Toward Strategic Auto-Orientalism in Iranian American Self-Narrative: A Critique of Jasmin Darznik’s The Good Daughter

Abstract:This paper critiques Jasmin Darznik’s bestselling memoir, The Good Daughter: A Memoir of My Mother’s Hidden Life (2011), in order to investigate the author’s literary response to mainstream, (neo-)Orientalist literary representations of Iranian women in the United States. In doing so, this study sets out to examine whether the narrative reinforces dominant Western stereotypes of Iranian/Muslim women as passive, oppressed victims of social and religious patriarchy or offers a strategic discursive intervention in the American literary market to construct a space for reimagining Iranian womanhood. To this end, the author’s adoption of strategic auto-Orientalism, as formulated by Martina Koegeler, as her representational modus operandi is analyzed to reveal the manner in which the narrative might promise new subjectivities and modes of writing for hyphenated female authors through exploiting the potentialities offered by the strategic appropriation of auto-Orientalism.