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Ecological Futures and Biopolitics in Iraq+100
Abstract by Merve Tabur On Session 066  (Literature and Literary Production I)

On Friday, November 15 at 10:15 am

2019 Annual Meeting

Abstract
Iraq+100: Science Fiction Stories from a Century After the Invasion is the first short story collection to tackle the 2003 occupation through the lenses of speculative fiction. The collection’s initial circulation and popularization in English reflects the development of new literary sensibilities that address a global readership instead of an exclusively Arab solidarity that takes the Arabic language as its common denominator. In Iraq+100, language no longer serves as the basis of a national or pan-Arab identity, which the stories depict as having disintegrated in the imagined futures of Iraq a century after the 2003 occupation. However, it continues to be the primary marker of a humanity defined by its speculative capacity. By mobilizing the imaginative capacity of language to depict the post-human futures of Iraq, Iraq+100 affirms the centrality of the speculative linguistic act to the humanism it articulates. As my analysis of three short stories (“Kuszib” by ?assan ?Abd al-Razz?q, “The Worker” by ?iy?? Jubayl? and “Gardens of Babylon” by ?assan Bl?sim) reveals, this proves to be an eco-conscious humanism that underscores the inseparability of humanity’s history in nature and its history in language. These stories offer commentaries on a hitherto neglected aspect of the 2003 occupation: the intersection of environmental degradation, biopolitics, and human imagination. They depict dystopian worlds in which nature is treated as merely the source of raw materials—human bio power, oil, or other natural resources—to be extracted, repurposed, and eventually depleted. This conceptualization of nature as a passive provider to be exploited rather than a web of creative forces with agentiality is foundational to the intertwined operations of colonialism and global capitalism in the 2003 occupation of Iraq. I my reading, I build upon discussions on postcolonialism, biopolitics, and ecocriticism to analyze the texts’ portrayal of the occupation’s impact on Iraq as an ecosystem in which human and nonhuman biopower are extracted and commodified in service of a neocolonial agenda. I argue that in this framework, the depletion of nature, reduced to mere natural capital, accompanies the stifling and exhaustion of the human imagination. Thus, imagining the future of the human does not only necessitate a profound concern with the sustainability of extra-human natures. Speculating on essentially unknowable futures also requires a conceptualization of human imagination and history as renewable sources. This renewability signals the possibility of a future, understood as the rewriting of the past instead of a break from it.
Discipline
Literature
Geographic Area
Iraq
Sub Area
None