Sara Pursley

Familiar Futures

Time, Selfhood, and Sovereignty in Iraq

• Broschiertes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

Sara Pursley is Assistant Professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at New York University.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Seitenzahl: 320
• Erscheinungstermin: 15. Januar 2019
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 226mm x 153mm x 25mm
• Gewicht: 451g
• ISBN-13: 9781503607484
• ISBN-10: 1503607488
• Artikelnr.: 50911533

Autorenporträt

Sara Pursley is Assistant Professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at New York University.

Inhaltsangabe

Contents and Abstracts
Introduction: Iraqi Futures and the Age of Development
chapter abstract
This chapter introduces the central concepts of the book. Modern Iraqi
futures were familiar because they were produced through reforms of
familial and other intimate practices, imagined to already be somebody
else's past or present, and paradoxically reproductive of existing forms of
unevenness. They were also disrupted by other imaginaries of the future,
which might be familiar because they were drawn from Islamic discursive
traditions or were near or close futures that might be realizable because
they have some connection to the present. These last discourses stood
outside, and sometimes against, the modern political and conjugal imaginary
of reproductive futurism, in which the figure of the child embodies the
nation's yearned-for but congenitally receding future. The chapter also
looks at how Iraq was an overdetermined space for the coming together of
three previously distinct conceptions of development in the interwar
period: the economic, the national, and the psychobiological.
1Sovereignty, Violence, and the Dual Mandate
chapter abstract
This chapter looks at British practices in governing Iraq in the occupation
and mandate eras (191432). While British officials often invoked
discourses emphasizing the psychological underdevelopment and sexual
nondifferentiation of Iraqi subjects, this did not lead to their support
for the expansion of modern biopolitical or disciplinary institutions in
Iraq. British governance was primarily necropolitical, relying on violent
punitive techniques such as hanging, whipping, corvée labor, bombing or
burning down villages, and cutting off water and food to rebellious towns.
The chapter traces how these practices were implicated in the production of
Iraq as a bounded territorial space over which post-Ottoman sovereignty
could be asserted and economic development, as the extraction of resources,
carried out. The use of corporeal violence in mandate Iraq, while hardly
exceptional in the history of the British empire, was shaped by new
technologies of rule and explained through emerging narratives of
developmental psychology.
2Determining a Self
chapter abstract
Iraqi nationalist elites in the 1920s and 1930s called for the expansion of
disciplinary and biopolitical techniques, in opposition to British policy.
This chapter explores education and the military as key domains in which
these struggles played out, mainly in this period over the bodies and minds
of male youth, and engages with the writings of the Arab nationalist and
"father of Iraqi education" Sati al-Husri. In contrast to usual scholarly
concerns with the (Arabist or Iraqist) content of nationalist narratives
prevalent in Iraq's schools and military, the chapter explores these
institutions as temporal-spatial regimes that worked to make a sovereign
Iraqi future familiar even while temporally deferring it. An emerging
Arabist and statist discourse envisioned precocious demands for Iraq's
independence as symptoms of backwardness, not progress, and accused those
making such demands of being both less modern and less Iraqi than those
working toward a deferred sovereignty.
3The Gendering of School Time
chapter abstract
This chapter explores how the curriculum and pedagogies implemented in the
1920s were challenged in the 1930s by a new generation of education
officials, many of whom were educated in the United States. Influenced by
American conceptual vocabularies of pragmatism and adapted education, the
new educators criticized the unified school curriculum implemented by
al-Husri's ministry, calling for a "differentiated curriculum" governed by
the urban-rural difference and the male-female difference. From 1932 to
1958, often in response to the advice of US and global development
organizations, the Iraqi school system was increasingly differentiated by
sex, with more and more of the school time of female students devoted to
mandatory home economics education. The chapter proposes that this
peculiarity makes Iraq a productive context for examining pedagogies of
domesticity in the late interwar and postwar periods.
4Generational Time and the Marriage Crisis
chapter abstract
In the years around World War II, Iraqi officials were increasingly
concerned that a crisis was brewing in the form of a generation of educated
youth who were taking up leftist ideologies. This chapter explores how
generational affiliations produced largely by the expansion of public
schooling-often in combination with extended family ties along
intragenerational lines, that is, between siblings and cousins-worked to
foster political mobilization within the underground but hugely popular
Iraqi Communist Party (ICP). The widespread sense of generational crisis
was expressed in three more specific crises prominent in public discourse
during these years: the crisis of adolescence, the crisis of girls'
education, and the marriage crisis. Efforts to intervene in and stabilize
the stage of adolescence drew on new, globally circulating psychological
theories as well as on specific forms of postwar economic development
expertise. Conceptions of modern sexual difference and desire were central
to these interventions.
5The Family Farm and the Peculiar Futurist Perspective of Development
chapter abstract
The chapter examines efforts to reform rural families on the Dujayla Land
Settlement Project, one of the world's first programs attracting the new
international organizations founded after 1945 to launch the global "age of
development." The idea was to create a class of small "family" farmers by
distributing land to some of the landless poor. Yet the isolated family
farm model used to design the settlement, which was based on US Cold War
modernization and agrarian reform theory, contributed to ecological and
social catastrophe. The nuclear family type, while failing to take hold as
a widespread social reality in rural Iraq, had significant effects on rural
lives. By working as a standardized grid for development operations, this
model altered agricultural practices and thus the land, while making
certain kinds of "family" relationships legible so that they could be
worked on by techniques of governmentality and development.
6Revolutionary Time and Wasted Time
chapter abstract
After the 1958 revolution, state officials and political party leaders
stressed the need to combat "stagnation" in the economy and the bodies of
laborers. The word used for this condition was jumud, "a frozen state."
Many agreed on the need to "suspend" or "to freeze" various kinds of
political mobilization in the present. Sexual difference was crucial to
both parts of this process: the conquering of economic stagnation or jumud
and the enforcement of political stagnation or tajmid. The chapter focuses
on a controversy over a communist women's rural literacy project, which
critics saw as violating the tacit terms of the alliance between the state
and middle-class feminists. The project was not believed to propagate
techniques for the policing of families in the name of the child's and the
nation's future, but to be a symptom of social promiscuity threatening the
political order.
7Law and the Post-Revolutionary Self
chapter abstract
This chapter examines the 1959 Personal Status Law, Iraq's first unified
national family code under the control of the state. It argues that the
law's drive to make marriage more stable, while simultaneously making the
conjugal home less permeable to strangers, discloses the use of a
reproductive-futurist reasoning to create a properly modern and timeless
domestic sphere. The chapter explores responses to the law from communists,
Bathists, liberals, and Sunni and Shii ulama'. It considers a Shii juristic
critique by the mujtahid Muhammad Bahr al-Ulum, who argued that the law
only appeared to promote progressive change, while actually replacing the
temporally and spatially dynamic Islamic systems of jurisprudence with
legal stasis. This critique suggests a key difference between the modern
state's tendency to produce a static space and earlier Islamic
understandings of "the state," or al-dawla, as cyclical and thus
ever-changing.
Epilogue: Postcolonial Heterotemporalitiess
chapter abstract
The epilogue explores a famous work by the artist Jawad Salim, Nusb
al-Hurriyya, or the Monument to Freedom, which still stands in Baghdad's
Liberation Square. The work has usually been read as a linear-historical
narrative of the Iraqi nationalist movement and the 1958 revolution it
produced. Engaging with a rich tradition of Arabic language art criticism
on the monument, the chapter shows how this work also evokes multiple and
heterogeneous conceptions of time, often drawn from the Islamic discursive
tradition, that can be read as subversive of contemporary developmentalist
reasoning. For example, Islamic cyclical imaginaries of time do not work
against promises of radical historical change in the monument but on the
contrary give such promises more imaginative purchase than they typically
achieve in linear modernization narratives, with their tendency to open
onto a singular and static future.