236

ROUNDTABLE: PERSPECTIVES ON RESEARCHING IRAQ TODAY

By Mona Damluji, Arbella Bet-Shlimon, Alda Benjamen,Saleem Al-Bahloly, Haytham Bahoora, Caecilia Pieri,Bridget L. Guarasci, Zainab Saleh, and Peter Sluglett

Introduction

Mona Damluji is Associate Dean and Director of The Markaz: Resource Center for Engagement with Peoples and Cultures of the Muslim World

at Stanford University

Universities around the world were prime sites for the expression of popular opposition to the US invasion of Iraq. During the year prior to March 2003, students and scholars organized protests, teach-ins, and panels to voice the outcry against the hasty plans of the Bush regime to “liberate” the Iraqis. From its inception, Operation Iraqi Freedom suffered from a lack of historical and humanistic perspective.1 As distant witnesses to the violence and injustices televised nightly, many researchers living outside of Iraq hoped that Saddam Hussein’s fall would at least open up critical new avenues for research. During the thirteen years of brutal UN sanctions that

237

preceded the war on Iraq, substantial ethnographic work, cultural studies, and historical research were exceedingly difficult if not impossible due to lack of access to people, places, archives, and information inside the country. Scholarship on Iraq in this period relied chiefly on British colonial archives and top-down political analysis.

Moreover, in April 2003, arsonists, thieves, saboteurs, and military operatives devastated national collections of archives, objects, and buildings in Baghdad. Unidentified regime loyalists and profiteers torched and looted the Iraqi National Library and Archive (INLA), despite its proximity to the Ministry of Defense.2 A fragile collection of original documents from the Ottoman and monarchy periods was flooded and destroyed in unverified circumstances. Much of the documentation of Iraq’s Jewish community in the basement of the Iraqi Security Services building was badly damaged before the US Army confiscated and transferred it to Washington, DC. Baghdad’s National Museum of Modern Art was severely vandalized and stripped of furniture and fixtures, as thieves walked away with thousands of original works of Iraqi art. Under the auspices of the Iraq Memory Foundation, Kanan Makiya assumed custody of extensive archives in the Ba‘th Party Regional Command Headquarters and transferred them to the Hoover Institute at Stanford University. Additionally, the US military took about 100 million pages of documents from Iraq during the invasion. The Pentagon and CIA insist on keeping these papers classified.3  

Reporting in the days after the invasion of Baghdad reveals that US military forces left sites of cultural significance vulnerable and unprotected despite pleas for help by local staff and onlookers. Environmental hazards caused by the bombings, rampant looting, and vandalism left the INLA, the Iraqi Museum and other government buildings in near ruins. As a result, the INLA lost one quarter of its library holdings and sixty percent of its archival collections, including rare books, photographs, and maps.4 Myriads of artifacts and sites spanning ten thousand years of archaeological and architectural history have been irretrievably lost, damaged, or even destroyed, while large quantities of looted modern artwork have disap-peared from Iraq altogether.5

The loss of these historical sources, as well as the devastating toll of decades of dictatorship, sanctions, occupation, and war, has influenced critical studies of Iraq. Mass displacement and loss of life resulting from

Roundtable

238

unprecedented levels of violence since 2006 have dispersed communities irreversibly and divided social worlds according to newly politicized sec-tarian and ethnic identities. Thus, a greater understanding of Iraq cannot rely on historical work alone. An investment in producing ethnographic and culturally oriented research, and building constructive alliances with Iraqi scholars and institutions, is urgently needed.6 Yet the volatility and intensity of identity-based violence has severely hindered the possibility of conducting fieldwork. Devastating attacks on Iraqi universities and faculty pose significant security risks to scholars researching in Iraq and organizing conferences in Baghdad and throughout the country.

In the aftermath of the invasion and fall of the Ba‘th regime, the US occupation introduced problematic opportunities for scholars eager to study Iraq. Anthropologists and urbanists were actively recruited to embed with military forces and provide information to US local commanders and intelligence agencies.7 The Iraq Memory Foundation established archival collections at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution that placed millions of Iraq government documents at the fingertips of historians and political scientists. Academic researchers continue to grapple with the potentially paralyzing ethical dilemma that shapes current knowledge production on Iraq: Will our pursuit of research make us complicit in, or even allow us to benefit from, the war and occupation? How can we contribute to the production of knowledge on Iraq and maintain a critical distance from the imperial apparatus? More than ten years after the US-led coalition inva-sion, Iraq remains inaccessible to many international scholars invested in producing humanistic, ethnographic, and historical research grounded in qualitative fieldwork. This collection of short essays brings together scholars working in fields of history, visual culture, literature, architectural and urban studies, and anthropology to address the opportunities for and challenges to research on Iraq since 2003 and prior to the emergence of the self-proclaimed Islamic State.

From nationality and personal networks to gender identity and class position, a number of specific circumstances can shape a researcher’s access to archives, sites, and people in Iraq today. The eight contributors to this collection, from various disciplines, represent a range of experiences that international scholars have encountered in identifying and navigating avail-able sources inside and outside the country. The essays also point toward

239

new directions of research that existing scholarship has left unaddressed. Arbella Bet-Shlimon emphasizes the need for historical work that moves beyond the milieu of Baghdad. Alda Benjamen points to the urgency of writing social histories of Iraq’s minority communities, as mass displace-ment has entailed the loss of long-standing neighborhoods, communities, and personal archives. Saleem Al-Bahloly contemplates the work of art historians and anthropologists invested in retrieving and reconciling lost generations of modern art in Iraq. Haytham Bahoora considers how Iraqi literature might inform the writing of a cultural history of modern Baghdad. Caecilia Pieri illuminates the possibilities for, and the inherent obstacles to, conducting fieldwork on the streets of Baghdad. Bridget L. Guarasci shows how ethnographic studies of imperial formations require a multi-sited and flexible methodological approach. Zainab Saleh urges attention to the richness and diversity of individual narratives in the Iraqi diaspora. The roundtable concludes with a reflection by Peter Sluglett, a prolific scholar of Iraqi history, whose studies and historiographies continue to be foundational for studies of Western imperialism in Iraq and the region.

We offer here an interdisciplinary dialogue on contemporary methods for research on Iraq. A number of recent volumes have reflected on the impact of the war and occupation on anthropology, history, and cultural studies.8 Building on this body of work, as well as a number of stimulating conversations and organized sessions that have taken place during Middle Eastern Studies Association meetings over the past few years, this publica-tion aims to draw together these disciplinary perspectives.9 Our hope is that future approaches to the study of Iraq and its diaspora might benefit from a more complex and multi-faceted understanding of the stakes, the possibilities, and the needs in emerging research agendas on Iraq.

Beyond Baghdad: Writing a History from the Iraqi Periphery

Arbella Bet-Shlimon is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Washington, Seattle

Much as “Europe” tends to be the “sovereign, theoretical subject of all histories,” as Dipesh Chakrabarty has argued,10 capital cities are often the exclusive points of reference for histories of modern states and empires. Political histories, for example, tend to focus on decision-making in central

Roundtable

240

governments. While the historiographies of countries ranging from China to the United States, as well as those of most major modern empires, have substantially challenged this proclivity, it remains dominant in the histo-riography of modern Iraq.

In large part, the propensity to render Baghdad the overarching subject of inquiry is a function of the readily available sources. The most commonly referenced archive is the British colonial archive, which overwhelmingly consists of files from the British mandate authority and, later, the British embassy in Baghdad. If one turns instead to intellectual and cultural history, as many scholars have recently done,11 most germane sources—periodicals, novels, poetry, scholarly publications—were produced and printed in Baghdad. Provincial regions appear in most histories of Iraq insofar as they directly affect the capital. It seems, then, that an effort to “provincialize” Baghdad, to re-center Iraqi history in other places and spatial concepts, is long overdue. But why is it necessary? And how can it be done, particularly in an environment where researching Iraq at all poses enormous challenges?

Certainly, studying areas of Iraq outside of Baghdad illuminates the nature of state making. It is important to examine political dynamics from the “peripheries,” cities, towns, villages and borderlands where people alternately cooperate with and resist incorporation into the state, or forge an alternative path. Centering one’s analysis on the Iraqi provinces makes categories of economic-historical inquiry, such as “agriculture” and “oil production,” tangible because it attends to where and how they actually occur. In addition, examining Iraq’s linguistic and cultural peripheries allows us to understand nation building and collective self-definition as they take place outside of elite discourses and national spaces. In a place like Kirkuk, the subject of my current research,12 these processes of identity formation are crucial.

However, those who choose to take on the task of writing Iraqi history from the periphery face many obstacles. When I began the project of writing an urban history of Kirkuk in 2007, I had to invent my approach as I went along. The main problem I found was that of physical access. I was born of Iraqi-Assyrian heritage in the United States and hold only a US passport, making any kind of travel to Iraq difficult (outside of the autono-mous Kurdistan region). Only one historian—Hanna Batatu in 1964—has managed to gain access to archives in Kirkuk.13 Furthermore, many por-

241

tions of the Iraqi archives, both inside and outside Baghdad, have been lost, looted, or intentionally purged. The colonial archive is not immune to this problem. My attempts to find British consular documents from Kirkuk at the National Archives of the United Kingdom often turned up slim folders containing handwritten notes indicating that most of the reports therein had been destroyed prior to declassification. Finally, there was the problem that Kirkuk was not a center of print culture, making a history of discourses particularly hard to write.

In my project, the limited, fragmented sources necessitate the consid-eration of a variety of kinds of information. I use an eclectic mix of official documents, works of memory, images, and papers of corporations and firms.14 These sources demand a range of historical questions. That is, it would be nearly impossible to write a coherent economic or social or political history of a place like Kirkuk. The links as opposed to the distinctions between the phenomena of economy, society, and politics become more salient.

Just as the imperatives of a fuller understanding of Iraq prompt new conceptual approaches, so too do the practical problems of researching provincial Iraq force historians to explore how to aggregate diverse sources into a single analysis. Indeed, the hidden advantage of the problems facing contemporary scholars of Iraq is that their solutions produce methodological innovations that can benefit scholars studying many other regions.15 As Iraq continues to demand critical attention and nearby countries (most notably, Syria) become all the more difficult to study, these innovations in approach and method are especially instructive for future research.

Writing a Minority's History of Iraq

Alda Benjamen holds a PhD in Modern Middle Eastern History from the University of Maryland, College Park

The various ethno-linguistic and religious communities in modern Iraq have historically coexisted in the same region for centuries. Scholarship on Iraq and the Middle East in general often omits this plurality. Akram Khater and Paul Rowe critique the “ahistorical views” that present Middle Eastern Christians as either persecuted minorities or agents of imperialism.16 This representation is applicable to Iraqi Assyrians. Most historians of modern Iraq refer to the community only in passing when they mention the Iraq

Roundtable

242

Levies or the Simele massacre of 1933.17 There is a significant gap in scholar-ship pertaining to this community.

By expanding our parameters of research to include scholarship on Iraq’s minorities, such as the Assyrians, we add to our understanding of Iraqi society and engage with current debates in the field.18 At the same time, such research provides insight into a community that has an ancient ethno-religious genealogy and is currently fleeing Iraq due to violence and instability. As more Assyrians become refugees in neighboring countries, archival material and private collections are left behind, making future research on this community increasingly difficult.

The gap in academic scholarship presents a challenge. Yet finding appro-priate sources on the community is another difficulty. I will briefly address the challenges encountered in writing a gendered minority’s history of Iraq. My research analyzes Assyrians’ role in ideological and social movements, such as the Iraqi Communist Party, the Kurdish uprising, and Assyrian literary, cultural, and nationalist movements from the 1960s to the 1980s.19

Due to over-reliance on British colonial sources, scholars frequently portray Assyrians in Iraq as mere imperialist agents. To complicate this shallow historical portrayal, I conducted research at the Iraqi National Library and Archives (INLA) in Baghdad.20 My Iraqi nationality made this trip more manageable. Iraq’s volatile situation and the archives’ proximity to the Ministry of Defense, a regular target for armed insurgent groups, hamper access for all researchers. Additionally, destruction of INLA’s archives in 2003 has critically reduced their collection, specifically of Ottoman and Hashemite documents.21 Nevertheless, while there, I discovered important material relating to the Assyrians from the 1960s. However, the bulk of the available material from the Ba‘thist archives is not in Iraq, but at the Hoover Institution in California.22 This poses an ethical dilemma for researchers who want to see these documents returned to Iraq. Needless to say, researchers in Iraq do not to have access to the modern archives of their country. On a more practical note, researchers interested in the Assyrian community who intend to use the Hoover archive will encounter obstacles navigating the digitized index using the preset search engine.

In search of alternative sources from the Ba‘thist era, and more spe-cifically on Iraqi Assyrians, I approached smaller libraries and publishing houses in Iraq. This included Najm al-Mashriq and the Dominican library

243

in Baghdad, as well as the Assyrian Cultural Center and the Oriental Cultural Centre in Duhok, where I discovered plentiful material written in classical Syriac, modern Aramaic, Arabic, and various Western languages. The secular and religious textual material I found in these libraries helped balance the study. The Assyrian Democratic Movement’s center in Baghdad also housed a small collection of Ba‘th Party archives that was specific to the Assyrian and Christian community. I also searched the Modern Assyrian Research Archives, which is a digital library affiliated with the University of Cambridge containing collections of Assyrian periodicals and personal archives.

In addition to archival documents, popular culture in the form of music and poetry is an important medium for intellectual and cultural produc-tion. Through singers and cassette tapes, music’s influence on Assyrians transgressed transnational borders. Abboud Zeitoune’s discography of Assyrian music is a comprehensive reference. Cassette tapes and CDs at community centers and online digital collections are also rich sources.23 In addition, oral history and folk songs can provide unique insight into gender and sexuality in Assyrian communities and broader Iraqi society.

Analyzing the role of Assyrians in Iraq’s socio-ideological and political movements reveals how minorities positioned themselves socially, elevated community issues in the larger national sphere, and identified with Iraqis on class and gender lines. By moving away from popular representations of minorities, we can formulate new ways of addressing this subject. Numerous sources on Iraq inside and outside the country remain underutilized. By weaving together conventional and non-conventional archival sources along with ethnographic data, scholars can conduct substantial and novel studies on Iraq.

The Importance and Impossibility of Interpretation: Writing

a History of Modern Art After 1963

Saleem Al-Bahloly is a EUME Fellow at the Forum Transregionale Studien

Not long after the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, I came across an article about Ala Bashir in The New Yorker. Bashir is an artist, and for many years he was also a personal physician to Saddam Hussein, who had been an admirer of his work. The article profiled the unusually intimate relationship Bashir had

Roundtable

244

had with the man everyone feared, less because of his skills as a surgeon than because of his art, which Hussein “didn’t understand” yet found com-pelling.24 The article focused on Bashir’s willed aversion to the moral ques-tions that his proximity to Hussein raised. Though bewildered by Bashir’s silence, it was nevertheless attentive to the impossibility of moral action under those circumstances, and how that impossibility seemed to register in Bashir’s painting, where the recurring motif of a raven dramatized the limits of human action.

The story of Ala Bashir was my first exposure to the modern art of Iraq. Cutting through the delirious debates about democracy and the fixation with weapons of mass destruction that framed the war, the story opened a different angle on Iraq, pointing to a silent counter-narrative. In graduate school, I decided to write a dissertation about the practice of modern art in Iraq, in light of the country’s history of political violence. However at that time, in the summer of 2007, it was not possible for me to go to Baghdad. Nor was it clear what I could find there, since the National Library had been burned and flooded, the Institute of Fine Arts destroyed, and the National Museum of Modern Art looted and vandalized during the chaos that fol-lowed the US invasion of the city.

Faced with these conditions, I became aware of the existence of another archival geography, one located among populations of exiles in Amman and London, in the libraries of US universities, in private art collections coming up for auction and in new museums and foundations established in Doha and Sharja. At one of the bookstores that Iraqis had opened in downtown Amman, I found a magnificent two-volume history by the artist Shakir Hasan Al Sa‘id entitled, Fusul min Tarikh al-Haraka al-Taskhiliyya fi al-‘Iraq [Chapters from the History of the Visual Art Movement in Iraq], and its bibliography led me to dozens of other titles. Following trails of footnotes, I amassed from journals, magazines, and newspapers hundreds of pages of documentation on the history of modern art in Iraq.

In the summer of 2009 I initiated a project with the art historian Nada Shabout and the Alexandria Archive Institute to assemble these materials into a digital archive called the Modern Art Iraq Archive (MAIA). The project also aimed to expand this archive by digitizing the personal libraries of Iraqi artists living in the United Kingdom and the United States.25 However, after digitizing the libraries of a couple of artists, I stopped, because as I read

245

through the material and looked at the art, I came to realize that the major historiographical problem facing research on art practice in Iraq was not the loss of a documentary record or the looting of the National Museum of Modern Art. After all, I had already found a significant amount of material outside Iraq, and I had even met a former gallery owner in Beirut who had photographed the museum’s collection in the 1970s. The problem we face today has to do with a drastic yet unrecorded shift in art practice that followed the first Ba‘th Party coup in 1963. Between February and November of that year, the party’s militia detained, and in many cases tortured, thousands of students and workers, intellectuals and professionals, writers and artists, for their real or perceived leftist views. Those events reconfigured the conditions of speech in Iraq in ways that brought about a shift in art practice. That shift both complicates any inquiry into art practice and makes such an inquiry vital to an attempt to reconceive research on Iraq.

Modern artwork was first conceptualized as such in Iraq by Jawad Salim, with the founding of the Baghdad Group for Modern Art in 1951. Comparing the role of the artist to that of a writer, and conceiving of a painting as a language, Salim located the practice of art in the public sphere that was emerging after World War II out of fervent desire to participate in political life. As social and political discontent grew throughout the 1950s, and the monarchy increasingly suppressed the expression of discontent in newspapers and on the street, artists gave form to the same issues that were the subject of political debate and struggle. Many of these issues were embodied in the figure of what Baghdadis called the shurugi, a sometimes hallucinatory amalgamation of peasant, urban laborer, slum inhabitant, and mass subject whose demonstrations were regularly put down with force by the police, which was, as Hanna Batatu has pointed out, largely staffed from the shargawiyya26 [Figures 1 and 2].

After the revolution overthrew the Hashemite monarchy in 1958, the public sphere gave way and the exchange of ideas it had fostered was replaced by a street contest between the Iraqi Communist Party and the Ba‘th Party. This contest culminated in the Ba‘th coup in 1963 and the brutal crackdown on dissent that followed. At that point artwork turned inward. The speech that was no longer possible in the public sphere was displaced into different methods of art practice. Some artists began to explore the expressive possibilities of techniques and materials not necessarily associ-

Roundtable

246

Figure 1: Kazim Haydar, He Told Us Everything As It Happened, 1957, oil on canvas, 96 x 65 cm. Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharja. Image courtesy of Meem Gallery.

Figure 2: Mahmud Sabri, Bedouin Family, 1957, oil on canvas, 90 x 121 cm. Mathaf Arab Museum of Modern Art. Image courtesy of Meem Gallery.

247

Roundtable

Figure 3: Salih al-Juma‘i, Domes [Qibab], 1968, watercolor and aluminum foil, 81.5 cm x 81.5 cm. Mathaf Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha. Image courtesy of the author.

Figure 4: Dia’ ‘Azzawi, Folklore Mythology [Min al-Asatir al-Sha‘biyya], 1966, oil on canvas, 100 x 71 cm. Private Collection, London. Image courtesy of Meem Gallery.

248

ated with modern art. They experimented with printing ink on paper or tested the responsiveness of scrap aluminum to heat [Figure 3]. Others looked to popular culture or literary history for expressive forms they could transpose to the artwork [Figure 4]. The work of these artists recovered the possibility of speech but in a way that was hermeneutically sealed; even as it generated a certain kind of allegorical meaning, this speech could not entirely be interpreted. When some form of public critique became possible again in Iraq, authorized by the staggering defeat of the Arab states in a war with Israel in 1967, artists returned to producing work on contemporary events, employing the different means of expression they had devised in the previous years. However, art practice never lost the peculiar inscrutability it acquired in the aftermath of 1963.

The question today is what to do with this inscrutability. On the one hand, it is a historiographical blind spot. Residing in the materiality of the artwork, it invites interpretation, but refuses it, referring to nothing other than itself. It is thus opaque in its relation to the political context in which it was produced. And yet, on the other hand, this very inscrutability is a social fact. It marks the withdrawal from the public sphere and the formation of another space where thought and critique became possible. Indeed, the kind of public sphere normative to liberal democracies may have collapsed following the revolution in 1958. But that collapse was attended by the crea-tion of other spaces where Iraqis could inhabit their historical traditions or practice of art in ways that secured subjectivities intelligible neither to the Ba‘th nor to the liberal traditions of political thought. Though some archives may be irretrievably lost, and others recovered, what we could do today is begin with the artwork, or when absent, images of it. We could then attempt to interpret that art, and perhaps through the very work of interpretation, of reconstructing an artist’s method and placing that method in a context, we can open a window to a different history.

249

Literature as Archive: Writing Literary History

as Cultural History

Haytham Bahoora is Assistant Professor of Arabic Literature at the Uni-versity of Colorado, Boulder

What can literary texts reveal about those undocumented aspects of life in Baghdad? Is it possible to write cultural histories of Baghdad, a city with deep layers of textual, visual, and material history, without physical access to the city, its spaces, and its cultural and archival institutions? Can scholars use literary texts as a historical archive while recognizing their ambiguities and aesthetic autonomy? Questions like these must inform all interdisci-plinary undertakings, yet they are even more relevant in the context of academic production on Iraq, where physical access is limited, and where state archives are largely inaccessible or have suffered irreversible damage.

My interest in the cultural production of the 1940s and 1950s in Baghdad is based on the remarkable confluence of political, material, and cultural factors that produce what Orit Bashkin has termed “literary and cultural renaissance” in Iraq.27 However, at the heart of my approach lies a paradox: it is impossible to write a comprehensive cultural history of any period of Baghdad’s history. We can only partially uncover and imperfectly understand the city’s plural cultural histories. Decades of war have exacer-bated this situation. Moreover, interpretations of literature and art can never be fixed or certain. They depend on ambiguity and interpretation. Scholars often bypass this very ambiguity in favor of using texts to augment a political or historical thesis. We must situate literary texts as more than reflections of history or politics, or more precisely, as illuminating the complexities and contradictions of a particular historical moment. We must also be attuned to the material circumstances of these literary texts’ production and the ways they intervene in their social and political contexts. All the while, we cannot lose sight of their aesthetic characteristics and their status as fictional texts.

Within literary and cultural studies of Iraq, there is now a canonized set of assumptions about cultural production in 1940s-1950s Baghdad. These assumptions structure how academic knowledge is produced. One assumption is that modernist poetry produced in the late 1940s and 1950s in Baghdad relied on mythologies of the past to undertake a project of cultural renewal and reawakening. A second assumption is that short story

Roundtable

250

writers adopted social realism to produce a politically committed aesthetic that sought reform on issues such as women’s rights and peasant rights. A third assumption is that modernist painters such as Jawad Salim created a

“national” style by mobilizing elements of Iraq’s classical and ancient her-itage (al-Wasiti, Mesopotamian civilizations) to produce art that reflected the realities of contemporary Iraq.

This set of cultural knowledge has become hegemonic, structuring our understandings of this particular cultural moment in Baghdad’s history. But there remains a trove of literature and art from this period that does not fit, or fits uneasily, into these canonized narratives.

The challenge to writing a cultural history of Baghdad, therefore, is to search for the hidden, the arbitrary, and the anomalous, while finding new ways of reading and understanding the nuances of the cultural world of this period. For me, this has meant bringing together recent historical scholar-ship on Iraq with literary texts that may reveal undiscovered subtleties and dissonant narratives. The search for these nuances is in part a consequence of the inaccessibility of the physical space of Baghdad and its archives (not simply institutional or state archives) to researchers.

The work of Iraqi poet Husayn Mardan, for example, provides an alternative understanding of Baghdad’s cultural history during a period of anti-colonial political commitment. It is a Baghdad in which questions of the political were not always transparent, and the revolutionary was not always related to political action or the formation of a national conscious-ness.28 Literary texts tell the stories of characters, encounters, and objects. They narrate, in fiction, the transformation of spaces, places, ideas, and experiences. They can tell us of the emergence of new social types and the articulation of social problems, including conflicts over class, gender, and sexuality. They create repositories of images and rhetoric, and they fashion a cultural consciousness for a specific time and place that extends beyond temporal and spatial confines.

Cultural histories that use these fictional texts are perpetually incom-plete, raise more questions than they answer, and do not provide unmediated access to understanding this (or any) period in Baghdad’s cultural history. But these limits can be an enabling undertaking. The last few decades have seen an academic insistence that the archive should encompass a wide range of sources and objects, from textual to visual and oral histories. Yet

251

boundaries that hinder interdisciplinary research and insist upon traditional material archives, particularly to write history, even literary or cultural histories, remain deeply entrenched. Scholars of Iraq can creatively contest these boundaries by searching the margins and assembling incomplete pictures that provide disparate yet complementary narratives of Baghdad’s cultural pasts.

Navigating the City Under Threat:

The Challenges of Fieldwork in Baghdad

Caecilia Pieri is Head of the Urban Observatory at the Institut Français du Proche-Orient, Beirut

In 2004, I decided to resume academic work after twenty years as an editor of architectural and urban studies publication. At that time, my aim to document and analyze the transformations of the urban and architectural landscape of Baghdad under the Hashemite monarchy seemed an immense challenge given the political circumstances.29 I planned to document and make an inventory of built work from this period, underscoring what had been at stake politically and culturally in the making of the mid-century modern capital city. Historical research on modern architecture and urbanism in postcolonial contexts around the world often presents the same difficul-ties. Archival sources are dispersed between the country and its colonizer, in this case, Iraq and Britain, either in official archives or among families scattered around the world.

Complicating matters is the fact that administration of public works in Iraq has always been in an ongoing state of reorganization. For instance, between the two world wars construction activities were alternately the domain of the Administration of General Works Affairs, the Waqf Authority (the office of religious properties), the Engineering Section (part of the Ministry of Education), and an independent Railway Authority. These insti-tutions changed names and functions as they passed from one organization to another. Furthermore, numerous archives are scattered among different private companies, like oil companies, banks, and building companies invested in various projects. Moreover, modern vernacular residential archi-tecture is largely undocumented and anonymous, and thus the history of this construction relies mainly on people’s memories. When architectural

Roundtable

252

documents do still exist, “they omit important information and precise details. Many do not state the name of the architect, while others only mention the name of the builder (ustadh), which leads to confusion as to the exact role played by the architect in the design. Some projects are not even dated.”30

The roots of many obstacles to conducting on-site architectural and urban research as well as gaining access to data precede the current political situation by four decades. The change of leadership in 1963 increasingly hampered scholarship, due to a strong official distrust of “foreign” scholarly literature, the scarcity of translations, and the lack of potential interlocutors, who had often gone into exile. Iraqis then witnessed the looting of many libraries and archives in the aftermath of the 2003 war. In Baghdad, the digital backlog accumulated due to thirteen years of sanctions. As of 2005, access to the institutions supposedly in possession of the available archives, the Ministry of Public Works, the Mayoralty, the Ministry of Housing and Reconstruction, and the sector city halls, has become difficult if not impossible for security reasons. The severity of violence in Baghdad since 2006 has made the situation explicitly dangerous for foreign researchers, at risk of kidnapping.

In the city, discretion and relative invisibility are the best form of protection. In February 2005, during my first visits to the Le Corbusier Gymnasium in the al-Sha‘b district, I wore a black abaya and hijab. On a visit three months later, in order to avoid traffic jams, I rode on the back of a friend’s motorcycle wearing men’s clothes, shoes, and helmet. Being discreet is essential. That said, the “safe” official escorts for foreign travelers in Iraq in fact constitute effective security barriers against research efficiency. Beyond the prohibitive cost of these escort vehicles, they immediately broadcast the passenger’s foreign official status and turn them into potential targets. Thus researchers are confined to travel among planned appointments under the supervision of a third party. More obstacles than opportunities exist for the individual researcher attempting to work discreetly in the streets of Baghdad beyond the Green Zone. These protections prohibit any possibility of uncontrived urban life experiences and enclose the researcher in the forti-fied enclave in the old Karradat Maryam district. This ultra-sophisticated apparatus of blast walls, no-man’s lands, dogs, and military troops is a frontier that resembles the walls that divided Berlin and now Palestine.

253

Since 2011, I have increasingly focused on the analysis of the urban fragmentation of Baghdad following the implementation of the “walling strategy” in April 2007. This has transformed the city, with its thousands of concrete blast walls, into a “cropping-up of mini-green zones.”31 A profusion of international websites and blogs, whether scientific or not, is devoted to Baghdad’s “sectarian” mapping and the internal displacement of popula-tions. Yet to a certain extent, Baghdadi society continues to display a form of resilience that can only be understood from the ground. For instance, last year I met Sunni families who preferred to leave their supposedly ultra-secure residential neighborhood to protect their children from kidnapping. They moved to the city center, where long-standing neighborhood ties amidst poorer Shi‘i families guaranteed them a convivial protection. In reality, Baghdad’s blast wall barriers are unfixed lines, constantly appearing or disappearing according to the imperatives of current events. Media reports have suggested that the murals covering these walls express some form of artistic sponta-neity. They are in fact the result of strictly controlled commissions [Figure 5].

Roundtable

Figure 5: The French Embassy commissioned a series of painted murals on the blast walls surrounding its compound in December 2003. The foreign media has incorrectly referred

to these murals as a symbol of spontaneous popular expression. The mural here is the work of the painter Husayn Mutashar. Image courtesy of Caecilia Pieri, April 2013.

254

As far as I can judge, my interviews with local artists, official representatives, and academics evidence that there is no liberty of expression in Baghdad for many reasons, including the fear of being threatened or marginalized. I make every effort to visit Baghdad at least once a year, for short stays of one to two weeks, which frees my research from reliance on intermediaries like translators or on long-distance interviews. Though rife with obstacles, this methodology positions me to better grasp the evolution, complexity, and, above all, contradictions of the city.32

Investigating Imperial Formations: Conducting Ethnography

of Iraq's Marsh Restoration

Bridget L. Guarasci is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Franklin and Marshall College

Iraq’s marshes are a site layered with meaning. Tied to every political trans-figuration of Iraq since the inception of statehood, the marshes are what Michel Foucault called “an especially dense transfer point for relations of power.”33 From 2006-2007, in multiple locations but primarily in Amman, Jordan and Sulaimaniya, Iraq, I conducted ethnographic research on Iraqi marsh restoration to investigate emerging imperial relations. I approached research on the marshes as an incision into the formation of imperial power.34 Twentieth-century British interventions in Iraq sought to extend imperial governance across the nation-state, itself a creation of British geopolitical posturing. Twenty-first century imperial formations, such as the network of actors restoring Iraq’s marshes, sought to establish power over strategic areas of natural resource wealth. To track imperial power, my focus was not the marshes proper or their residents, but a global network of marsh advocates investing in the wetlands with new environmental purpose. I examined the marshes as the altruistic emblem of Iraq’s occupation. I asked: what is the relationship of environmentalism to war and to the reconfiguration of power in post-Ba‘th Iraq?

My ethnography moved up and down scales of power to evaluate global political and philanthropic networks and locally situated networks of science, nostalgia, and political practice. I defined the ethnographic field as one of cultural production on the marshes that spanned countries and continents and was informed by competing histories and political agendas.35 I examined

255

money as the index of power and evaluated policy as evidence of its effects. I researched financial transfers between contractors, government donors, and Green Iraq, the Iraqi exile-run NGO spearheading marsh restoration, and I analyzed policies developed during this time on environmentalism.

Asking people directly about power would have foreclosed conver-sation. The marshes became my entry point to explore the collaborative networks of corporate, governmental, and humanitarian entities. As a media-celebrated “success story of the war,” marsh restoration was some-thing that almost everyone involved wanted to talk about. In Switzerland, I observed and interviewed UN and Iraqi remote sensing scientists. In Jordan and Iraq, I conducted ethnographic fieldwork with Green Iraq on scientific praxis and organizational operations. In Britain, I spoke with Iraqi exiles who remembered visiting the wetlands during childhood outings or who recalled finding political sanctuary in their environs. In the United States, I interviewed government officials who sponsored marsh restoration at the outset of the 2003 war. In India, I conducted historical research on imaginaries of the marshes in the transition from the Ottoman to the British empires. Tracking financial and policy decisions enabled me to investigate the relative strength of environmental discourse in Iraq’s twenty-first century political transformation.

Green Iraq earned over thirty million dollars in bilateral aid grants, largely from Italy but also from Canada and the United States. The funding enabled Green Iraq to expand the marsh project from an Iraqi opposition movement PowerPoint presentation into a 2002 US State Department ini-tiative. Green Iraq enjoyed direct connections to the US Green Zone and to the highest levels of Iraq’s national government.

To fulfill obligations to its donors, Green Iraq spent eighty percent of its grants on grantee soil. The arrangement involved a system of contracting and subcontracting. Foreign administrators did not travel to the marshes or to Baghdad. Instead, Green Iraq hired teams of young Iraqi scientists to conduct scientific fieldwork in the marshes proper. To count birds and study water soil quality, Iraqi scientists, themselves outsiders to the marshes, learned the mortal risk of working in remote territory where kidnapping for ransom was common. In this way foreign marsh advocates devalued Iraqi human lives as they promoted ecological renewal, thereby creating a hierarchy that prioritized the environmental at a lethal human cost.

Roundtable

256

On the policy side, the war also brought environmentalism to Iraq. The UN and United States created Iraq’s Ministry of Environment after Saddam Hussein’s fall. One of the seven crimes with which the former president was initially charged was the decimation of the marshes, as well as the mass executions there, following the 1991 uprising. For the first time in history, a head of state was prosecuted on the basis of environmental crimes, expanding the global authority of environmental legislation. Green Iraq used environmental data it produced to successfully lobby the Iraqi government to adjudicate international treaties. They drew on the Ramsar convention for the protection of wetlands that, in 2007 with the admission of Hawiza marsh, compelled Iraq’s government to allocate enough water to sustain the marshes while the country’s water budget faced constraints from upriver damming in Turkey. While marsh restoration skyrocketed to global acclaim, on the local level, marsh residents and political leadership decried the project’s marginal effects for wetland communities that desired health clinics, roads, schools, and the Internet.

It is the decentralization of imperial power that characterizes twenty-first century initiatives like marsh restoration. Environmental policies can supersede nation-states to conserve biodiversity because ecosystems are inherently transnational. The capacity of environmentalism to pinpoint particular ecologies can also be a resource for motivated interests. In 2009, Italian conglomerate Eni won the rights to develop the oil fields proximate to the marshes. Green Iraq’s Italian contractors subsequently won numerous projects with Iraq’s Ministry of Water Resources and a controlling interest over Iraq’s waterways. Unlike corporate social responsibility projects where connections between humanitarian initiatives and corporate investments are deliberately visible, donor leveraging of marsh restoration to win lucra-tive oil contracts leaves no paper trail and is purposefully hard to trace. The research methods I developed were designed to track these invisible imperial sutures.

257

Learning from the Diaspora:

Toward an Anthropology of Iraqi Exile

Zainab Saleh is Visiting Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Haverford College

With few exceptions, ethnographic and archival research based in Iraq has been largely inconceivable for the last thirty-five years.36 The rise of the Ba‘th regime to power in 1968 in general, and the reign of Saddam Hussein since 1979 in particular, was a major challenge to access to sources and people in Iraq. Iraqi academics living and writing in Iraq, where history was the most prestigious discipline in the humanities, had to work with the docu-ments the government made available at the National Library in Baghdad. Archives outside Iraq, in particular the British Library, the National Archives in Kew, the Library of Congress, the British archives in India, and more recently the Ottoman archives, became the main sites of knowledge pro-duction on Iraq for historians and political scientists. While this literature has provided nuanced and critical analyses of the history of the modern state of Iraq, it paid little attention to individual accounts. How did Iraqis live through, and interact with, political events and developments? The inability to conduct ethnographic research in Iraq and the lack of attention to Iraqi exilic communities until very recently marginalized Iraqi voices.37 My research aims to bridge this gap by focusing on stories and perspectives of Iraqis living in Britain.

Based on two years of fieldwork, my research focuses on questions of memory, diaspora, and sectarianism among the Iraqi community in London. This community’s emergence since the late 1970s has been deeply connected to Saddam Hussein’s rise to power in 1979. My key approach was to elicit and record life histories through in-depth interviews that focus on the life and experiences of particular individuals. Life history does not simply complement historical and political scholarship. It is also a venue to humanize Iraqis, and to shed light on their experiences and perceptions. I documented different social and political scenes under different regimes; the persecution suffered under Hussein’s regime since the late 1970s; the journey to and life in exile in London; and relationships among members of the diasporic Iraqi community. I analyze the unexpected ways in which politics described as “sectarian” are refracted in Iraqis’ life stories. These

Roundtable

258

stories complicate conceptions of home and the constantly fluctuating boundary between past and present. Indeed, the narratives of Iraqis in London raise a major challenge to the question of ethnography. One should be careful not to collapse Iraqi exilic communities with Iraqis living inside Iraq. They face different concerns and have differing understandings of affiliation, nostalgia, immigration, and generational struggle.

My research focuses on key questions related to producing ethnogra-phies of Iraq (versus in Iraq) via diaspora communities. How can we study Iraqi exilic communities who are geographically distant even if they share histories and lived experiences? In this case, how do our questions and insights differ from ethnographies of Iraqis in Iraq? I argue that the Iraqi diasporic communities constitute a rich source of narratives. Studies on diasporas emphasize the interconnections between an exilic community and a homeland.38 I make this theoretical perspective speak to a methodological scheme. The complex ties Iraqi exiles have with Iraq since their flight, and the arrival of more Iraqis in Britain since 2003, provide an opportunity to gain ethnographic knowledge about Iraq vis-à-vis England. In addition, I trace the transnational connections between the Iraqi diasporic commu-nity in Britain and Iraq. The political ambitions of the Iraqi opposition in Britain, supported by US imperial interests, have had significant repercus-sions post-2003. These repercussions include the drastic transformation of Iraq’s political and social landscapes through the unprecedented institu-tionalization of a sectarian quota system. Finally, unlike major diasporic communities, Iraqi diasporic communities have received little academic attention. My research aims to bridge this gap since these communities warrant studies on their own.

As with all research, conducting work among diasporic communities is beset with difficulties. These include the pitfalls of ethnographic fieldwork, such as building trust and expressing disagreement with people. Though Hussein’s agents were no longer active after 1990, Iraqis in London still distrusted outsiders. The simplest questions raised suspicion, and it took some time to gain people’s trust. As a “native anthropologist,” I had to grapple with unanticipated difficulties. Given the salience of secular and religious sectarianism among Iraqis in London, many sought to categorize me in terms of my alleged sect, political convictions, and family background. A US or European anthropologist did not face such questions, which can

259

determine access. However, this situation is informative, and sheds light on interactions among Iraqis in exile. Another difficulty revolved around discussions of religion and sectarianism. There was tremendous anxiety among the Iraqis I met over these questions. Any acknowledgement of differences seemed to indicate that Iraqi society has always been sectarian, and never secular.

Iraqi narratives merit much more academic attention. Hopefully, in the future, conducting much-needed ethnographic fieldwork in Iraq will be increasingly possible. Even so, anthropologists need to study Iraqi diasporic communities. The emergence of considerable Iraqi communities in Europe, Iran, Jordan, the United States, Canada, and Australia, is a recent phenom-enon associated with Hussein’s rise to power and the intensified sectarian violence following the US invasion in 2003. Ethnography can shed light on the impact of devastating political events on Iraqi lives and society. It also highlights Iraqi voices, perspectives, and experiences that have been marginalized, if not ignored, for far too long.

Reflections on Recent Studies of Iraq

Peter Sluglett is Director of the Middle East Institute at the National Uni-versity of Singapore

The essays in this collection addressing recent research on Iraq by younger colleagues have taught me a great deal. The interest of the essays is only matched by their authors’ engagement, perspicacity, and even physical courage. Like Mona Damluji, I hoped that the overthrow of the Ba‘thist dictatorship in 2003 might open up new academic possibilities, both for those inside Iraq and those compelled to study the country at a distance. This did not happen: the great wall erected during the 1990s separating Iraq from the outside world still exists, and a series of smaller but equally exclusionary walls separating neighborhoods from each other, constructed since 2007 purportedly to contain sectarian violence, have blighted the spatial and psychological landscape of Baghdad.39

US insistence that sectarianism is one of the organizing principles of Iraqi society, and even more, that it forms the basis of Iraq politics, has done incalculable harm. In Sectarianism in Iraq: Antagonistic Visions of Unity (Hurst, 2011), Fanar Haddad deconstructs the assumption, often made in

Roundtable

260

relation to Bosnia, or Iraq, or Lebanon, that sectarianism consists of a fixed set of values or perceptions surviving immutably down the generations. Instead, he shows how a combination of state policy and historical events, the Iran-Iraq war, the intifada of 1991, the sanctions of the 1990s and early 2000s, and the overthrow of the Ba‘th regime in 2003, came to turn what he calls “banal sectarianism” (the general sense that one is a member of a particular sect, and the fact that other sects exist) into an “assertive” or

“aggressive sectarianism.” Reading the essays by Arbella Bet-Shlimon and Alda Benjamen, both

lamenting the relative poverty of available source material, reminded me how often I have envied, say, our Latin Americanist colleagues, who have relatively unencumbered access to large collections of state, provincial, religious, or family archives.40 Closer to “home,” the late imperial historian Chris Bayly based some of his early work on Allahabad on an examination of the volu-minous account books of merchant families to which he had access.41 Alda Benjamen’s pursuit of material in “smaller libraries” and of oral-historical sources has yielded valuable results. Similarly, Orit Bashkin’s exploration of a wide variety of archival sources in London and Jerusalem (especially the Babylonian Jewry Heritage Center in Or Yehuda) and of newspapers, memoirs, and interviews, has produced a fascinating study of the last years of the Jewish community in Iraq.42 Many Assyrians, both Chaldeans and Nestorians, were deeply involved with the Iraqi and/or Kurdish left, and felt themselves thoroughly integrated into Iraqi society.

The essays by Saleem al-Bahloly and Haytham Bahoora are in dialogue with the major contributions on the study of Iraqi art by Nada Shabout and with Silvia Naef ’s recent article “Not Just ‘For Art’s Sake’: Exhibiting Iraqi Art in the West After 2003.”43 I was intrigued by Bahoora’s description of a “canonized set of assumptions about cultural production in 1940s-1950s Baghdad,” which has a curious echo of “communist political correctness” vis-à-vis cultural production at the height of the Cold War. Bahoora wants to find “the hidden, the arbitrary, and the anomalous.” I hope he will be able to surmount “the entrenched boundaries that hinder interdisciplinary research.” In fact, archives can be less intimidating than he suggests, espe-cially in their function of providing chronologies.

The contributions of Caecilia Pieri, Bridget L. Guarasci, and Zainab Saleh all point to the difficulty of gathering information. For Pieri, the

261

widespread looting of 2003 complicated the rediscovery of Baghdad’s archi-tectural past, while the foreigners’ perceived need for bodyguards turned them into obvious targets. Pieri has tried to make sense of the “walling strategy” mentioned above, but she indicates that the paintings that appear on the walls are officially commissioned, and that “there is no freedom of [artistic] expression in Baghdad today.” Guarasci has investigated the project to restore the Iraqi marshes to some semblance of their functionality before Saddam Hussein’s huge drainage efforts after 1991. Unsurprisingly, most of the money raised for it was spent outside Iraq; the voices of the local marsh communities were largely ignored, and companies in the donor countries acquired substantial economic opportunities for their pains. More than an inkling of the favoritism and mismanagement of the US-backed Coalition Provisional Authority and of the looming tide of corruption in post-invasion Iraq can be found in Ali Allawi’s The Occupation of Iraq: Winning the War, Losing the Peace.44

Finally, Zainab Saleh conducted her fieldwork among Iraqi exiles in London. Her essay captures the difficulty encountered by the “native anthro-pologist” examining her own society: problems of trust, and the almost inevitable efforts on the part of respondents to “place” their interlocutor within their own universe of social categories. I remember my relief when, on a visit to Baghdad in 1976, I was identified as being related to so-and-so by marriage, and could thus fit in. I was particularly interested in the contemporary salience of sectarian and ethnic differences among Iraqis in exile, a phenomenon one would probably not have encountered fifteen or twenty years ago.

In closing, I would like to say something about the archives of the Iraq Memory Foundation at the Hoover Institution, and particularly the moral unease surrounding its current location expressed by one or two of the contributors. Clearly, it is imperative that this material should one day return to in Iraq, and that researchers there should be able to make use of it. At this point, all we can do is speculate as to the fate of these documents had they not been spirited out of Iraq. I do not think it is very likely that they would have survived, and even less likely that they would have been unconditionally accessible to researchers. Yet the wholesale transfer of part of one country’s documented historical memory into the hands of the state that has effectively colonized it does present something of a dilemma. On the

Roundtable

262

one hand, it has made possible two books that have transformed our under-standing of how Iraqi society functioned under the Ba‘th: Joseph Sassoon’s Saddam Hussein’s Ba‘th Party: Inside an Authoritarian Regime and Dina Khoury’s Iraq in Wartime: Soldiering, Martyrdom, and Remembrance.45 On the other hand, the existence and location of the archive raises important questions about the mechanics of the production of knowledge, and the politics of patrimony. One day, certainly, this archive must return to Iraq.

263

ENDNOTES

1 See Rashid Khalidi, Resurrecting Empire: Western Footprints and America’s Perilous Path in the Middle East (Boston: Beacon Press, 2004); Toby Dodge, Inventing Iraq: The Failure of Nation-Building and a History Denied (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003); Derek Gregory, The Colonial Present: Afghanistan, Palestine, and Iraq (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004).

2 Nabil Al-Tikriti, “‘Stuff Happens’: A Brief Overview of the 2003 Destruction of Iraqi Manuscript Collections, Archives, and Libraries,” Library Trends 55, no. 3 (2007), 730–45.

3 John Gravois, “Disputed Iraqi Archives Find a Home at the Hoover Institution,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 23 January 2008.

4 Saad Eskander, “Records and Archives Recovery in Iraq: Past, Present and Future,” Iraqi National Library and Archives Website (2005): www.iraqnla.org/fp/art/art1.htm.

5 Peter G. Stone, Joanne Farchakh Bajjaly, and Robert Fisk, The Destruction of Cultural Heritage in Iraq (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 2008); Nada Shabout, “The Preservation of Iraqi Modern Heritage in the Aftermath of the US Invasion of 2003,” in

Ethics and the Visual Arts, eds. Elaine A. King and Gail Levin (New York: Allworth Press, 2006).

6 See Haydar Al-Mohammad, “Interview,” Cultural Anthropology 27, no. 4 (2012), [Supplemental Material (web only)]: http://culanth.org/articles/8-a-kidnapping-in-basra-the-struggles-and.

7 American Anthropological Association Commission on the Engagement of Anthropology with the US Security and Intelligence Communities, Final Report on The Army’s Human Terrain System Proof of Concept Program, 14 October 2009: http://www.aaanet.org/cmtes/commissions/ceaussic/upload/ceaussic_hts_¿nal_report.pdf.

8 See Antonius C. G. M. Robben, Iraq at a Distance: What Anthropologists Can Teach Us About the War (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010); Jordi Tejel and Peter Sluglett, et al., Writing the Modern History of Iraq: Historiographical and Political Challenges (Singapore: World Scienti¿c, 2012); Nadje Sadig Al-Ali and Deborah Al-Najjar, We Are Iraqis: Aesthetics and Politics in a Time of War (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2013).

9 See Mona Damluji, “Report on TAARII-sponsored roundtable: Researching Iraq Today: Archives, Oral Histories, and Ethnographies,” TAARII Newsletter 8, no. 2 (2013).

10 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, 2nd ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 27.

11 See, e.g.: Haytham Bahoora, “Modernism Before Modernity: Literature and Urban Form in Iraq, 1950-1963,” Ph.D. dissertation, New York University, 2010; Orit Bashkin, The Other Iraq: Pluralism and Culture in Hashemite Iraq (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009); Kevin M. Jones, “The Poetics of Revolution: Cultures, Practices, and Politics of Anti-Colonialism in Iraq, 1932-1960,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Michigan, 2013.

12 My upcoming book will be based on my Ph.D. dissertation: Arbella Bet-Shlimon, “Kirkuk, 1918-1968: Oil and the Politics of Identity in an Iraqi City,” Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 2012.

13 Hanna Batatu, The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq: A Study of Iraq’s Old Landed and Commercial Classes and of Its Communists, Ba‘thists and Free Of¿cers (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), 912n1.

14 I have previously discussed the details of my research in Arbella Bet-Shlimon, “Provincial Histories of Twentieth-Century Iraq: ReÀections on the Research Process,” TAARII Newsletter 6, no. 2 (2011), 10-13. Other approaches to Kirkuk’s history using new source bases will be present in Ph.D. dissertations by Idan Barir at Tel Aviv University; Alda

Roundtable

264

Benjamen at the University of Maryland, College Park; and Fadi Dawood at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.

15 A similar argument with regard to African historiography is found in Akinwumi Ogundiran, “The End of Prehistory? An Africanist Comment,” American Historical Review 118, no. 3 (2013), 792.

16 Akram Khater, “Introduction,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 42, no. 3 (2010), 471; Paul Rowe, “The Middle Eastern Christian As Agent,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 42, no. 3 (2010), 472-74.

17 Sargon Donabed, “Iraq and the Assyrian Unimagining: Illuminating Scaled Suffering and a Hierarchy of Genocide from Simele to Anfal,” Ph.D. disserataion, University of Toronto, 2012, and Fadi Dawood’s forthcoming dissertation on Assyrians during the colonial rule are welcome additions to the ¿eld.

18 For example, Orit Bashkin’s work on pluralism in Iraq demonstrates the possibility for Iraqis to transcend ethno-sectarianism and participate in various socio-intellectual move-ments of the day. Bashkin, The Other Iraq.

19 Alda Benjamen, “Negotiating the Place of Assyrians in Modern Iraq, 1960-1988,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Maryland, College Park, 2015.

20 Alda Benjamen, “Research at the Iraqi National Library and Archives,” TAARII Newsletter 7, no. 1 (2012).

21 Al-Tikriti, “‘Stuff Happens.’”22 Hugh Eakin, “Iraqi Files in US: Plunder or Rescue?” New York Times, 1 July 2008.23 Abboud Zeitoune. Music Pearls of Beth-Nahrin: An Assyrian/Syriac Discography (Wiesbaden,

Germany: Assyrische Demokratische Organisation, 2007).24 Jon Lee Anderson, “Saddam’s Ear,” The New Yorker, 5 May 2003.25 See www.artiraq.org/maia.26 Batatu, Old Social Classes, 133-52.27 Bashkin, The Other Iraq, 88.28 Haytham Bahoora, “Baudelaire in Baghdad: Husayn Mardan and the Poetics of the Self,”

International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 45 (2013), 313–29.29 This project came about after my ¿rst trip to Baghdad in 2003 when I went to co-organize

an exhibition of Iraqi painting, “Bagdad Renaissance,” which took place in Paris that October.

30 Khalid al- Sultani, “Architecture in Iraq Between the Two World Wars,” Ur 2, no. 3 (1982).31 Christian Science Monitor, 10 December 2007.32 This text was originally written in French. English translation by Wendy Parramore.33 Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality: An Introduction, Volume I (New York: Vintage

Books, 1990 [1978]), 103.34 Ann Laura Stoler, Carole McGranahan, and Peter Perdue, Imperial Formations (Santa Fe,

NM: School for Advanced Research Press, 2007).35 Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature (New

York: Columbia University Press, 1993).36 For a literature review of historiography on Iraq, see Orit Baskhin’s article in this special

issue. Alda Benjamin managed to conduct archival research in Iraq after 2003. See her piece in this roundtable. For ethnographic work conducted in Iraq after 2003, see Hayder Al-Mohammad, “A Kidnapping in Basra: The Struggles and Precariousness of Life in Postinvasion Iraq,” Cultural Anthropology 27, no. 4 (2012), 597-617; and “Towards an Ethics of Being-With: Intertwinements of Life in Post-Invasion Basra,” Ethos: Journal of Anthropology 75, no. 4 (2010), 425-46.

265

37 See especially Nadje Al-Ali, Iraqi Women: Untold Stories from 1948 to the Present (London: Zed Books, 2007); and Omar Abdulilah al-Dewachi, “The Professionalization of the Iraqi Medical Doctor in Britain: Medicine, Citizenship, Sovereignty, and Empire,” Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 2008.

38 See Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995); and James Glifford. Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge. MA: Harvard University Press, 1997).

39 See Pieri (this volume) and Mona Damluji, ‘“Securing Democracy in Iraq’: Sectarian Politics and Segregation in Baghdad, 2003–2007,” Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review 21, no. 2 (2010), 71-87.

40 Although this is hardly a scienti¿c comparison, a search of the Widener Library’s holdings for “Sinaloa” in northwestern Mexico produces nearly 600 titles, many historical; running the same search for “Kirkuk” produces only sixty-¿ve titles.

41 Christopher Bayly, Rulers, Townsmen, and Bazaars: North Indian Society in the Age of British Expansion, 1770-1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). The only work I know of based on business records in the Middle East is Mafalda Ade Winter, Picknick mit den Paschas: Aleppo und die levantinische Handesl¿rma Fratelli Poche �1853-1880� (Beirut and Würzburg, 2013).

42 Orit Bashkin, New Babylonians: A History of Jews in Modern Iraq (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012).

43 See Tejel and Sluglett, op cit. 44 Ali A. Allawi, The Occupation of Iraq: Winning the War, Losing the Peace (New Haven,

CT: Yale University Press, 2007).45 Joseph Sassoon, Saddam Hussein’s Ba‘th Party: Inside an Authoritarian Regime (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 2011); Dina R. Khoury, Iraq in Wartime: Soldiering, Martyrdom, and Remembrance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).

Roundtable