How do we look at Iraqi history and society beyond the realities created by the American Occupation and the failure of the Arab uprisings? How much does our perception of Iraq today shape our view of Iraq's past? Our panel seeks to think about the ways in which scholars conducted research about Iraq, and the new archival and research strategies they employed in recent years. With the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, the US government and its military reinforced old-fashioned Orientalism in Iraq, portraying the country as one plagued by primordial ethnic divisions undergirding an innate sectarianism. During the last fifteen years, however, scholars of Iraq aimed to dismantle these essentialist logics. Relying on historical, literary, and anthropological material, scholars have demonstrated a nuanced, and historically informed reading of social and political transformation in the 20th and 21st centuries. Forefronting the political agency of Iraqis themselves and the politics of everyday life, this panel presents new modes with which to consider nationalism, colonialism, sectarianism, gender, memory, oil production, and social history of war in light of the new scholarship. It examines new approaches to conceptualize Iraq's relationships with its many diasporas, and highlights the changing scholarly landscape on Iraq at the turn of the 21st century and the subsequent US occupation. Thinking about new archives available to scholars and the inability to go to Iraq to do archival and ethnographic research, scholars found innovative ways to circumvent the question of accessibility. They looked at existing archives in the United States, United Kingdom and Israel to examine the history of colonial rule, intellectual production, Baath policies, or the politics of oil under monarchical and republican Iraq. They also made use of the documents housed in the Hoover Institute to discuss how the state operated under Saddam Hussein's regime. In addition, they explored such phenomena as diasporic communities and transnational connections to study the formation of Iraqi exilic communities following the rise of Saddam Hussein to power in 1979 and nascent environmental politics after 2003. This panel will focus on these different approaches to the study of modern Iraq and raise a number of questions about the possibilities and limitations that scholars increasingly face as they attempt to write about countries they cannot visit and local archives they cannot access.
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Dr. Bridget Guarasci
When UNESCO declared Iraq’s marshes a World Heritage Site based on its global biodiversity value in 2016, the Iraqi government widely celebrated the designation as a resounding state triumph on a global scale. However, the World Heritage conferral raises serious questions about Iraqi sovereignty. Iraq’s marshes lie in proximity to a third of the country’s petroleum resources and its two major rivers. Based on more than two years of ethnographic research, this paper argues that during Iraq’s reconstruction development capitalists selectively invested in Iraq in ways that fragmented the state into areas felled to ruins from sustained combat operations, like Ramadi, Falluja, Tikrit, and Mosul, and pinpointed territories vibrant with capital such as the marshes.
Under World Heritage, the Iraqi state accedes to govern in perpetuity its wetlands ecologies—subterranean, terrestrial, and atmospheric spaces—as global domain according to criteria set by UNESCO. In biodiversity conservation economies, states do not possess or control commodities as they would agrarian products, but manage species of flora and fauna as ecological, and therefore supra-state, worldly assets. Such 21st century economic rationalizations of the marshes share a long imperial history. However, while British and Ottoman empires sought to build an agriculture industry by harvesting wheat or rice commodities from the marshes, UNESCO’s heritage plan anticipates tourist economies of visual and experiential splendor where migratory birds, towering reeds, and wetlands lagoons stand as testament to Iraq’s embrace of late liberal capitalist values.
Global biodiversity conservation initiatives like World Heritage seek to arrest the catastrophic planetary impact of “the anthropocene,” an epoch of time that geologists and atmosphere scientists describe as anthropogenic wherein human activity has had an environmental impact so profound that it shapes the geology of earth. By examining how Iraq’s marshes became World Heritage, this paper demonstrates that acts of biodiversity conservation are every bit as anthropogenic as the actions they seek to prevent. Environmentalism too terraforms the planet.
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The US invasion of Iraq and the sectarian violence it leased marked a shift in the longing for an alternative Iraqi future and the imagination of the past. This paper examines nostalgic subjectivity in the context of exile, ruins, and disenchantment with the present. I focus on the nostalgic longing of the London-based Iraqi exiles, in particular communists, who find themselves stranded in the present. This subjectivity is acutely haunted by memories of revolution and disillusioned by the political catastrophes of the present. My interest is to examine the haunting political past that defines the lives and memories of Iraqi communists, and to capture the loss of the hope to return, the loss of homeland, and the loss of dreams. This paper revolves around social imaginaries of revolutionary pasts, in particular the anti-colonial struggle against the British and the monarchy, and the deep disappointment that followed the rise of Saddam Hussein to power in 1979 and the US occupation of Iraq in 2003. I show that the disappointment with the present and the dwindling prospects for a promising future has led to a tendency to mythologize the pre-Saddam past in which democracy, secularism, and social justice prevailed. Amid contemporary ruins and losses, an idealized past gains urgency since it provides a refuge from the present and a bleak future. My concern here is how people who lived the anti-colonial struggle remember and imagine the past, and how they inhabit the present amid the destruction of Iraq.
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Mona Damluji
The British-controlled oil company in Iraq played a powerful role in shaping a dominant aesthetic approach to visually documenting modern Iraq, beginning in 1950. For example, the Iraq Petroleum Company (IPC) provided its staff photographers and filmmakers unmitigated access to a bird’s (or more precisely an oil company’s) eye view. IPC’s British and Arab photographers used the aerial vantage point of aircraft to capture the impressive scale and vast extent of new infrastructural, urban, and architectural projects underway in Baghdad and beyond. As a result, whether shot from the air or an elevated vantage point, the photos reproduce a top-down perspective, echoing the hegemonic oversight that the company and government exercised over Iraq’s land, labor and built environments. In other words, seeing Iraq through the lens of this photographic practice meant seeing like the oil company, or more precisely how the oil company would like us to see. Iraq, as an oil state, derived capital for development projects directly from IPC revenue through the Iraq Development Board (IDB). Beyond this, as I will show, the Hashemite regime and IDB assumed the company’s image making infrastructure, approach and expertise for its own public relations efforts. Through a close reading of key photographic archives, I will critically examine how these collections work to construct an image world of modern Iraq “from above,” and argue for increased efforts to foreground untapped collections that can expose experiences of Iraq from the grounded vantage point of everyday life.
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Dr. Orit Bashkin
My paper asks what happens to Iraqi identity when Iraqis leave their homeland. I propose that memories of Iraq, even by displaced individuals, can serve as a defense mechanism in new exilic surroundings. As Peter Wien and Zeinab Saleh showed, the response of diasporic Iraqis to their new homes is directly attributable to their understanding of their Iraqi homeland. In Israel, Iraqi patriotism and nostalgia to Iraq enabled Iraqi Jewish migrants to cope with, and understand, Israeli realities. When Iraqi Jews arrived to Israel in the 1950s they were settled in tents and shacks in transit camps; some rotted there for nearly a decade. Suffering from poverty and exploitation in Israel, Iraqi Jews strove to maintain their connections to Iraq; they spoke the Iraqi Arabic dialect, they celebrated Iraqi music and culture, and they cherished their memories of their Iraqi family-life in the inhospitable Israeli space, typified by destitution and discrimination. Politically, left-leaning organizations used their experience in Iraq as a model. Iraqi Jewish communists identified ethnic nationalism with rightwing Arab chauvinism and sectarianism in Iraq and therefore took a critical position towards Jewish ethnic nationalism, i.e., Zionism, and professed their solidarity with the Palestinians. My paper is based on autobiographies, short stories written in the Iraqi dialect by Samir Naqqash, and the Arabic Israeli press of the 1950s.
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The state archive has become the locus of a great deal of scholarly literature: as site of memory; as project of colonial domination; as discursive field that produces regimes of knowledge; and as truth making tool in legal battles to bring justice. Much of this literature calls for a critical examination of the archive, whether national or colonial, as deeply embedded in regimes of power and asks that historian eschew positivism that their sheer volume and order elicit and perhaps demand. It is with this call against the positivism of the archive in mind that my presentation grapples.
I draw on my work and that of others in the Ba’th Arab Socialist Party Archive of Iraq archive, now at the Hoover Institution. The archive allows scholars a glimpse of the workings of a post-colonial state at a time when access to such archives in much of the Arab world is constrained by security concerns, war and prohibitions set by the states themselves. As Omnia el-Shakry so cogently argues, the result has been that historians have found that they have to write “history without documents,” and have been forced to find the “archival” in other places. The presence of the Ba’th Party archive provides both opportunity and risk. It allows for the writing of understandings of the workings of an authoritarian one party state, but it can draw scholars into taking that state at its own terms. It allows for a surfeit of politics, understood on the party’s and the archives’ terms, at the expense of other entries into Iraq’s history. My presentation seeks to answer three questions:
What kinds of history can be written using that archive? It is after all an archive of the last two decades or so of Ba‘thist rule, that is to say, very much an archive of the present and thus informed by the politics of its acquisition as an archive of “truth telling” as it is by the research agendas of scholars within the American academy. As a truncated and curated archive, what does it elide and what does it make visible? Finally, as a social historian, how does one navigate the pull of the positivism of the archive as a rich data source sutured to its nature as an archive of powerful and dominant party/state?
