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‘Walling’ Baghdad: Spatial dissonance and tactics of war
- Source: International Journal of Contemporary Iraqi Studies, Volume 7, Issue 1, Mar 2013, p. 55 - 69
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- 01 Mar 2013
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Abstract
This article examines the phenomenon of ‘walling’ in Baghdad. I demonstrate how barrier walls and internal borders represent a politicized manifestation of what Anibal Quijano calls the ‘coloniality of power’ (Quijano 2000: 533) a highly racialized and power-inflected Euro-centered discourse of Otherness destined to create distinctions between Euro-American ‘civilization’ and ‘third world backwardness’. At the same time, I will also show how Iraqi writers and poets create resisting narratives that contest the walls of coloniality in an anti-occupation poetics. These writers also contest the sectarian and gender violence that results from physical and symbolic territorial demarcations destined to create a fragmented city and a violated national imaginary.