Abstract
Contributing to a growing body of research on acknowledging U.S. imperialism within teacher education, this article explores how knowledge production on Iran—and U.S.-Iran relations more broadly—in secondary education represents a site of what Britzman has called difficult knowledge. Here, the difficulty of classroom engagements with the theme of U.S. imperialism is highlighted in several epistemic stumbling blocks, notably notions of White epistemic authority, neoliberal multiculturalism, and imperial feeling. Drawing upon data collected during a 9-month ethnographic study, the analysis presents classroom scenes from a high school world literature unit on Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, selected by the teacher to explore themes of colonialism, imperialism, and revolution. Despite these intentions, classroom engagements with the text often reproduced Orientalist understandings. These findings inform the concluding argument that mobilizes contrapuntal reading as a generative technique for teacher education research and practice to identify and confront the epistemic bases that normalize systems of oppression.
Keywords
May, 2014: It had been several weeks since I had observed Ms. Stevens’s first period ninth-grade English class. 1 Her classroom was where I had first started my yearlong ethnographic project at Spring High School, a Title I urban Midwestern U.S. secondary school where minoritized and indigenous youth comprised more than two thirds of the student body. The end of the school year was near, and I had been spending the past few weeks carrying out student interviews. Part of the reason I wanted to come back to sitting in on classes that week, however, was because the Social Justice Education Program (SJEP) at Spring High had finally begun a monthlong unit examining colonialism, imperialism, and revolution, one that I was looking forward to seeing play out in the SJEP classrooms where I had been spending much of my time. Indeed, the very fact that units such as this could be taught in a U.S. public high school was what had attracted me to the SJEP at Spring High in the first place.
That morning, the students were discussing When My Name Was Keoko by Linda Sue Park, a novel on the Japanese occupation of Korea, and were supposed to be working in groups to discuss relevant excerpts from the book to prepare for watching a film later in the week. After explaining the activity, Ms. Stevens circled the room to see whether students needed help. The classroom buzzed with conversation, but most of the students, however, were not discussing the text. In one group, Zach, Matt, and Jon—three White boys who usually sat with each other in that period—were laughing in a corner when Ms. Stevens stopped by to tell them to get to work.
Groaning, Zach initiated an exchange that frames the larger questions of this article: “Ms. Stevens, why do we need to know about this?” Already irked, she retorted that it was important for them to know this history to make “damn sure that imperialism didn’t happen again.” Zach responded by saying “yeah, but what am I supposed to do about that? No one could really change [things], that’s just the way the world is.” Ms. Stevens answered him with “if everyone said that, then nothing would ever change. Who’s supposed to prevent these things if no one speaks out?” Zach volunteered “the president,” leading Ms. Stevens to say “if no one says anything, the president is going to do what he wants, so the president needs our help and pressure to do the right thing.”
Although Ms. Stevens soon transitioned to talking about assignment, the brief discussion hung in the air for me, unresolved. The ethical demand Ms. Stevens was putting to her students—understanding imperialism to deepen global justice—was parried by Zach through the verbal equivalent of a shrug. This brief exchange between a White student and a White teacher—although not necessarily representative of her engagements with other students—was notable because it reflected an attempt to attach political significance to learning about imperialism and its impact beyond the United States. It attempted to impart personal responsibility to students to prevent imperialism, and then morphed into the importance of engaging with U.S. electoral politics without acknowledging the compromised nature of U.S. electoral politics or the role of the United States as an imperial power. Exhorting students to make sure imperialism “didn’t happen again,” also suggested that Ms. Stevens was discussing imperialism as a past-tense phenomenon, rather than as an ongoing political condition that structures oppressions within and beyond the United States, with effects that differentially distribute harm across populations.
Even after my yearlong ethnographic study at Spring High ended, I found myself returning often to Zach’s question as a way of trying to make sense of how U.S. imperialism—especially in a larger unit on imperialism, colonialism, and revolutions—constituted a site of what the educational theorist and psychoanalyst Deborah Britzman (2000) has termed “difficult knowledge” in U.S. K-12 education. Difficult knowledge refers to pedagogical and curricular encounters with social and historical trauma, or “knowledge that demands something of the learner” (Britzman, 2000, p. 42). The demands for learners to bear witness to historical atrocities, repair moral relations ruptured by violence, or grapple with complex emotions of loss are often left unmet when educators and learners alike struggle to move beyond their own ways of knowing and frames of meaning in making sense of the past. In this respect, resignation or indifference to the historic and contemporary coercions, displacements, violence, and negations of sovereignty that comprise imperialism—exemplified in Zach’s question of why do we need to know about this—constitute an important site of difficult knowledge that is often overlooked in K-12 settings. Britzman’s formulation informs some of the broader questions explored in this article:
Engagement with such questions is vital for research on teacher education and for the preparation of preservice teacher candidates who, through their teaching, can effectively identify and challenge the ideological frames that normalize hierarchies of human value, notably systems of racialized heteropatriarchal capitalism (Roshanravan, 2014) that often impact the lives of students in their classrooms. Confronting empire, and its attending militarism, is consonant with calls to deepen educators’ commitments to social justice and transgressive and abolitionist teachings meant to dismantle harmful structures, practices, and ways of knowing that justify oppression and racialized violence (hooks, 1994; Love, 2017). As Chávez-Moreno (2021) argues, although imperialism is rooted in White supremacist logics, it remains an overlooked sociopolitical-historical context in teacher education and critical studies of multicultural education that affects immigrant and nonimmigrant students alike. U.S. imperialism is predicated on racialized, religious, and nationalistic beliefs of U.S. global hegemony and sustained by a vast military infrastructure that hardens U.S. borders and stretches across continents in dozens of countries (De León, 2015; Vine, 2021). Beyond cultivating knowledge of U.S. imperialism as historical and contemporary interventions in states’ sovereignty, it is also important for educators and teacher educators to consider the ways that may foreclose possibilities for transforming educational structures, practices, and ways of knowing. Consider that U.S. global power is sustained by a massive public funding for military spending—approximating US$740 billion in 2020 alone—whereas requested federal funding for education in 2020 totaled US$64 billion 2 and US$155.5 billion in 2021, with US$82 billion earmarked for coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) relief aid. 3 Under the “best” circumstances, the United States spends nearly five dollars on its military and defense programs for every federal dollar spent on education—and, more often, a fraction of that. It is vital then for educators and teacher educators to understand the material and ethical costs of imperialism to imagine what forms of education could be possible if these disparities were not so pronounced.
Relatedly, when educators and students do not examine U.S. history and global projections of power beyond hegemonic narratives of U.S. benevolence, they miss opportunities to make vital connections between systems of racialized oppression that operate perniciously within the United States and in its international relations. Narratives about U.S. “national security” illustrate this point well. For U.S. high school students who graduated in 2021, U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as the multisited “War on Terror,” were backdrops for the entirety of their lives. Since 2016, within U.S. territory, federal border security and multinational energy security projects have normalized racial profiling and violated rights of sovereign indigenous nations enshrined in bilateral treaties (Fredericks & Heibel, 2018; Sutton & Uluc, 2019). Thus, for educators and teacher educators committed to strengthening social justice in/through education, facilitating critical comparative analysis of “internal and external forms of colonialism” (Coloma, 2013) is an important pedagogical horizon in the pursuit of a decolonized society.
In this article, I engage with these points and provide an empirical engagement with the questions above by examining the teaching of Persepolis—a graphic novel by Marjane Satrapi that examines themes of political protest, gender relations, and migration in relation to the 1979 Iranian Revolution—in classroom scenes at Spring High. I provide an overview of the text’s narrative for readers unfamiliar with the story and examine how it was utilized as part of knowledge production on Iran in the classroom. Although Persepolis is not an anti-imperialist text per se—nor without its own shortcomings of representation—it can be mobilized in classrooms to serve as scaffolding for more critical inquiry at the secondary school level on U.S.-Iran relations and for engaging with histories of U.S. imperialism more broadly. Such critical inquiry is vital, given that, as recently as January 2020, the United States came agonizingly close to a military conflict with Iran.
The persistent invisibility of empire in U.S. historiography and K-12 education is a point of departure for this analysis, as is the Orientalist 4 oversimplification of the Iranian Revolution as a clash of “radical Islam” against the “West.” I mobilize Britzman’s notion of difficult knowledge as a theoretical entrance into understanding the difficulties of enacting an anti-imperialist pedagogy and augment this frame with concepts of White epistemic authority, neoliberal multiculturalism, and imperial feeling, which consistently materialize in the ethnographic scenes of teaching and interview excerpts I present as findings from my analysis. Notably, this article illustrates how these dynamics materialize in the classroom and inhibit the possibilities for critical knowledge production on U.S.-Iran relations, and of U.S. imperialism and its constitutive effects more broadly. Finally, I explore the implications of this study for teacher education and the potential of what Edward Said (1993) has named “contrapuntal reading” for challenging the epistemic regime of U.S. exceptionalism that powerfully shapes pedagogical encounters with the Other.
Invisible Empire, Hypervisible Antagonists
Although analyses of the United States as an empire are not new, the aftermaths of 9/11 have prompted new interest in theorizing the United States as empire (Coloma, 2013; Maira, 2009). Yet terms like “imperialism” and “empire” are neither common in the lexicon of U.S. K-12 teacher education, nor have they appeared as central themes of U.S. historiography (Chávez-Moreno, 2021; Coloma, 2013). 5 As a growing number of scholars have argued, U.S. empire is regularly denied in educational spaces, thus marking it as a difficult space of knowledge, reflection, and teaching (Chávez-Moreno, 2021; Coloma, 2013; Maira, 2009). This disavowal represents an overlooked conceptual stumbling block with respect to teaching about Iran (and the greater Middle East), given its prominent position within the history of U.S. imperialist interventions. Dominant narratives of the Iranian Revolution downplay Iran’s former status as a U.S. client state that violently repressed political dissent, and instead distill it to a “fundamentalist” Islamic uprising against “modernity” represented by the United States (Abrahamian, 2018; Fayyaz & Shirazi, 2013). Relatedly, the contemporary antagonism between Iran and the United States is predominantly explained in U.S. political discourse as the result of persistent Iranian anti-Americanism, and Iran’s unlawful state behavior, as opposed to long-standing U.S. military and economic coercion. These understandings cannot be separated from how Iran is made visible in the United States through political rhetoric and media representation, nor how durable these representations are in the U.S. public imagination. What remain underacknowledged in the historiography of the Iranian Revolution are the anti-imperialist, internationalist, and socialist underpinnings that contributed to the overthrow of the U.S.-backed Pahlavi monarchy (Abrahamian, 1999; Sohrabi, 2018). It is therefore not surprising that these vantage points are also underexamined in most high school classrooms in the United States.
To understand why this may be the case, this article ethnographically revisits different classroom moments and draws upon teacher reflections on teaching Persepolis to examine impediments to engaging with the difficult knowledge of U.S. imperialism. Britzman’s notion of difficult knowledge is useful for this task in two respects: First, it suggests that the challenges posed by difficult knowledge cannot be surmounted by careful lesson planning or curricular resources alone (Zembylas, 2014). Second, working through difficult knowledge entails a reordering of the learner’s understanding of themselves and the world, exemplified in this study by various attempts at SJEP to teach the recent political history of Iran, a history that occasions contending with the mythologies of inherent goodness and progress that underlie commitments to U.S. exceptionalism and imperialism. By embarking on such an exploration, this article takes up the invitation by Chávez-Moreno (2021) to imagine different possibilities for exploring these questions in the classroom and for further contextualizing U.S. empire in teacher education.
In the following, I provide a brief overview of Persepolis as a memoir of the Iranian Revolution and its aftermath, as well as its reception in U.S. educational settings and at Spring High in particular. Conceptually, my argument proceeds from the claim that Persepolis is a potent threshold to engage with difficult knowledge of imperialism as U.S. history. And yet, it is a threshold that is difficult to traverse in the classroom when pedagogical aims become limited to facilitating multicultural encounters without critical attention to the larger sociopolitical histories or relations of power or clearly engaging with the epistemic points of entry that students may bring into such a unit. Despite good intentions, the threshold presented by Persepolis for secondary students and teachers to engage with legacies of U.S. imperialism is not easily approached, even in units designed to generate such awareness.
Overview of Persepolis
Persepolis was published in English in 2003 as two autobiographical graphic novels by the Iranian artist, Marjane Satrapi, and later published as a single volume in 2007. Persepolis is narrated by Marji, a child born into an affluent family with leftist political sentiments in Tehran. Crucially, Persepolis introduces the reader to several pivotal events in U.S.-Iran relations, notably the 1953 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)-sponsored coup d’état and 1979 Iranian Revolution. Persepolis narrates the revolution with a sense of anticipation for the uprisings against the Shah, as well as shock at how Islamist forces consolidated power and ruthlessly suppressed their ideological rivals. As the political situation in Iran worsens, Marji’s family decide to send her to Vienna. There, Marji’s story brings to light the difficulties of her migration experience—she is transformed by her experiences of racism, drug use, and housing insecurity. Beleaguered, she returns to Iran, where she experiences further culture shock as she tries to readjust to life there, making friends, studying, and eventually, getting married. When her marriage disintegrates, she decides to leave Iran for good, this time for France.
As a graphic memoir by an exilic Iranian artist, Persepolis has also been the subject of much political analysis, hailed and critiqued for its depictions of Iran and its reflections on postrevolutionary Iranian gender relations, politics, and culture. Satrapi (2007) is unafraid of recreating scenes of violence, torture, and death that were the backdrop for her childhood, but she frequently contrasts these scenes with those of Marji reveling in (contraband) U.S. pop culture. Representations of this sort of youthful revolt seem intended to disabuse non-Iranian readers of prevalent understandings of Iran as a place consumed by religious fanaticism. Satrapi has stated that she sought to depict her story in ways that help readers see themselves in Marji and in her life in Iran as a way to challenge the discourse of Iran being part of an “axis of evil” (Malek, 2006, p. 373). As Malek (2006) and others argue, however, these representations carried larger political significance as well—Persepolis appeared in English at a time both when memoirs by exilic/diasporic Iranian women proliferated, and influential conservatives in Washington were agitating for a military confrontation with Iran.
In addition, Satrapi (2007) narrates this history from an unmistakably affluent class perspective: Due to her family’s socioeconomic standing, Marji lives comfortably in Tehran, with domestic servants and relatively unencumbered mobility between Iran and Europe. These factors have prompted a critical revisiting of Persepolis’s narrative constructions of postrevolutionary Iran that raise questions about the credibility of its representations. Despite its limitations, however, Persepolis remains a generative text for introducing critical awareness of the imperialist aspects of U.S.-Iran relations among U.S. high school students. Such encounters are facilitated by the growing popularity of the text in U.S. secondary school settings. During the 2013–2014 school year at Spring High School, for example, I observed Persepolis being taught in three different classrooms across the ninth and tenth grades, in the Revolutions Unit with Ms. Stevens, in ninth-grade English for English language learning (ELL) students taught by a student teacher, and a 10th-grade English class on graphic novels. In my observations and discussions with teachers, it was apparent that different teachers also had different aims for students, ranging from prosaic tasks, such as reinforcing vocabulary and identifying various literary themes, to inciting an introductory intercultural understanding and critical historical awareness. In this article, I limit my analysis to Ms. Stevens’ English class for two reasons: First, it was the space in which I observed and participated most in the unit on Persepolis, and, second, it was also a site in which the text was meant to be taught from a critical vantage point.
Attachments and Impediments of Difficult Knowledge
At the heart of my argument is the notion that Persepolis, by virtue of its popularity in U.S. K-12 education, represents a unique—although imperfect—portal to difficult knowledge of U.S. imperialism and its effects on political developments in Iran. Britzman has written about the concept of difficult knowledge in several places, but the most pertinent elaboration of the idea emerges from her work on the psychic and affective difficulties of teaching and learning around social and historical trauma, notably in relation to the teaching of The Diary of Anne Frank and Holocaust education (Britzman, 2000). Britzman’s work has also found resonance in a range of other areas of inquiry, including curriculum studies, language, and literature (Sonu, 2016; Tarc, 2011; Zembylas, 2014).
A key question that Britzman (2000) puts to educators is how do we learn from the traumatic experiences of others, when that learning often entails the activation of our own defense mechanisms that attempt to ward off overpowering feelings of loss and helplessness? In addition, she charges us to reflect on how we undertake that affective work, when so much of curricular thinking assumes student learning to be predictable and relates our learning to concrete, measurable outcomes. Britzman (2000) enumerates several different forms of attachment to difficult knowledge, such as “identification, idealization, clinging, splitting, incorporation, over-familiarity, numbing, uncanniness, and thinking, as some of the possible scenes that structure social recognition and mis-recognition” (p. 32), of the stranger. These modes of attachment often inhibit the possibility of the learner/mourner to come to terms with what has been lost, or to be changed by the learning/memorializing of the loss. Drawing prominently on the psychoanalytic work of Freud, Britzman (2000) proposes “working through” as a promising mode of attachment that is well-suited for difficult knowledge in which there is an ongoing balance of resisting mechanisms that impede making an ethical relation with the stranger, as well as recognizing emotions that break through the defenses against trauma. Thus, the affective and ethical labor of “working through” materializes distinctly across learners. In the context of this study, some of the modes of attachment that Britzman identifies above similarly impede students’ forming of the ethical relation she discusses; however, I also attend to pedagogical approaches that seemingly vacate the text of its transformative potential.
Yet, for all of the suggestiveness of Britzman’s questions on the need to disturb our narratives and unlearn what we know—and despite her recounting of histories that need excavation as difficult knowledge—there is surprisingly little attention given to considering the epistemological bases that work to elevate the value of some lives over others, and legitimize certain forms of political knowledge over others. In the case of working through difficult knowledge of the imperial debris left behind by U.S. statecraft, for example, there is a need to confront colonial forms of nationalism, racism, Orientalism, and U.S. exceptionalism, and the ways in which these discourses work across borders to constitute subjectivities, agency, morality, and notions of humanity itself.
Enjoining Difficult Knowledge With Disavowals of Empire
Although Britzman provides an important point of departure for this study, my analysis of Persepolis as representing a form of difficult knowledge is critically informed by three related ideas: Mills’ (1997) idea of White epistemic authority, Melamed’s (2011) accounts of neoliberal multiculturalism, and Maira’s (2009) notion of imperial feeling. Together, these ideas constitute productive modes of encounter with histories and contemporary formations of imperialism. What Mills (1997) adds to Britzman’s framework is a vital critical race analysis that helps us to understand that difficult knowledge exists, similar to other social propositions, within a hierarchical framework of racialized social legibility. Here, we can appreciate how scenes of difficult knowledge, those that may make demands on learners, remain deeply saturated with discourses that shore up the epistemic authority of (notably White) learners. That is to say, we have to attend to White epistemic authority in the classroom and how works in two respects: first, as a bulwark against difficult knowledge being valued as “knowledge” at all, and, second, that pedagogical encounters with this knowledge—when the notions of imperialism and colonialism are underacknowledged or absent—do not make meaningful ethical demands upon learners.
Maira’s (2009) notion of imperial feeling—defined as a “complex of psychological and political belonging to empire that is often unspoken but always present” (pp. 62–63)—also offers important insights into why U.S. educators and students may struggle to identify U.S. history and politics as imperial history and politics. Writing about the aggrieved U.S. nationalism that emerged from the aftermath of 9/11, Maira (2009) points to the oft-heard question, “Why do they hate us?” to illustrate how imperial feeling materializes in nationalist claims of innocence and everyday denials of empire’s pernicious effects. The rhetorical question that Maira (2009) draws attention to exemplifies the invisibility (or ignorance) of the harms wrought by U.S. imperialism. Similarly, we can argue that imperial feeling underlies the moments when educators and learners fall into facile readings of historical events and contemporary processes that maintain the innocence of U.S. power.
Finally, Melamed’s (2011) argument that “global” literature can be a staging point for neoliberal multicultural projects, that is, assisting Americans to come to “know” the Other, is also significant for understanding how Persepolis is engaged in these classrooms. As a literary text, Persepolis provides an intimate look at some aspects of life during/after the Iranian Revolution; however, without seeing the tumultuous political trajectory of Iran introduced by Persepolis—as one bound up in imperial history, as U.S. history itself—the text may work to secure only its narrator as a subject worthy of empathy, while leaving Orientalist perceptions of Iran and narratives of U.S. exceptionalism largely intact. Read together, these critical insights enable expansions of Britzman’s difficult knowledge as a problem of knowledge-making and representation, by identifying specific techniques and mechanisms by which denial and disavowal of U.S. imperialism typically happen in educational settings.
Methodological Approaches and Considerations
Aspects of this research are inseparable from my own personal experiences that predate and inform the fieldwork discussed here. Notably, my critical engagement with how Iran, U.S.-Iran relations, and Iranian peoples are visible in political rhetoric, media representation, school curricula, and the social encounters of everyday life have been forged by my own experiences of negotiating the processes of racialization and sociopolitical membership in the United States, as a child of displaced Iranian immigrants. These experiences were often intertwined with the security and economic interests of the United States in the Middle East. From the backlash against Iranians in the United States after the U.S. Embassy hostage crisis in my early childhood, to the 1991 U.S. invasion of Iraq in my adolescence, to the militarized nationalism of the “War on Terror” that formed the backdrop for my work as a public school teacher, and to the restrictions and crushing U.S. sanctions imposed by bipartisan administrations on Iran, the imperialist policies of the United States toward much of the Middle East have been a constant presence in my lifetime. In this respect, I have a vested personal and professional interest in both understanding and intervening in the processes of knowledge production on Iran in K-12 educational settings.
I start my methodological discussion with these experiences because they informed my practices of knowing and observing within the school although the ethnographic study from which the data are derived was not originally about how Iran or Iranian history is taught in the United States. Rather, the questions that drew me to Spring High School were developed to understand how implicit beliefs and pedagogical stances produce social meanings around “being American” in schools. My fieldwork occurred during the 2013–2014 academic year—a time when U.S.-Iran relations seemed to be in a period of détente, culminating in the 2015 Iran nuclear deal and the lifting of some sanctions by the United States. In the midst of this larger study, I observed Persepolis being taught in different classes, and the possibility of this particular analysis became visible to me.
Setting
Spring High is an urban Midwestern Title 1 high school of approximately 1,300 students. The student body is 36% African American, 5% Asian American, 7% Native American, 19% Latinx, and 33% White. Similar to most U.S. secondary schools, most teachers at Spring High were White. Most of my observations were carried out in the ninth- and tenth-grade classes affiliated with the SJEP, which is driven by a progressive education philosophy that privileged critical thinking among students and encouraged them to apply their own learning in the pursuit of social justice. My connection to SJEP was built the year before my fieldwork began through several engagements with members of the program’s teaching staff (including Ms. Stevens) in community settings within and beyond Spring High. Through these engagements, and conversations on education as a site for social justice, the SJEP teaching staff and myself developed the possibility of my observations and research within their classes. SJEP is one of three academic programs at Spring High, open to all students from across the district, in contrast to the other academic program offerings. Although Spring High has a reputation for being a more progressive and racially diverse high school than others in the district, it is also heavily securitized with handheld metal detectors and screenings of personal belongings at the school entrance, uniformed security guards patrolling the hallways and common spaces, and a “school resource” police officer stationed in the school. Facilitated by my relationships with SJEP teachers, I was invited to observe and participate in a total of six teachers’ classrooms across grades and content areas. I also spent time in common spaces as well as in student clubs and activities.
Data Collection and Participants
The observation and interview data reported in this article were collected in Ms. Stevens’ SJEP English classroom at Spring High as part of the larger ethnographic study during the course of the 2013–2014 academic year. 6 My larger aim that year was to learn about how minoritized transnational youth 7 learn political membership in school and what political horizons were deemed as possible in everyday learning. My attention to the discursive practices of White students in this article should not be read as inattention to the perspectives of minoritized transnational youth, who generally did not participate in these class discussions nearly as often as their White counterparts. To the contrary, as I came to understand after several months of fieldwork and many individual interviews, these scenes reflected the power relations, unspoken assumptions, and various microaggressions that shape how “class participation” is racialized and gendered as is the case in so many U.S. school settings.
Data Analysis
Britzman’s work on difficult knowledge is a conceptual primer for this analysis. Her idea that the possibilities of learning social and historical trauma were pedagogical, fraught, and often subverted resonated with my feelings while observing and interacting with students and teachers in these classrooms. My initial analysis of the observation data was informed by analytical memos derived from field notes that I used to establish preliminary themes for analysis (Strauss, 1987). The interviews—which had been previously recorded, transcribed, and coded—were re-coded for this study with the help of a graduate student research assistant, Alex Willets-Klapperich.
For this study, interview transcripts were coded using an open coding scheme (Saldaña, 2013) to identify relevant excerpts and themes, especially those about learning and teaching about Persepolis, and more broadly, Iran. This initial round of coding reflected two key patterns in the data: first, that students and teachers brought limited understandings about Iran and U.S.-Iran relations into the classroom, and, second, that these understandings were consonant with several key themes running through the work of Melamed (2011), Maira (2009), and Mills (1997), notably on matters of learning about the Other without threatening the epistemic integrity of empire and imperialism. Using these themes, the observation and interview data were further analyzed in research meetings with Alex, me, and another graduate student assistant, Tiago Bittencourt. These discussions also drew upon my previous analysis of other project data, such as class posters and student interviews, which were important in developing the theoretical frames and analytical approaches of this study.
Classroom Scenes
In this section, I present scenes and interview data from Ms. Stevens’ ninth-grade SJEP English class. Given the ethnographic nature of this study, the presentation of findings and their discussion are enmeshed in this section to allow for critical reflection. Although I observed and participated in 6 of the 7 days that the class spent engaging with Persepolis, I do not present a chronological account of the unit in my analysis. Although Ms. Stevens’ pedagogical aims were to utilize Persepolis as a means to make the underlying historical facts behind the Iranian Revolution clearer to students, what emerges here is that engagements with both the text and broader context of Iran were facilitated in ways that frequently worked to evacuate the text of its more potent political possibilities, despite stated objectives to the contrary. I argue that these scenes reflect the pervasiveness of White epistemic authority, imperial feeling, and neoliberal multicultural logic in engagements with Persepolis. Identifying such moments in class is important because they allow us to see where and how the opening to grappling with the legacies of U.S. imperialism and normative assumptions of U.S. goodness can present themselves and can also be possibly subordinated.
White Epistemic Authority in Everyday Knowledge Production on Iran
A week after the discussion in Ms. Stevens’ first period class where Zach asked why he needed to know about imperialism, the ninth graders in SJEP began the “Revolutions” component of the unit. In English, the students were to read Persepolis to accompany their world history unit on revolutions around the world. I was in Ms. Stevens’ first period class the day the unit began, and she made a point of telling students that they were lucky to have an Iranian researcher in the class this year because he (I) could answer questions about Iran or about Persepolis itself. She encouraged them to ask questions while I was with them. Although I was not comfortable being conscripted into the discussion as an Iran expert, I went along partly to see what dynamics would possibly come out of this announcement.
After an initial silence, a round of questioning ensued. Ms. Stevens’ first asked me to clarify the name of a full-length garment that Iranian women wear in public to conform with the Iranian government’s religious dress code. She was referring to the chador, but she wasn’t sure how to pronounce it, and mentioned that it wasn’t the same as “hijab,” and she wanted to make sure that she was saying it correctly. Matt, one of the White boys who sat with Zach, loudly said, “Ms. Stevens, it’s hee-jab, not a head-job!” and others in his group started shouting out random words like “sundress” and “sun-veil” to refer to the chador. My glance shot to Abyan, a Somali girl in the class who wore hijab in class, but her gaze was trained on her desk during these remarks. Ms. Stevens appeared frustrated by these comments, but did not address them. Tina, a White student who was a regular participant in class discussions, then asked Ms. Stevens if she could also ask me some questions. Ms. Stevens agreed, and Tina started by asking me whether the name of the country was actually pronounced “Eye-ran” or “Er-ron.” When I told her that the name of the country was pronounced more closely to “Ë-ron,” Tina expressed shock and asked me “Are you sure,” because she couldn’t believe the way that she had pronounced it all of her life (Eye-ran) was wrong. Tina posed a second question to me on the language spoken in Iran, asking me whether it was “Farsi” or “Persian.” One member of the group of White boys asked whether “the language was actually Farsi, or parsley?” Dan, another member of the group piped up that “it’s actually pronounced Fart-see,” drawing more snickering and other comments from his friends. Here, Ms. Stevens’ intervened, not by saying anything directly to the students, but by asking me to clarify the proper term for the language. Before responding, I fixed my gaze on Dan until he became aware that I was looking at him. I waited several seconds before saying it is a useful practice to consider what we want to say before speaking, and that the name for the language in English is “Persian,” whereas “Farsi” is the term for Persian used in Iran.
I revisit this exchange because it illustrates some of the ways in which White epistemic authority freely operates within everyday encounters and classroom moments centered on learning about difference. Mills (1997) explains that White epistemic authority validates misunderstandings on matters of race and racial difference and enables a self-representation in which there is no need for accountability for such misrepresentation. Here, we see four White students asserting an entitlement to know or to name concepts of which they had limited or no knowledge, either for the sake of affirming their existing sociolinguistic practices or to have a laugh, akin to Paul Willis’s (1977) “lads.” The sociolinguistic practices exhibited here work as microaggressions insofar as they reflect a disregard for sociocultural practices and skepticism of personal knowledge/experience. Over time, and if left unchecked, such practices can function to condition the inquiry space of the classroom, and inhibit possibilities of humanizing Othered populations. For educators wishing to introduce conversations on imperialism in their classes, not addressing these practices leaves imperial (among other) hierarchies of human value intact.
Rather than to call direct attention to these practices, Ms. Stevens asked me a question to redirect instead. Fortunately, the derisive comments from Dan and his friends did not dissuade other student questions, including one about the reasons for the 1953 CIA-organized coup d’état. In answering this question, I explained that the nationalization of Iranian oil was a result of an unfair 60-year concession given to a British investor by an Iranian monarch in 1901. The British profited massively from this arrangement, keeping US$0.84 of every dollar from the sale of Iranian oil, and further undercut Iranian royalties in multiple ways. Angered by the 1951 Iranian nationalization of “their” oil, led by Mohammad Mossadegh, the British organized an embargo against Iran and worked with the CIA to overthrow the Mossadegh government in favor of the Shah. Several students were surprised to learn that the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company later became known as British Petroleum, or “BP,” whose gas stations are widespread throughout their city. They were even more surprised that not one word about the British-organized embargo of Iranian oil and its role in the 1953 coup was written on the company’s website. Beyond this exchange, the matter of the coup did not materialize again during my observations of the unit, despite its seismic impact on 20th-century Iranian politics.
Encountering Iran Through Neoliberal Multiculturalism and Imperial Feeling
During my exchange with the students, Ms. Stevens was setting up the media console to screen “Rick Steves’ Iran,” an episode of a popular travel show devoted to Iran that first aired in 2009, as a primer on Iran before reading Persepolis. 8 The episode took up the remainder of the period, and the subsequent class period. Later, Ms. Stevens told me that this was the second year that she was using Persepolis for the Revolutions unit and, based on her previous experience teaching the text, she decided that it would be beneficial to give students a primer on Iranian culture and politics before reading the book. As the episode started, Ms. Stevens asked whether I had seen it. I replied that I had, but felt the show was limited in its approach to representing Iran, and that the host brought Orientalist assumptions into his interactions Iranians, particularly Iranian women. These assumptions are reiterated on the program’s website, where the host states, “Without a body to flaunt, the face is an Iranian woman’s powerful tool. If the nose isn’t quite right, it can be fixed. We saw many nose jobs healing. And those eyes . . . truly a contact sport.” 9
Apart from visits to tourist sites, the premise of the episode seemed to be that it was shocking that Iran is not the evil place it is often made out to be in the United States—that in fact, Iranians can be kind to Americans. As a sociocultural primer on Iran then, the episode worked to affirm what Melamed (2006) has termed a neoliberal multicultural understanding of Iran. Neoliberal multiculturalism sutures together U.S. nationalism with an apolitical and deracinated anti-racism to legitimate U.S. global power. This neoliberal multicultural understanding is seen in the episode’s narrative of how Iran—despite chants of “Death to America” and anti-American murals—is surprisingly hospitable to Steves and, by extension, to his U.S. viewers. Although mentioned in the program, anti-U.S. sentiment in Iran is left underexamined and limited to being a source of personal discomfort for the host—a lingering feeling of “why do/did they hate us”—instead of being addressed as part of a complex legacy of U.S. interventions and imperialist policies toward Iran. Maira (2009) refers to such responses as imperial feeling, or a conception of self, which works to both reinforce American innocence and deny the legacies and latent effects of U.S. imperialism. For students learning about imperialism and popular revolutions then, there was little in this program that challenges dominant knowledge on the Iranian Revolution, U.S.-Iran relations, or disrupts the fantasy that the United States is a benevolent country that globally projects its power in the service of a more ethical future. Rather, the image of Iran as part of an “axis of evil” is partly rehabilitated through the hosts’ encounters with “good” Iranians, a motif that is carried forward by Satrapi’s (2007) Persepolis.
I later met with Ms. Stevens during her lunch break to learn more about how SJEP decided on Persepolis and the imperialism, colonialism, and revolutions unit. She said that her colleague in SJEP, who taught world history, first proposed the unit, and that the school already had copies of Persepolis, so it came together organically. Her interest was also linked to her learning of Middle Eastern politics. She explained that it was a colleague who first told her about European colonialism and the making of the contemporary Middle East, and how learning that history made her question the ways in which she had been taught about it before. Learning about European colonial history in the Middle East also sparked her interest in sharing it in her classroom. She mentioned that she was glad I was in the room the first day because she wondered whether she knew the text well enough to foster critical conversations. I told her that I also felt challenged by teaching the unfamiliar, before asking about her goals for student learning in the thematic unit. She explained, I want them to understand why revolution happens. I want them to understand that it’s for lots of reasons, and that it’s not necessarily that one side is right or wrong—although we like to pick sides—but that it’s people using their voices to say they don’t agree with the way things are going. And for whatever reason, they want change. I want them to see that, but I also want them to be able to understand the facts behind historical fiction and understand, because this is World Lit, why the authors are writing about what they’re writing, their purpose, that it’s important to talk about these things so you have an understanding, and when you’re faced with something you can look at [it from] all sides. . . I’m hoping that when the speakers come in, you for example, they see that people are in their lives who are affected by that very closely, and that they could be sitting next to them.
Although her aims to rethink the Iranian Revolution and foreground its historical factors is important, in practice, the historical facts behind the Revolution—and specifically its connections to U.S. imperialism—were not in the forefront of student learning in Ms. Stevens’ class. Rather, the pedagogical approaches in her first period seemed to fall into providing students with “intercultural” benefits and understandings of Iran and Iranian culture, with the hope that viewing and reading these materials may allow students to better relate to or understand the lived impacts of the revolution on Iranians they may meet. Without sufficient opportunities for students to critically explore the imperialist roots of the Iranian Revolution, or more explicit acknowledgment of how narratives—even those that aim to trouble hegemonic representations—can reflect narrators’ locations within relations of power, this unit inadvertently veered into learning about the (Iranian) Other through neoliberal multicultural representations of Iran and Iranians as relatable and not as threatening to “us” as believed (Melamed, 2011). This veering may have resulted in part due to reliance on problematic resources, notably the Rick Steves episode, and a reliance on students’ discovery of sociopolitical insights without a critical excavation of the epistemological bases that students come into the classroom through which to learn. The reliance on student meaning-making was seen on the second day of the Persepolis unit; students in the first period collaborated on a KWL (What do you Know, What Do you Want to Know, and What Did You Learn) activity for Iran after viewing the Rick Steves documentary. During this activity, students were to work in groups to deepen their understandings of Iran and the 1979 Revolution through internet research. It was not clear which online resources students had made use of in their internet research. Students also synthesized their findings in small groups to create large informational posters that were put up in the classroom. With about 10 min remaining in the period, students quickly discussed their findings with the rest of the class and were to draw connections to the text.
Although the student posters varied in topical focus and some reflected close engagement with recent Iranian political history, several posters contained notable errors: One poster stated that Arabic was a “main” language spoken in Iran (although Arabic is spoken in Iran, it is spoken by 3% of the population, primarily in the regions bordering Iraq and adjoining the Gulf); another bullet on this poster reported that Iranian women could divorce their husbands and could wear “Western” clothing before the revolution. A second poster stated—without further connection to the text—that “Islam is a religion of peace, shahadah, fasting, prayer, and pilgrimage.” These points, although not entirely “wrong,” per se, were too vague to be reflective of the material conditions and historical facts that Ms. Stevens wanted her students to read the text through. The posters also suggested that the revolutionary and anti-imperialist curricular framing for this unit was not always clear to the students, and that, intentionally or not, they were often drawing upon Orientalist representations of Iran in their work.
Ms. Stevens had also developed graphic organizers as a way of making sure that her students were understanding ideas raised within the text, but students sometimes struggled with drawing the connections, or engaging deeply with the political narratives of the text. As an example, one of the worksheets asked students about Leon Trotsky and Che Guevara (both mentioned in Persepolis) to examine connections between communism and Iranian politics. When a student asked for help with that point, Ms. Stevens posed their question to the class for larger discussion. When students did not answer—apart from Zach and his friends shouting “commies!” and “the Russians!”—she told them that British and Russian colonialism in Iran was the connection to communism, without providing further elaboration. One of the boys in Zach’s group declared, “they can’t be commies and Persians.” Rather than to query this statement constraining political subjectivities in a graphic novel detailing state violence against Iranian leftists, Ms. Stevens told the students that perspective on the revolution is but one perspective, before shifting to a different topic.
In these examples, we see how assigning a text such as Persepolis does not automatically lead students to necessarily question the narrow frames with which they have come to understand Iran or its politics (or indeed, the world outside the United States). Instead, we glimpse the workings of White epistemic authority as a recurring obstacle to confronting imperialism, as well as engaging with political histories that challenge dominant accounts of Iran and the Iranian Revolution in students’ minds. Ms. Stevens’ statement about the existence of multiple perspectives pertaining to a historical event is a critical point, but on its own, it risks falling into a form of depoliticized relativism that does not adequately situate narrative accounts or representational practices into larger relations of power.
To be clear, unfamiliarity with a given political history cannot be understood as evidence of willfully being “wrong”—responses borne out of unfamiliarity often highlight the ongoing and unfinished nature of learning. However, there is a crucial distinction between educators engaging with responses of unfamiliarity with accompanying curiosity (or even humility) versus those that rest upon White epistemic authority: the former can pave the way for deeper discussion and critical examination of a given history, whereas the latter works to dismiss the importance of other ways of knowing that disrupt hegemonic understandings.
Certainly, when trying to intervene in dominant narratives that sustain empire and imperialist practices, a robust base of sociopolitical and contextual knowledge matters. An equally important step for educators attempting to teach and learn about colonialism, imperialism and revolution, however, is to situate their students’ encounters with a text—and the difficult knowledge it may embody—within wider historic, cultural, and political experiences and ideological beliefs that frame/constrain popular understandings of the United States and its relations with the rest of the world. With this aim in mind, teaching for “mastery” of a specific text becomes secondary, and educators can instead creatively employ the text as a springboard for broader critical questions that align with the curricular aims of the unit, such as the following brief examples: Persepolis mentions the U.S.-backed 1953 coup in Iran, which led to the overthrow of an anticolonial nationalist Iranian government. Why did the United States elevate its own political interests over the sovereignty of another country? How many times has the United States done precisely that since its founding? How did that event set the stage for the U.S.-Iran relations that came thereafter? Such questions align with Chávez-Moreno’s (2021) arguments for U.S. educators and teacher educators to confront imperial privilege and to dismantle masternarratives that “construct us/U.S. in a sanctimonious light, and blame Others for their own destitution” (p. 214).
Discussion and Conclusion
The classroom scenes revisited in this article highlight the knowledge production resulting from a high school English teacher’s use of Persepolis as a text within a unit on colonialism, imperialism, and revolutions. Despite her aims to use the text and the unit to help students learn the historical facts of the Iranian Revolution behind the text, or to prevent imperialism from happening again, Ms. Stevens’ unit on Persepolis was often reduced to working as a vehicle for the legitimation of White epistemic authority and a form of neoliberal multiculturalism in which learning about the Other and reading “global” literature is a staging point for becoming an informed “global citizen” (Melamed, 2011). These legitimations materialized in the silences and missed opportunities to interrogate Orientalist assumptions about the text and Iran writ large.
Highlighting these practices is not a way to point fingers at my participants or to propose a how-to manual for educators on teaching Persepolis. Rather, these everyday scenes and interactions illustrate the epistemic frames that occlude knowledge of U.S. imperialism and its political legacies in Iran, and illustrate how they emerge in everyday classroom moments. Indeed, there is much to share with teacher candidates from Ms. Stevens’ instructional practices, with respect to setting up a meaningful curricular encounter with imperialism. Notably, her personal learning about European colonialism in the Middle East, and how it sparked her interest in incorporating those perspectives into her own teaching; her embarking upon cross-subject area curricular planning with her world history colleague; her inviting diasporic Iranian guest speakers to speak of their personal experiences of the Iranian Revolution; her revising her unit after reflecting on how it went previously to provide greater contextual grounding for students reading Persepolis; and her being willing to reflect on her approaches to the topic with a critical diasporic Iranian researcher, constitute meaningful work and suggest an ongoing process toward facilitating critical perspectives on the Iranian Revolution and its aftereffects.
Nevertheless, the scenes from her class also illustrate additional opportunities to deepen engagements with the effects of U.S. imperialism in the classroom. Despite pedagogical aims to the contrary, the data highlight how the pervasiveness of White epistemic authority in the classroom affirms an ambivalent (and at times Orientalist) gaze toward Iran and the Iranian revolution. We are also left wondering how this unit would have unfolded differently, for example, if there was greater scaffolding of the anti-imperialist aims of the unit, or if the White epistemic authority of the students presented here could have been subjected to greater collective scrutiny and discussion in the classroom. Similarly, the supplementary resources utilized represent points of further critical engagement. I turn back to Chávez-Moreno’s (2021) call to grapple with imperial privilege in teacher education to offer a concluding reflection on how teachers can create epistemic space for alternate readings, possibilities, and ways of knowing.
For teacher education to prepare future educators for the challenges of this complex endeavor—to equip them to educate for a more just world to come, rather than the world as it is—acknowledging and critically examining imperial privilege is a powerful starting point. Conceptually, imperial privilege resonates with the ideas I have mobilized from Maira (2009), Melamed (2011), and Mills’ (1997) in my analysis—they collectively highlight the ways in which processes of empire materialize at everyday individual levels through denial, silencing, and disavowal of empire itself as a sociopolitical context. From this perspective, Zach’s question of “why do we need to know about this” can be read less as end-of-the-year boredom, than as an encapsulation of imperial privilege, as exasperation by being asked to care about imperialism, and to become aware of how it is predicated on the insecurity, suffering, and dehumanization of entire populations.
Chávez-Moreno (2021) argues that the masternarratives that uphold the United States as an exceptional polity can be challenged by teacher educators in several ways: by inviting teacher candidates to trouble beliefs founded on masternarratives, by troubling our own beliefs, and through inquiries “into the experiences of individuals on the margins, by listening to their stories” (p. 6). She also suggests that teacher educators can usher conversations about imperialism into their teaching through texts, including (but not limited to) graphic history books. Although I largely agree with these points, this article nevertheless highlights that drawing upon a particular text or resource is not necessarily enough to dislodge masternarratives—it also deeply matters how students and educators come to the texts, scaffold them, and work through them together. To this end, I argue that contrapuntal reading emerges as a powerful technique for disrupting imperialist knowledge-making, or at least bringing greater awareness of ways of knowing that leave the ideological underpinnings of imperialism intact.
Edward Said (1979, 1993), whose analysis of Western literature inaugurated postcolonial critiques of Orientalism as a system of knowledge, identified contrapuntal reading as a way of rerouting the text away from totalizing and hegemonic meanings. Said’s use of contrapuntality rests on the assumption that compositions comprise multiple, simultaneous lines that enable different possibilities to appreciate or understand a text or narrative. Analytically, contrapuntality raises the possibility of multiple narratives, meanings, and implications in a text. At the same time, contrapuntal reading is not simply a call to accept a plurality of voices as equally meaningful or privileged, as suggested by Ms. Stevens’ response to an essentializing student comment. As Chowdhry (2007) notes, Said’s plea for a contrapuntal reading is not to valorise plurality, rather it is a plea for “worlding” the texts, institutions and practices, for historicising them, for interrogating their sociality and materiality, for paying attention to the hierarchies and the power-knowledge nexus embedded in them, and for recuperating a “non-coercive and non-dominating knowledge.” (p. 105)
Teaching about difficult knowledge through contrapuntal reading entails critical attention to what is said, by whom, and how, as well as closely engaging with the silences therein. In the case of Persepolis, a contrapuntal analysis could be built upon several related aims: first, critically mapping the knowledges that students and educators bring into the classroom with themselves on Iran and U.S.-Iran relations, and excavating the origins of these understandings. Such an account can be used to critically engage the epistemological bases that inform how a society is perceived or how text might be read, such as through Mills’ (1997) White epistemic authority, Maira’s (2009) imperial feeling, and Melamed’s (2011) neoliberal multiculturalism. For educators committed to dismantling the epistemic bases that normalize systems of oppression, critically grappling with ways of knowing is equally—if not more—important than assigning students a “multicultural” text.
Second, Satrapi’s (2007) treatment of critical moments in U.S.-Iran relations is often fleeting, so it is important for educators to resist the temptation to imbue Persepolis with comprehensive historical authority, or read it as reflecting a contemporary perspective on Iran. As a memoir, Persepolis offers a perspective situated in a particular time and socioeconomic position, one that both interrupts and reproduces hegemonic understandings of the Iranian Revolution, as well as its causes and aftermath. Delimiting Persepolis as a graphic memoir then—rather than as a historical tome—both underscores that working with narrative is complex and sets up possibilities to further explore additional texts and resources. In this way, a contrapuntal commitment not only invites readers to see texts as an account, rather than the account, but also situates those accounts within sociopolitical histories and larger relations of power. Echoing Chávez-Moreno (2021), drawing upon distinctive vantage points to challenge masternarratives can enrich understandings of the role of imperialism in modern Iranian politics to learners. For example, teachers could also draw upon the graphic novel Operation Ajax—which details the 1953 coup in Iran—for a deeper engagement with the imperialist roots of the Iranian Revolution. In the absence of an “ideal” text, however, teachers can underscore that narratives reflect situated accounts that cannot be excised from their epistemic commitments or relations of power.
For contrapuntal pedagogies to be successfully enacted in classrooms, it is important to consistently provide preservice teachers opportunities to critically explore how they know what they have come to know, and to critically query what seems common sense or normative. In the short term, such critical inquiry does not necessarily require a seismic restructuring of the classroom as much as consistent commitment and pedagogical intention to trouble norms that legitimate different forms of oppression. Although the labor of epistemic transformation is undoubtedly complex and radical reimaginings of education are undoubtedly necessary, educators can (and should) nevertheless make creative use of opportunities at hand to hold space for advancing these transformations in the meanwhile. In relation to the related ideas of imperialism and U.S. exceptionalism, for example, a think-pair-share activity exploring what it means to be “American” could open vital reflective space and create opportunities for further unpacking of masternarratives of U.S. exceptionalism that sustain U.S. imperialism.
In lieu of offering a “how-to” of additional activities, I want to underscore that sustained provocations of this sort are needed in the everyday context for advancing long-term epistemic transformations—The charge for teacher educators committed to advancing these transformations is to consistently hold and model such space and praxis for preservice teachers. In the long term, these efforts would be enriched by ongoing engagements with educational studies of emotionality and psychoanalysis (Britzman, 2000; Zembylas, 2014), decoloniality and praxis (Hantzopoulos & Bajaj, 2021; Williams & Bermeo, 2020), critical race theory (e.g., Lynn & Parker, 2006), and White teacher identity studies in teacher education (Lensmire, 2017; Picower, 2009). These approaches—alongside those of Mills (1997), Maira (2009), and Melamed (2011)—offer theoretical openings that are vital for advancing long-term epistemic transformations and interrupting the replication of White epistemic authority in the classroom.
Finally, the aspects of U.S.-Iran relations glimpsed in Persepolis can be generative for teaching U.S. interventions in Iran as a part of U.S. history itself, as something to critically examine as an “American” practice, rather than using the story as a mirror into the Iranian psyche or present political conditions. Read contrapuntally, the text no longer constitutes a pedagogical end to facilitate neoliberal encounters with difference that leave inequalities of power untouched, but rather, becomes a threshold for further inquiry and comparative analysis of how U.S. imperialism has materialized and is felt around the world. Teacher education has much to gain by cultivating future educators’ contrapuntal awareness, as an epistemological foundation upon which teacher candidates can endeavor toward textual engagements that center not only the sociopolitical context of empire, but also those of interconnected systems of oppression.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The author wishes to thank Alex Willets-Klapperich, Tiago Bittencourt, Maria Hantzopoulos, Brooke Harris Garad, and Diana Rodríguez Gómez for their generative feedback to earlier versions of this manuscript.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
