical study, she moved to the United States, and in 2003 she published Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books, a confessional narrative about her experiences as a professor teaching literature in Iran. In 2009, she wrote another memoir inspired by her mother titled, Things I Have Been Silent About: Memories, and in 2014, she published, The Republic of Imagination: America in Three Books. Of all these works, Reading Lolita in Tehran is the most successful, considering it spent time on the bestseller list and has been translated into thirty-two languages. Reading Lolita in Tehran gives an account of a period of almost two decades, extending from the Iranian Revolution in 1979 and the subsequent rise of the Islamic Republican Party in 1980 to the late 1990s. Nafisi’s work mainly refers to the period under the rule of the Islamic Republican Party – a period during which Nafisi, upon the completion of her research degree in the States, returns to Iran and commences her academic career. However, because of the strict rules BridgesAcrossCultures2015 6 imposed on intellectuals by the Republic, she resigns from her academic post, and in 1995 begins to run a reading group at her home every week to “discuss literature” (3). Nafisi’s confessional narrative has been viewed as a controversial work that reads more as a political commentary than a personal memoir. As Christine Grogan writes in her article, “Lolita Revisited: Reading Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books,” the memoir has been criticized for “its alleged neo-conservative and pro-military messages” (54). In his article, “Native Informers and the Making of the American Empire,” Hamid Dabashi claims these messages are “at the service of the U.S. ideological psy-op” (Dabashi). Pointing critically to the repressed position of women in Iran after the Islamic Revolution, Grogan also criticizes the work for “providing a dangerously oversimplified depiction of women as nothing but victims,” and in doing so reinforcing “the stereotypes of Iran” (66). Whilst these political biases can be traced in Nafisi’s work, reading the book solely within a political frame would be an injustice to the poetics of the book. In fact, Nafisi’s book is not the only work that deals with this subject matter. Marjane Satrapi’s highly acclaimed 2000 graphic novel, Persepolis: The Story of an Iranian Childhood, is yet another memoir that deals with the Islamic Revolution of 1979 and is inspired by the author’s childhood experiences. Although both works engage with similar issues, Satrapi’s graphic novel mainly tends to depict the effects of the oppressive regime on adolescents of the time (including herself), whilst Nafisi explores the impact of the Revolution on a relatively wider age group consisting of students and academics. As John Rachal explains, the book also “chronicles the ultra- fundamentalism of the revolution,” (744) by drawing a comparison between the world of academia before and after the Revolution. Although both texts can be read as political manifestos, Reading Lolita in Tehran [1] specifically uses the literary imagination as a medium to draw attention to oppressive ideologies. Indeed, Nafisi’s work is about literature, reading, and the liberating powers BridgesAcrossCultures2015 7 of works of fiction within a social landscape that, as Nafisi writes in her memoir, “denied any merit to literary works” (25). Although the title of the work refers only to Nabokov’s Lolita, the book offers a multi-voiced intertextual appreciation of other literary works from Western and Eastern cultures and forefronts the notion of imaginative power embedded in fiction. With a poignant portrayal of life under an oppressive regime, particularly the lives of the women in her social landscape, Nafisi’s work highlights the idea of fiction as a source of escapism from the harsh realities of the world, and more importantly, as a gateway to “liberate minds and peoples” (Nafisi, “Azar Nafisi”). In doing so, the text, as Kristine Huntley describes in her review of the memoir, “mixes literary analyses in with [Nafisi’s] observations of the growing oppressive environment of the Islamic Republic of Iran” (1443). Thus, her reading group, which lasts for only a couple of years before she eventually moves to the U.S. for good in 1997, serves as an exit from the restrictions of her social environment, and becomes a stimulating place for her with seven of her “best and most committed” (3) female students – Nassrin, Manna, Mahshid, Yassi, Azin, Mitra, Sanaz – to explore “the relation between fiction and reality” (6). Therefore, the room in her house where she holds her classes becomes “a place of transgression” (8) and “a space of [their] own” (12), rendering her female students the opportunity to communicate their different perspectives on the works they read. This experience, as Nafisi points out, enables these young women, albeit temporarily, to reclaim their subjectivity that was denied to them in the outside reality that intended to impose an indistinguishable appearance and mindset on women. As opposed to this restrictive environment, Nafisi’s reading group functions as a “wonderland” (8). It is a place to stimulate the power of imagination, where she and her reading group discuss works of literature in a free environment in “a secret language of [their] own” (21). In these classes, they also enjoy the experience of, as Nafisi puts in a literary fashion borrowed from Nabokov, “how the ordinary BridgesAcrossCultures2015 8 pebble of ordinary life could be transformed into a jewel through the magic eye of fiction” (8). In her book, Nafisi emphasizes the way in which works of fiction provide “open spaces” as opposed to the “closed ones” that Nafisi and her students were “confined to” (19) during the Revolution, thus allowing them “to defy the repressive reality outside the room” (57). In her vindication of the empowering aspect of literature, Nafisi celebrates “every great work of art,” defining art as “an act of insubordination against the betrayals, horrors and infidelities of life” where “the perfection and beauty of form rebels against the ugliness and shabbiness of the subject matter” (47). Here, Nafisi refers to the power of works of art to communicate various situations of dismay and distress in a highly stylized fashion, steering the feelings of the reader towards an empathetic response for the characters constructed in these works.

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