Journal of Contemporary Iraq & the Arab World - 1-2: Iraq and the Maladies of Archives, Jun 2022

This article explores the making of the National Palaces Privy Purse Archive, which later was conjoined with the State Archives of the Presidency of the Republic of Turkey (the Ottoman Archives), and investigates the silences in the Ottoman and Iraqi historiographies that were produced in this process. Building on Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s scholarship, I argue that the moment of fact assembly and the moment of fact retrieval should be highlighted in understanding historiographic shifts as well as their related silences. This article further elaborates on the archival material in the Privy Purse record group, now accessible through the State Archives of the Presidency of the Republic of Turkey in Istanbul, Turkey, and suggests ways in which the Privy Purse record group could inform Ottoman and Iraqi historiographies in the future.

In this article, I highlight the importance of literary products as an alternative archive. Focusing on Iraqi history in the first two decades of the twentieth century, I suggest that relying on Arabic literature is a useful method of decolonizing knowledge, which allows us to reconstruct, even partially, voices of Iraqis and exposes to us to their creativity and world-views. Some of Iraq’s poets, novelists and writers supported, and were supported by, the State, whose praises they sang in extravagant odes and mediocre novels. Others, however, were dissidents, radicals, anticolonial activists and commentators on social justice and gender equality. Their literary products are thus highly relevant to the late Ottoman period and the early years of the mandate as an archive countering British perceptions of politics at the time.

This article reflects on a recent research trip to Iraqi archives to raise questions about methodology in historical writing on Iraq. The article begins by describing the documentary sources available in Basra and Baghdad for writing provincial urban histories, and discusses the implications of accessing state archives in Iraq today, when the state that established them arguably no longer exists. It then interprets the sense of disjuncture that I experienced when comparing my own interest in twentieth-century Basra to that of local scholars writing about the same topic to build an argument about historiography and conceptual approaches to the modern Iraqi state. While the state is conspicuously absent from local Basrawi scholarship in particular, it occupies an outsized but superficial position in most Anglophone accounts of modern Iraq. New archival research may offer an alternative account, however, through a social history of the Iraqi state and its peripheries.

Iraqis in Iraq and the diaspora, through their life experience and interpretation of events, can be a site of a living archive. They possess knowledge about how national and imperial events impacted people on the ground, and about daily life and struggle to reckon with the past and the present, imagine the future and carve a sense of belonging through storytelling. The ability to provide a personal account of the events they lived through becomes a venue to challenge their portrayal as sectarian subjects in mainstream media. In this article, I argue that life stories can serve as anticolonial methodology, techniques of representation and empowerment, and sites of knowledge production about daily lives and struggles. As a living archive, life stories act as a platform to bear witness, challenge essentialist misconceptions, expose colonial and imperial realities and constitute individuals as subjects empowered to provide an account of their own lives.

This article contemplates Iraq’s archive fever, a repositioning of Freud’s death-drive as prescribed by Jacques Derrida, to contextualize the feverish obsession with Iraq’s archives. It promotes a grammar to describe the ways in which western institutions have consistently legitimized the dismembering of Iraqi archives in order to oversee and profit from digitization projects. This process is an orientalist pursuit to command Iraq’s history through the restructuration and transplantation of archives along with the exclusion of Iraqis from accessing its new form. This critique begins by describing the etymologies of archive fever, then shifts to highlight the discourse on the transposing of Iraq’s archive and concludes with an examination of masters and doctoral research to study how graduate students in Iraq overcame archival plunder and dislocation. The prevalence of source material in Iraq constitutes the building blocks of Iraqi graduate students’ theses and dissertations, underscoring the fallacies of digitizing plundered records.

The displacement of millions of Iraqi archival records to the United States in the 1990s and early 2000s generated considerable controversy about the legality and ethics of moving a country’s archival records to another country, especially during wartime. Since 2020, however, most of these records have been returned to Iraq, though digital copies remain accessible in the United States in many cases. How does the repatriation of Iraqi archival documents impact the ethical arguments for and against researchers using the digitized copies of previously displaced archives? And now that records have been returned to Iraq, how can researchers continue to safeguard the identities of individuals named within these papers? This article summarizes the history of the legal and ethical controversies surrounding displaced Iraqi archives and proposes ethical considerations for researchers of Iraq to keep in mind while engaging in scholarship.

This article considers the ethical issues surrounding conducting research in archives that include records of atrocities, taking Baʿth Party and Islamic State records that were de-territorialized from Iraq between 1991 and 2016 as case studies. I argue for the need to further consider whether historical subjects are being granted a voice in how their stories are being told. I will discuss the dichotomy between the imperatives to expose human rights abuses and seek accountability, against the need to consider the power dynamics defining control of the post-mortem narratives of the individuals named within records. I advocate for an approach to academic research that takes into account the affective power of records and the relations created by engaging them. I will explore how we might approach official records that document the abuse people have suffered as extensions of their physical bodies, as sacred remains.

Review of: Return to Ruin: Iraqi Narratives of Exile and Nostalgia, Zainab Saleh (2020)

Stanford: Stanford University Press, 280 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-50361-411-6, p/bk, $25.00