Political Undesirables: Citizenship, Denaturalization, and Reclamation in Iraq | Zainab Saleh & Attiya Ahmad
The Institute for Middle East Studies invites you to join Zainab Saleh as she discusses her book Political Undesirables: Citizenship, Denaturalization, and Reclamation in Iraq.
Political Undesirables considers the legal making and unmaking of citizenship in Iraq, focusing on the mass denaturalization and deportation of Iraqi Jews in 1950–51 and Iraqis of Iranian origin in the early 1980s. Since the formation of the modern state of Iraq under British rule in 1921, practices of denaturalization and expulsion of citizens have been mobilized by ruling elites to curb political opposition. Iraqi politicians, under both monarchical and republican rule, routinely employed the rhetoric of threats to national security, treason, and foreignness to uproot citizens they deemed politically undesirable.
Using archival documents, ethnographic research, and literary and autobiographical works, Zainab Saleh shows how citizenship laws can serve as a mechanism to discipline the population. As she argues, these laws enforce commitment to the state’s political order and normative values, and eliminate dissenting citizens through charges of betrayal of the homeland. Citizenship in Iraq, thus, has functioned as a privilege closely linked to loyalty to the state, rather than as a right enjoyed unconditionally. With the rise of nativism, right-wing nationalism, and authoritarianism all over the world, this book offers a timely examination of how citizenship can become a tool to silence opposition and produce precarity through denaturalization.
We hope you will join Zainab Saleh and interlocutor Attiya Ahmad for this thoughtful discussion about the history of citizenship, denaturalization, and reclamation in Iraq. You can participate in this conversation in-person or virtually. The event is open to the public.
Speakers
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Zainab Saleh is an Associate Professor of Anthropology and the Director of John B. Hurford ’60 Center for the Arts and Humanities at Haverford College. Her research focuses on subjectivity, nostalgia, belonging, war, empire, citizenship laws, and violence in Iraq and the Iraqi Diaspora. She is the author of Return to Ruin: Iraqi Narratives of Exile and Nostalgia (Stanford University Press, 2021. Winner of The Evelyn Shakir Non-Fiction Award at the Arab American Book Award). Her second book, Political Undesirables: Citizenship, Denaturalization, and Reclamation in Iraq was just published with Stanford University Press. She is a co-editor of Iraq as Barometer: Political Imagination, Land, and Law, under contract with Edinburgh University Press. Her recent book, How US Media Legitimized the Invasion of Iraq: A Will to Ignorance, is under contract with I.B.Tauris/ Bloomsbury. Her work also appeared in American Anthropologist, Arab Studies Journal, Anthropology News, Journal of Contemporary Iraq and the Arab World, Costs of War project with Brown University, Political and Legal Anthropology Review, Palestine/Israel Review, and Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East.
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Dr. Attiya Ahmad is an Associate Professor of Anthropology and International Affairs. Broadly conceived, her research focuses on the gendered interrelation of Islamic reform movements and political economic processes spanning the Middle East and South Asia, in particular the greater Arabian Peninsula/Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean regions. Dr. Ahmad is currently examining the development of global halal tourism networks.
