This paper will examine Sa‘dawi’s 2013 novel, which won the International Prize for Arabic Fiction in 2014, from the perspective of the dominant branch of theory addressing science fiction. Theorists beginning with Darko Suvin have explored how SF uses cognitive estrangement to reflect our own world in the distorting mirror of the world of a given text. Cognitive means here that the world of the text is scientifically plausible within its own framework, while estrangement is borrowed from Brecht’s work on theatre and denotes a defamiliarization of the everyday. SF is, for these theorists, less a form of popular entertainment or storytelling than a means of social criticism. Arabic SF, an emerging genre in popular literature whose roots as a literature of social criticism date back to the 1960s as self-conscious SF, engages in what in previous published work I have called double estrangement, in which a text not only estranges the society from which it comes in order to critique it, but also foregrounds the overall stagnation or decline in scientific and technological productivity in its society over the modern period. Sa‘dawi uses the Whatshisname, the term for the monster assembled from body parts left behind by sectarian bombings, and others’ reaction to him both to make a critique of political and social conditions in US-occupied Iraq, and to estrange the gap between the Iraq of the Islamic Golden Age, and the Iraq of today, where technology comes from without and from which rational people emigrate. The novel also provides a counterexample to three of the dominant theories among Arab critics of ASF: it uses layered and three-dimensional rather than “flattened” characters to portray the effects of rationalism and (imported) technology upon Iraqis, it does not “patch” its narrative in order to contain the threat to traditional society posed by science, and it frames traditional culture rather than technology as dehumanizing. More importantly, however, by using characters from marginalized social and ethnic groups, the novel draws a contrast between the newly-independent Iraqi state of 2013 and beyond and its glorious past: by depicting how each of these marginalized identities has to wrap itself in falsehood or flee the country, Frankenstein in Baghdad argues that the decline in scientific and technological production is a result of moving from an embracement of diversity to an intolerance thereof.

The difficulty of representing war in literature is notorious. Particularly vexing is the question of how to represent dead and wounded bodies resulting from war and other atrocities. Some critics call for a directly referential realism, while others find that such stark realism aestheticizes and depoliticizes the dead body. Despite the challenges, Iraqi novelists Betool Khedairi in Absent and Sinan Antoon in The Corpse Washer attempt to represent the disfigured space of Iraq in the wake of its disastrous series of wars. More specifically, both novelists attempt to recuperate for history the anonymous wounded and dead bodies of Iraqis—both soldiers and civilians, male and female. Rather than focusing on soldiers and combat, however, both writers choose instead the figure of the failed civilian artist to monumentalize and remember the destroyed bodies of Iraq. At first glance, the focus on civilian artists by Khedairi and Antoon may seem to be an evasion of the trauma of war. I argue, however, that a focus on visual art in their fiction allows these writers to engage in the debates over the representation of war and promote their own aesthetic theories. Antoon highlights his aesthetics of war by explicitly foregrounding the work of Swiss artist Alberto Giacometti, whom the protagonist Jawad reveres. Giacometti was known for his lifelong attempt to render his inner vision, which simultaneously captures the objective reality of the external world while also expressing the inner perspective and unique point of view of artist. In The Corpse Washer, Antoon attempts to replicate Giacometti’s aesthetics. In this novel, the external nightmare of Iraq and the internal nightmares of Jawad interpenetrate each other to such an extent that the boundary between the two realms becomes unclear to the reader. Khedairi, on the other hand, promotes the aesthetic modes of cubism and surrealism to represent the disfigured female body and the social distortions caused by wars. Despite their slightly different aesthetics, both Betool Khedairi and Sinan Antoon borrow from the traditions of visual art in order to evoke the distortions of history and the disfigured body politic of Iraq.

How has the Palestinian experience been described in contemporary Syrian literature? Since the late-1960s, Ali al-Uqlat Arslan, a Syrian writer supported ideologically by the Ba’thist regime, has demonized the “Zionist entity” and advocated “struggle” or “martyrdom” for the Palestinian cause. However, at the same time, he has not accepted the independent position of the Palestinian liberation movement, as initiated by the Palestinians themselves. His drama Palestinian women made exaggerated references to “Arab liberation”, the “Arab-Israel conflict” and even “the third world revolution”. For his part, during the era of the first Intifada, Saadallah Wanus, a prominent Syrian dramatist possessing considerable insight into the reality of Syrian politics, unmasked the deceptions of the official discourse of “Arab nationalism”. In his famous work Rape, Wanus emphasized that the Arab regimes, including the Assad regime, were nothing but a replica of the “Zionist entity”, relying upon occupation and oppression. As such, their citizens, whether Palestinian or Syrian, were little more than victims of these Arab regimes’ merciless power politics. Despite their differences, there is one major similarity between Arslan and Wanus, in that their writings on “the question of Palestine” are written from the viewpoint of Syrians, and directed at a largely Syrian audience. However, especially since the 2000s, Palestinian writers who were born and grew up in Syria, such as May Jalili, have developed their own literature, based on the memory of their lives in Palestinian camps or neighborhoods in Syria. In doing so, they have afforded readers a new perspective on Syrian-Palestinian identities. In this context, Ali al-Kurdi published his novel Shamaaya Castle, which dealt with his memories of his childhood in the former Jewish quarter of Damascus during the 1950s and 1960s. Depending on his own self-consciousness, rather than old-fashioned ideological discourses, the author presented the Syrian-Palestinian reality of co-existence and shared humanity, in a country characterized by the rich histories and cultures of diverse religious communities. It is well known that the Syrian people have sympathized with the Palestinian cause and that the Syrian government has frequently mouthed assent to such slogans while there have been various internal political conflicts, and social discrimination against Palestinians living in Syria. However, little research has been done into the description of Palestinian experience in Syrian fiction. In this presentation, I would like to focus, historically and sociologically, on the depiction of “Palestine” in contemporary Syrian literature, from both human and ideological angles.

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.