What were the limits and possibilities of Arab nationalism in 1960s Iraq? What role did economic expertise play in the struggle to realize Arab nationalist aspirations? And what do debates about economic policy and doctrine in 1960s Iraq tell us about processes of postcolonial state formation? This paper adopts a “social biographical” approach to analyzing these questions. It contends that the life history of a single individual can illuminate larger patterns and dynamics of world history. By analyzing where a particular individual sits within in a larger social structure and then tracing the trajectory of their life history, we have the opportunity to think anew about the relationship between structure and agency – and about the relationship between contingency and determinism in history. In this case, I examine the intersection of two social biographies to illuminate the limits and possibilities of political action in a postcolonial context. The paper follows the rise, and ultimate overthrow, of Dr. Khair el-Din Haseeb, the Governor of Iraq’s Central Bank and the Director of Iraq’s Economic Organization (1964-68). Based on oral history interviews with Dr. Haseeb, I trace his rise from humble Mosuli origins in the late 1920s, to the pinnacle of Iraqi state power in the 1960s, with a particular focus on how his political and moral values were formed. I pay special attention to his years of education at the London School of Economics and then Cambridge in the 1950s, and argue that the expertise that he developed in these years made him a significant threat to the interests of the Iraq Petroleum Company – a conglomerate of Western corporations. It was this expertise, and this threat, that brought him into contact and conflict with Dr. Edith Penrose, a US-born economist at the London School of Economics and the School of Oriental and African Studies who specialized in the political economy of Iraqi oil. Drawing on memoirs and declassified US government records, I trace Dr. Penrose’s rise to global prominence and suggest that despite her outward appearance as a disinterested scholar, she was in fact in the employ of British intelligence, and that in this capacity she conspired with Iraqi conservatives to bring about the July 1968 coup d’état that overthrew Haseeb and opened the door to a Ba’thist regime.

In this paper, I trace the lives of Egyptians in exile, particularly those who currently live the United States and Tunisia. Egypt has had three major waves of exile, all in response to different iterations of a military regime established in 1952. The last and largest wave started in 2013 as a response to a coup that brought General Abdel-Fatah el-Sisi to power. My paper has two aims: first, I look at connections between generations of exiles, both interpersonally and ideologically. Many of those who are in exile were ‘organic intellectuals’, who spent a long time talking about ideas, moved to action by those ideologies, without necessarily writing down their motivations, their activism and their political commitments. As such, storytelling becomes an important method to track both intellectual history and personal histories. By recounting their stories, their political commitments and their own personal trajectories, my paper seeks to uncover an “ethnography of concepts” (Stoler 2016) and a genealogy of “traveling theory” and ideologies (Bardawil 2020) tracing how political ideologies have morphed, developed and/or stayed the same across generations. Secondly, I trace how life and family history serve as important methodology in understanding political geography and changing shifts in power (Elyachar 2005). Through life history, we can see how Egyptians have navigated and produced different political geographies, how their political and affective subjectivities changed, and how those subjectivities shaped in turn the generations after. Resistance to militarism, I propose, particularly has history that is embodied through generations in exile. I build on Mannheim’s (1983 [1923]) formulation of generations as those who share not necessarily an age group, but rather a “common location in historical dimension of the social process (1983: 167). I look at how these generations continually produce “political geographies of exile”, drawing on the work of Antrim (2012). Antrim argued that trajectories of movement have produced specific geographic concepts. I take that as a starting point to thinking about how movement in space creates different conceptualizations and categories of what exile means for my interlocutors. Practices of movements engender distinct practices of knowledge making; this knowledge-making is spatial, temporal, gendered and generational.

In the last decade, the number of migrants from countries in Africa to Turkey has grown immensely. Some hope to make their way to Europe, while others aim to stay in Turkey indefinitely. In Istanbul, Turkey’s largest city, African residents have built storefront churches, soccer leagues, informal restaurants, and social networks, aiming to build community and care for each other. In the absence of support from the Turkish government due to their immigrant status, they turn to each other to make care available—efforts that are necessarily complex and incomplete. In this essay, I take Istanbul as a lens to add nuance to analyses of how care unfolds within African diasporas. I show that the complexities of care articulate through anti-Black racism, which is often deemed a “nonissue” in the broader Turkish political discourse. I follow the events surrounding the passing after a struggle with AIDS of a young Ghanaian man in Istanbul who had aspired to be a professional soccer player. The circumstances of his funeral arrangements reflect many narratives of his life and death, illuminating the coming together and coming apart of communities, solidarities, and care. I trace these narratives’ paths through various communities—from the young man’s teammates to his Pentecostal church congregation—showing how care works unequally in practice, particularly in diasporic communities. I juxtapose Ghanaian narratives about his life with Turkish narratives about his death. In particular, the way Turkish state officials referred to his body throughout the funeral proceedings reveals the stigmatization of migrant Black bodies with AIDS in a country that denies anti-Black racism as a meaningful or significant domestic issue. In this way, discrimination and racism become entangled around non-Muslim and non-affluent death. Retelling these narratives through an essay addressing him, I seek to convey the affects his death invokes, and hope to animate others to think through and act upon racialized death and migration.

My paper traces the central role of food and drink in the process of memory-making and inherited memories across three generations of Iraqi women living in diaspora. By exploring the way in which memories are transmitted across generations through family histories, dreams, anecdotes and food metaphors, the paper offers a framework for considering the role of place and space in shaping the affective belongings of diasporic migrants. With a view to understanding how, in diaspora, migrants reconstruct their internal landscapes and memories, the paper’s focus is on urban women migrants from Iraq who have been displaced to suburban sites in the Detroit metropolitan area, Toronto's satellite cities, and refugee camps outside of Amman, Jordan. Drawing upon fieldwork conducted across all three sites of settlement from 2008 to 2018, the paper seeks to understand the ways in which Iraqi women used the senses in our oral histories to invoke and initiate memories that were threaded with difficult pasts. The paper will trace, for example, how Iraqi diasporic women of diverse ethno-religious background use the ritual of serving coffee in oral history interviews to designate formal and informal spaces. The interconnectedness of food and loss in the nostalgic imaginaries of women's memoryscapes informs the basis for this methodological reflection on the process of “sharing authority” in ethnographic work with women refugees. In conclusion, the paper will posit an analysis on the ethics of representation in oral history research.