During World War II Reza Shah favored Nazi Germany. British and Soviet forces entered Iran in 1941, forcing the shah to abdicate in favor of his son, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.

After the war, British and U.S. forces left Iran, although Soviet forces remained in Azerbaijan until 1946. The Majlis approved the nationalization of the petroleum industry in March 1951. The leading advocate of this measure was Muhammed Mossadegh, leader of the National Front, who was elected prime minister in April 1951. Mossadegh attempted to establish Iranian political and economic independence and to democratize the system established by the Pahlavis. However, his government fell in August 1953 as the result of a coup d'etat that was backed by the United States and the United Kingdom, who opposed the nationalization of the oil industry and Mossadegh's alleged communist ties. The shah assumed full control of the government in 1963, when he began a program of land reform and social and economic modernization known as the White Revolution. However, he also became increasingly autocratic, using violence to crack down on the opposition. Opposition to the increasing repression as well as the Westernization and secularization of Iranian society was widespread and articulated particularly by Islamic clergy, notably Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, exiled to Turkey and then Iraq after 1963.

In March 1975 the shah introduced a single-party system based on the Iran National Resurgence Party. Opposition grew, however, and during 1977 and 1978 demonstrations against the shah and his secret police (SAVAK) rose to crisis level. The most effective opposition came from Ayatollah Khomeini, who conducted his campaign from France, where he had arrived in October 1978 after 14 years in exile in Iraq. Khomeini demanded a return to the principles of Islam, and the response to this call in Iran was so great that the shah felt compelled to leave the country in January 1979.

Khomeini arrived in Tehran shortly afterward and effectively took power on February 11. A 15-member Islamic Revolutionary Council (IRC) was formed. Khomeini declared Iran an Islamic republic on April 1, 1979, and introduced a constitution that vested supreme authority in the faqih (leader), initially Khomeini. In the immediate aftermath of the revolution, militant students, with the tacit approval of the mullahs, occupied the U.S. embassy and took 66 diplomatic personnel hostage, releasing 13 shortly thereafter. This action, which was against all accepted international conventions, was condemned by both the United Nations and the International Court of Justice. The remaining hostages were released after 444 days of captivity in 1981, coinciding with the inauguration of President Ronald Reagan. A presidential election in January 1980 resulted in a win for Abolhassan Banisadr, who received about 75 percent of the votes. Elections for the 270-seat Majlis followed and resulted in a clear win for the Islamic Republic Party (IRP).

In June 1981 proceedings on the grounds of incompetence were instituted against Banisadr in the Majlis, and Khomeini ordered his dismissal. He was succeeded by Mohammad Ali Rajai in July 1981. The following month, however, Rajai and his prime minister, Mohammad Javad Bahonar, were the victims of a bomb attack mounted by the Mujahideen e-Khalq, an opposition group. In October, Ali Khamenei was elected president, and Mir-Hossein Mousavi was elected prime minister. Both Ali Khamenei and Mir-Hossein Mousavi were reelected in 1985.

In 1987 Tehran reacted bitterly to a bloody midyear confrontation with Saudi security forces at Mecca's Grand Mosque that resulted in the death of more than 400 Iranian pilgrims. In 1989 relations with the West again plummeted after Khomeini issued a fatwa, or death decree, against Salman Rushdie for his book Satanic Verses, considered offensive to Muslims.

From 1980 to 1989 Iran was embroiled in a war with Iraq that proved costly and bloody. In 1980 Iraq abrogated a 1975 accord dividing the Shatt al-Arab along the median line and invaded Iran's Khuzestan Province. Despite early reverses, Iran succeeded in retaining control of most of the larger towns, including Abadan, and by the end of the year the conflict resulted in a stalemate. Iran advanced into Iraqi territory for the first time in 1982 but made only marginal gains on the southern front. A renewal of the Iranian military offensive in late 1987 proved futile as Iraqis drove the Iranians from Basra, and half the Iranian fleet was lost during the fighting. In 1988 the war of the cities commenced, with both countries bombing each other's capitals and large cities. The two countries, faced with a no-win situation, agreed to a cease-fire in 1988, followed by a peace agreement in 1990. The agreement was essentially on Iranian terms and restored the border to its 1975 status.

Ayatollah Khomeini died in June 1989. The Council of Experts elected President Khamenei to succeed Khomeini as the faqih. In the presidential election of July 1989, Hashemi Rafsanjani commanded 95.9 percent of the votes. He was sworn in as president in August 1989. Over the course of the next eight years the government of Iran slowly moderated its Islamic extremist, separatist position. In 1997 a more moderate government was elected under the leadership of Mohammed Khatami. Khatami's election did not improve relations with the West immediately, but he had a moderating effect. He also relaxed some of the Islamic restrictions on women and young people. However, there was tension between Khatami and the more hard-line fundamentalist supporters of Iran's supreme leader Khamenei. Khatami was reelected in 2001.

Iran was outraged in early 2002 when U.S. President George Bush referred to the nation as part of an "axis of evil," along with Iraq and North Korea, and accused Iran of developing long-range missiles. That September, Iran began construction on a nuclear reactor at Bushehr. The United States and United Nations (UN) both kept a close watch on Iran's nuclear weapons program. Iran agreed to suspend its nuclear program in 2003 and allow UN inspectors to visit; the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) found no evidence of nuclear weapons in 2003 but then scolded Iran for lack of cooperation in 2004. In November 2004 the European Union (EU) persuaded Iran to suspend its uranium enrichment program.

Iran's government became increasingly conservative in 2004. Conservative representatives gained a large majority in parliament after a controversial election in which the Council of Guardians disqualified most reformist candidates before voting began. In 2005 ultra-conservative Mahmoud Ahmadinejad became president. Under his leadership, Iran resumed its uranium enrichment program. The IAEA consequently reported Iran to the United Nations Security Council (UNSC), charging violation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. In 2008 conservative representatives won over two-thirds of the seats in the parliamentary elections. Iran test-fired a new long-range missile it claimed is capable of hitting targets in Israel. The UNSC unanimously passed a new resolution reaffirming demands that Iran stop enriching uranium.

In June 2009 Ahmadinejad won reelection over Mir Hussein Moussavi in what was widely viewed by the international community as a flawed election. Protests against the alleged fraud erupted in Tehran in what amounted to be the largest antigovernment demonstration since the 1979 Iranian revolution. Seven people were killed. Moussavi filed an official appeal for a recount to the Guardian Council but later demanded a new election. The Council agreed to a partial recount, alleging that the law prevented a new election from being held. Ahmadinejad was sworn in for a second term in August 2009 and presented a cabinet that, for the first time since the revolution, included women.

"Recent comics criticism, and in particular criticism of graphic memoirs, centers on the instabilities inherent in the multimodal text. Michael Chaney, Hillary Chute, Rocio Davis, James Hatfield, Theresa Tensuan, and Gillian Whitlock focus on the disjunctures between word and image, across panels, and in the present narration of a past self. According to this scholarship, it is from the medium's tensions and instabilities that it gains its political force, undermining hegemonic social structures, representing the unrepresentable, and positioning the reader as an intimate participant in its construction. Characteristic of this work, Davis contends that graphic memoirists "revise established genres to destabilize ideologyand conventional strategies of meaning in order to enact distinct sociocultural situations. Readers who encounter these revisionary texts are thus obliged to reexamine their expectations and critical perspectives" (2005, 265; emphases added)" (Darda 33).

"The face belongs to the realm of ethics in part because it is incomprehensible.To use Gordon's term, the face signals the complex personhood of the other: shecannot and must not be altogether discernable. We must understand difference. [36] Levinas suggests, not as a project of assimilation or categorical othering but interms of what he calls proximity: "Proximity as the impossible assumption ofdifference, impossible definition, impossible integration. Proximity as impossibleappearance" (1999,138). Rather than demanding that the other be more like one-self or attempting to understand otherness through artificial and static categoriesof difference—the "ethno-racial blocks" of US multiculturalism come to mind—the face communicates the proximity of the other as irreducible to "a 'kind ofthisor that,"' neither "unity" nor "ultimate difference" (138-39). The face positionsthe other not as alien but as a neighbor incomprehensible in her complexity. Theface, as Levinas puts it, cannot "become a content.... it is uncontainable" (1985,87). The ethical tension of the face thus engenders an ""excess of sociality" thattranscends the framework of self and other itself (1999,137). Ethics is not a matterof lack—an absence of conflict—but of surplus, an irreducible complexity thatarises from contradiction. The face tempts us with murder at the same time thatit prohibits us from committing it. The face is neither the same nor different" (Darda 35-36).

"In assessing Persepolis, it is important to consider the text's intended audience,as Satrapi is candid about her target readership. With a first printing in Erance from 2000 to 2003 (and in the United States in 2003 and 2004), the memoir is meant for a Western audience.' As yet, there is still no official Farsi translation inprint. In a 2004 discussion of her work, Satrapi clarifies, "I wrote [Persepolis] for the other ones, not for Iranians. For Iranians I wouldn't give so much explanation" (2004a). If her autographic is a work of historical reclamation, then it is one that takes place in the historical imagination of the West. Just like Butler, Satrapi's chief concern is the perception of Iranians and Western Asians in France and the United States as either inhuman or missing, as either global terrorists or historical absences. Her autographic presents a past self that is at center frame, right in the reader's line of sight, but that her drawings do not capture. She is there but as a human, not a figuration.Taking account of its target audience—French and US citizens likely less than familiar with Iranian history—Persepolis is often characterized as a work of didacticism. Davis for one describes Satrapi's autographic as a "didactic project" capable of presenting an "insider perspective" on Iran (2005, 265). The Bildungsroman is after all a form that tends to educate and moralize. Yet Satrapi's autographic is, as her remarks in the introduction make clear, less about educating Western readers on Iranian history than it is about denaturalizing their prescribed understandings of Western Asia" (Darda 37).

A significant section of the novel (Satrapi [35], 157–247) focuses on the position and acculturation process of a young Iranian pupil who moves to Europe, more precisely Vienna, where she spends four years of her life. During this time, initially she goes through the so-called honeymoon phase of cultural adjustment, the stage that precedes culture shock since '[d]uring the first few weeks most individuals are fascinated by the new' (Oberg [26], 143). Several studies also identify this phase as the 'tourist phase', because sojourners in their early phase of acculturation, in a way similar to tourists, 'have experiences largely limited to institutions (hotels, resorts, business, airports) that isolate them from having to deal with the local culture in a substantial way and on its own terms' (Winkelman [40], 122). In other words, the phase is mostly limited to enjoying the superficial aspects of the local culture: food, drinks, landscapes, shopping, parties and sexual pleasure. This honeymoon experience is typically observed among international students whose lifestyle allows such pleasurable activities: 'A number of longitudinal studies of emotional adjustment have found that, on arrival in the new society, many students initially express optimism and elation' (Bochner [10], 189; see also Ward et al. [39], 83)

[ . . . . ]

As Typhaine Leservot observes, the early episodes of Marji's life before the Islamic revolution provide a 'nuanced look at Western culture', which indicates the mobilizing of at least three different discourses: the anti-Western discourse of the Islamic regime, the pro-Western discourse of the Shah and the ambivalent discourse of intellectuals (Leservot [20], 121). After the revolution, however, the three discourses become reduced into two: the official Islamic discourse and the superficial underground pro-Western attitude. The latter is vividly portrayed by episodes when the young Marji revels in her newly acquired tapes of Western music, Kim Wilde posters, chocolate, denim jacket and Nike sneakers (Satrapi [35], 130–134). Thus, as Gilmore and Marshall observe, on 'one level, then, Persepolis also affirms ideologies [and images] associated with Western neoliberalism ... which explains in part the popularity of the text and its use by conservatives and liberals alike' ([16], 681).

The more experienced Marji, however, realizes the superficiality of such an attitude. Eventually she understands that Iranian people take on the appearance of Western culture, but this is just a mask that they are wearing in opposition to the official discourse of the Islamic regime. Later in the book, her narrating self describes her friends as the following: 'When something is forbidden, it takes on a disproportionate importance. Much later I learned that making themselves up and wanting to follow the western ways was an act of resistance on their part' (Satrapi [35], 261; emphasis added). This is clearly an example when the narrating self retrospectively uses 'evaluation and the drawing of moral conclusions' (Fludernik [14], 90), indicating the presence of a mediating person who sees beyond the surfaces and explains the covert elements of the Iranian culture to a Western audience.[ 6]

Especially Marji's narrating self represents and in most of the book maintains a synthesized or integrated attitude toward the West, in which the images of God, Descartes, Zarathustra and Karl Marx interact with each other. Foreign revolutionaries such as Che Guevara, Fidel Castro and Trotsky are juxtaposed to Iranian revolutionary heroes, including those of her own family (Satrapi [35], 4–10). Similarly, in the beginning when the narrating self gives a short introduction to the history of Iran, not only the Western interference in Iranian politics, but also invasions by the Arabs and Mongolians are criticized (11).[ 7] The Tyrol as the symbol of Austrian nationalism and jingoism and the Tyrol as the symbol of rural kindness coexist (172–174; 230). The uniqueness of Persian mythology is celebrated, while simultaneously its connections to elements of the Western mythology, for example the Holy Grail and the Knights of the Round Table, are also emphasized (332).

Marji's narrating self asserts the position of privileged knowledge when she assumes the role of a cultural translator or mediator who teaches westerners about Iran. This is candidly revealed, for example, in the introduction of the book in which Satrapi positions herself as a transnational individual, 'an Iranian who has lived more than half of my life in Iran'. She also emphasizes here that the prevalent Western view of Iran is distorted and erroneous: 'this old and great civilization has been discussed mostly in connection with fundamentalism, fanaticism, and terrorism ... I know that this image is far from the truth' (see also Gilmore and Marshall [16], 679–680; Satrapi [35], n.p.).

[ . . . . ]

Marji is an exile rather than an expatriate or other sojourner in the sense that she escapes from her country due to a totalitarian political regime and she has a complex and traumatic relationship with the homeland as she is 'physically located in one place while dreaming of an unrealizable return to another' (Naficy [24], 17). As Said observes, those who experience exile live in 'the perilous territory of not belonging' ([31], 177). The exilic state leads to a 'paralyzing crisis' (Naficy [24], 11), which derives from a sense of homelessness, depression, eccentricity and estrangement. Exile 'generally implies a fact of trauma' (Peters [29], 19) as well as 'the loss of something left behind forever'; hence, it is 'terrible to experience' (Said [31], 173).[ 9]

Exiles may feel both hatred and jealousy toward everyone who stayed in the native country: as Said says, '[e]xiles look at non-exiles with resentment. They belong in their surroundings, you feel, whereas an exile is always out of place' ([31], 180; emphasis in original). And yet, exiles often feel guilty that they did not remain at home and do not experience the political pressure, war or other dreadful events as the non-exiles. Marji also admits that 'each telephone call from my parents reminded me of my cowardice and my betrayal. I was at once happy to hear their voice and ashamed to talk to them ... while they were being bombed every day' (Satrapi [35], 195).

All this indicates that the exilic condition may entail marginalization for the transnational individual who is frequently unable to choose between the two cultures and does not feel comfortable in either of the societies: they are in a painful 'liminal state' of oscillation, as they are simultaneously 'cut off from homeland and roots and alienated from the host society' (Naficy [24], 6, 15). Thus, they become similar to migrants who 'vacillate between their two cultures, feeling at home in neither, an effect that has been referred to as the "marginal syndrome"' (Ward et al. [39], 31).