The years following the 2003 US invasion of Iraq witnessed a remarkable influx of American literature about Iraq, documenting in various literary forms the perspective of its combatants while appealing to a dominant national imaginary of selective memory. Most of these narratives have been inspired by personal accounts, initially drawing on the biographical experiences of servicemen and (to a far less extent) servicewomen, most of whom having briefly served in the US invasion of Iraq in some capacity. With the support of such institutions as the MFA program, these experiences have typically been curated and transformed into works of literary fiction. This group of soldier-cum-writers includes Kevin Powers, Phil Klay, Matt Gallagher, Brian Turner and Elliot Ackerman, to name a few. In addition to winning major critical acclaim over the years, these writers have come to redefine the contours of contemporary war literature for the years to come. At the heart of this genre is an inherent paradox: the (American) soldier’s/writer’s initial wrestling with the presumed incommunicability of traumatic war memory has – in the years following the invasion – opened the floodgates of war writing: novels and short stories, poetry collections and memoirs, all of which inevitably participating in a complex process of creating and disseminating war memory. This process is best examined by considering the central role of what Viet Thanh Nguyen, in the context of the Vietnam War, calls the memory industry, or “the material and ideological forces that determine how and why memories are produced and circulated, and who has access to, and control of, the memory industry." The process through which these testimonies are curated, fictionalized, and circulated as literary and historical documents of war, and the extent to which they are predicated on de-prioritizing other voices (most notably of Iraqi writers) that don’t fit into the national narrative, will be the focus of this paper. By drawing on literary history and theories of literary capital, this paper will examine some of these texts on two levels: on one hand, it will analyze the specific literary protocols these writers have employed to narrate experience and articulate traumatic revelation/memory. On the other hand, these literary protocols will be studied within the complex economy of literary circulation and the institutional dominance of creative writing programs, shaping the trajectory of a typical war production and the notion of writing as expression and resolution of trauma.

Neoliberalism has undermined and continues to chisel away at remnants of liberalism in the United States and other western states. Key to this process, underway since the 1970s, is the erosion of the social wage. The social dislocation and precarity caused by this process created a crisis of legitimacy for neoliberalism, which it attempts to alleviate by doling out an affective wage to its citizens. This wage is premised on the reification of ontological difference between a civilized, humane, and rational west, and an uncivilized, irrational, and fundamentally illiberal Muslim other. This paper situates the 2003 war in Iraq within this context through an examination of public statements, personal narratives, and journalistic reports of key American policy makers and participants in the war. It argues that the invasion and occupation was premised on and worked to maintain anti-Muslim racism in order to scaffold legitimacy for a neoliberal state that is hollowed out of its previous liberal promises.

Following Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, the United Nations imposed harsh economic sanctions on Iraq to force it end its occupation of the country. Though Iraq withdrew from Kuwait in 1991, the United Nations did not lift the sanctions, linking their removal with the disarmament of Iraq, which had a devastating impact on the Iraqi people. The sanctions led to a drastic increase in infant mortality. It is estimated that at least 500,000 children died between 1990 and 2003 due to malnutrition and lack of basic services. When asked by a journalist about the price of half a million Iraqi children for the sanctions, Madeleine Albright, the secretary of the state under the Bill Clinton administration, famously replied that “the price is worth it.” In addition, the sanctions crippled the economy as a whole, led to exponential inflation, and decimated the health care and education systems. The basic monthly rations distributed by the Iraqi government prevented mass starvation in the country, but they did not limit malnutrition. According to Roy Gordon, this catastrophe was brought about by policies adopted by the United States and Britain, in particular, which included restricting imports of food and goods in a country that was heavily dependent on foreign products, the undermining of the sale of oil in exchange for food, and the destruction of public infrastructure during the Operation Desert Storm in 1991. He called the sanction years, from 1990 to 2003, “an invisible war” waged mainly by the United States and Britain through their efforts to undermine any attempts to lift the sanctions by members in the United Nations. This talk will offer an ethnographic account of the impact of the sanctions on Iraqis through focusing on London-based Iraqis who lived in Iraq during the sanctions years. I argue that the sanctions as a form of invisible war engendered conditions of what Lauren Berlant calls slow death, whereby my interlocutors inhabited an in-between zone of getting by within structures of inequality brought about by US imperial interventions in the Gulf. Moreover, the talk will examine the interrelations between the sanctions, class, and gender, which gave rise to a new discourse of Iraqiness. In this narrative, Iraqi women from lower classes became symbols of Iraqi authenticity since they were the ones of who bore the brunt of the sanctions and struggled daily to make ends meet.

The Architecture of War critically investigates the relationship between art, architecture and archaeology and militarized visual culture, analyzed against the historical and political backdrop of imperial and neoliberal processes in the Middle East. Drawing from the fields of postcolonial theory, architecture, archaeology, visual and cultural studies, The Architecture of War sheds light on the United States’ 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq. It specifically examines the United States’ military occupation of Iraqi ancient cities and heritage sites (archeological and architectural) which has resulted in their destruction. It further investigates the U.S. military bases established in relation to the archeological sites and architectural monuments as a performative spectacle of power. The paper examines the ideologically driven programmatic destruction of Iraq and the United States’ ongoing use of cultural annihilation as a means of conquest, erasure, and reconfiguration of societies’ collective memory, history, and identity. The Architecture of War considers the ways in which the U.S. military strategies of disfiguring the representational monuments of Iraq is part and parcel of the dismantling process of the Iraqi nation state, in order to remap, reimagine, and reconstruct space through a long-term agenda in the service of capital and empire. It situates these acts within representational practices of empire building and link them to a colonial legacy, U.S. hegemonic control (geo-political, socio-economic, and military) of the region as it relates to neo-liberal globalization. The paper demonstrates that the Second Gulf War and the invasion of Iraq is part and parcel of a programmatic petrocultural engineering project, which sought the violent demolition of cities, and specifically of heritage sites, institutional structures, and architectural monuments. It has resulted in the setting for the spectacle of destruction, collective trauma, and disfiguration of collective memory, which enables the crafting of popular consciousness towards neoliberal aspirations and globalization.