Rick Steves

I don't feel it is necessary to beat the theme of the problematic depiction of Iran over again in my blog post. I am wondering what the goal Steves' project is and what is intention was when visiting Iran. I found a youtube video of a lecture he gave about his trip to Iran and it appears that the UN asked him to visit Iran because they were concerned with the perceptions of Iran and the movement toward war. That being said Steves indicates that in his program on Iran he attempted to discover the "humanness" and visit the country with a "travel point of view." He specifically says that he and his crew told the Iranian government that they were not interested in "politicizing" the their project. Thus he is not looking for an answer to Iran's stance on their nuclear program or if they fund terrorism. The problem I see with this that Steves may not be actively searching for these answers but his audience will inevitably have questions of this sort in their mind. They will be searching for ways to reconcile and understand the Iran they know from the media, the axis of evil, with the smiling faces of the innocent children found in Steves' production.

The lecture Steves gives is titled "Iran: Personal Impressions." I think this is a key piece of information to understanding what Steves is attempting to accomplish. In this lecture Steves says he was afraid of Iran and knew little of the country. Thus the video that we see and the lecture that Steves gives is his personal reaction to the clash of his expectations and his actual experience. The writing of the show was painfully ridden with Orientalism, the silencing of the other and constant comparisons of Iran to the "Western" world. Steves cannot say that Iran is a developing and modern country without saying that it is like every other developing and modern country in the west just without the fast-food restaurants. What I begin to wonder is if there are stages of recognition and realization? In an attempt to humanize Iran and eradicate fear, Steves, unknowingly or naively, forces a country into a definition that is contingent on Occidental interpretation and explanation. However, he is recognizing that what he has previously thought about Iran is incorrect and thus is creating a new definition. In this case, Steves' constant referral to the Occident is an attempt to ground himself and redefine something that his experience has proved his falsely identified. If Steves had been educated in postcolonialism perhaps he would have recognized what he was doing when he wrote the script for his program.

Returning to the idea of stages, I wonder if before people can be educated about the way they understand and define a culture or a people, they first must have all of their preconceptions and stereotypes shattered. In this sense, what we see is Steves' losing his preconceived notions and attempting to transfer his experience to an audience so they can share in the removal of stereotypes. The problem is with Steves distorted Oriental views we replace on misconstrued understanding with another. Ideally, one would have preconceived notions removed and replaced with educated understandings, I am just not sure that this is currently a common possibility in the United States. For starters our educated understanding of the Orient consists of TV shows like Steves that most people will not notice to be Orientalist. What I am really driving at in a roundabout way is that our education and material in the subject of postcolonialism is lacking and that we should becareful in our assumption that everyone can simultaneously let go of past perceptions and latch onto new "educated" views without a stepping stone stage: Steves' project is perhaps a illustration of that stage.

LIpstick Jihad

The more we read this semester the more I feel like there is a trend in identity and displacement. Lipstick Jihad, the Bastard of Istanbul, Persepolis, and the Image, the Icon and the Covenant all address the need to identify oneself as a part of a particular people. Azadeh struggles between thinking of herself as Iranian or American. This is further complicated by the fact that Americans and Iranians add their own projection to Azadeh's identity and she is consequently not fully considered one or the other. I fee like what we are seeing are generations of people who feel they have multiple identities and this multiplicity is in itself a new identity. One is neither exclusively Iranian or American but somehow genuinely both. This hybrid feeling seems to somehow deconstruct that one can only belong to one place and have only one nationality. A multiplicity of nationalities seems to suggest a healthier more encompassing personality. There seems to remain a pressure however to remain one thing, one nationality. Where does a person who feels both American and Iranian or Palestinian and Jordanian belong geographically and culturally speaking? It would seem as though a person's understanding of themselves is still distinctly linked to geographic location and acceptance. This struggle with identity found in the literature we have read this semester seems to point to the desire to still categorize and identify people as one or the other. When a person can be both/and their those attempting to identify them lose their ability to create a definition. Thus we find the person experiencing hybridity and those projecting grappling with ambiguity fluidity. The result is a struggle for acceptance and understanding.