Women Writing And The Iraqi Ba Thist State

Explores discourses on gender and representations of women in modern Iraqi fiction. By exploring discourses on gender in both propaganda and high art fictional writings by Iraqis, this book offers an alternative narrative of the literary and cultural history of Iraq.

By exploring how translation has shaped the literary contexts of six Iraqi woman writers, this book offers new insights into their translation pathways as part of their stories’ politics of meaning-making. The writers in focus are Samira Al-Mana, Daizy Al-Amir, Inaam Kachachi, Betool Khedairi, Alia Mamdouh and Hadiya Hussein, whose novels include themes of exile, war, occupation, class, rurality and storytelling as cultural survival. Using perspectives of feminist translation to examine how Iraqi women’s story-making has been mediated in English translation across differing times and locations, this book is the first to explore how Iraqi women’s literature calls for new theoretical engagements and why this literature often interrogates and diversifies many literary theories’ geopolitical scope. This book will be of great interest for researchers in Arabic literature, women’s literature, translation studies and women and gender studies.

Noga Efrati outlines the first social and political history of women in Iraq during the periods of British occupation and the British-backed Hashimite monarchy (1917–1958). She traces the harsh and long-lasting implications of British state building on Iraqi women, particularly their legal and political enshrinement as second-class citizens, and the struggle by women's rights activists to counter this precedent. Efrati concludes with a discussion of post-Saddam Iraq and the women's associations now claiming their place in government. Finding common threads between these two generations of women, Efrati underscores the organic roots of the current fight for gender equality shaped by a memory of oppression under the monarchy. Efrati revisits the British strategy of efficient rule, largely adopted by the Iraqi government they erected and the consequent gender policy that emerged. The attempt to control Iraq through "authentic leaders"—giving them legal and political powers—marginalized the interests of women and virtually sacrificed their well-being altogether. Iraqi women refused to resign themselves to this fate. From the state's early days, they drew attention to the biases of the Tribal Criminal and Civil Disputes Regulation (TCCDR) and the absence of state intervention in matters of personal status and resisted women's disenfranchisement. Following the coup of 1958, their criticism helped precipitate the dissolution of the TCCDR and the ratification of the Personal Status Law. A new government gender discourse shaped by these past battles arose, yet the U.S.-led invasion of 2003, rather than helping cement women's rights into law, reinstated the British approach. Pressured to secure order and reestablish a pro-Western Iraq, the Americans increasingly turned to the country's "authentic leaders" to maintain control while continuing to marginalize women. Efrati considers Iraqi women's efforts to preserve the progress they have made, utterly defeating the notion that they have been passive witnesses to history.

"Exiled, displaced, tortured, and grieving - each of the five Iraqi women whose lives and losses come to us through Haifa Zangana's skillfully wrought novel is searching in her own way for peace with a past that continually threatens to swallow up the present. Majda, the widow of a former Ba'ath Party official who was killed by the government he served. Adiba, a political dissident tortured under Saddam Hussein's regime. Um Mohammed, a Kurdish refugee who fled her home for political asylum. Iqbal, a divorced mother whose family in Iraq is suffering under the effects of Western economic sanctions. And Sahira, the wife of a Communist politician, struggling with his disillusionment and her own isolation. Bound to one another by a common Iraqi identity and a common location in 1990s London, the women come together across differences in politics, ethnic and class background, age, and even language." "Weaving between the women's memories of Iraq and their lives as exiles in London, Zangana's novel gives voice to the richness and complexity of Iraqi women's experiences. Through their stories, the novel represents a powerful critique of the violence done to ordinary people by those who hold power both in Iraq and in the West."--Jacket.

The war in Iraq has put the condition of Iraqi women firmly on the global agenda. For years, their lives have been framed by state oppression, economic sanctions and three wars. Now they must play a seminal role in reshaping their country's future for the twenty-first century. Nadje Al-Ali challenges the myths and misconceptions which have dominated debates about Iraqi women, bringing a much needed gender perspective to bear on the central political issue of our time. Based on life stories and oral histories of Iraqi women, she traces the history of Iraq from post-colonial independence, to the emergence of a women's movement in the 1950s, Saddam Hussein's early policy of state feminism to the turn towards greater social conservatism triggered by war and sanctions. Yet, the book also shows that, far from being passive victims, Iraqi women have been, and continue to be, key social and political actors. Following the invasion, Al-Ali analyses the impact of occupation and Islamist movements on women's lives and argues that US-led calls for liberation has led to a greater backlash against Iraqi women.

"By exploring how translation has shaped the literary contexts of six Iraqi woman writers, this book offers new insights into their translation pathways as part of their stories' politics of meaning-making. The writers' novels include themes of exile, war, occupation, class, rurality and story-telling as cultural survival. Using perspectives of feminist translation to examine how Iraqi women's story-making has been mediated in English translation across differing times and locations, this book is the first to explore how Iraqi women's literature calls for new theoretical engagements and why this literature often interrogates and diversifies many literary theories' geo-political scope. This book will be of great interest for researchers in Arabic literature, Women's Literature, Translation Studies, and Women and Gender Studies"--

The 2003 Iraq invasion provoked an unprecedented phenomenon in the Iraqi literary scene: fiction exceeds poetry in production, critical reception, and market figures. New narrative genres, concerned with stories of wars and trauma, depict corporality and sexuality in their most material sense. Writing Through the Body argues that interest in the physical indicates a new perception of corporeality and, to show this, it traces a genealogy of the Iraqi body to uncover the complexity of its historical and socio-political discourses. Considering religious, social, and political factors, the body is examined in three semiospheres: Iraqi society and culture before 2003, the discourse of the war on terror as a semiotic interference, and contemporary Iraqi fiction as the result of the encounter between the two. This structure shows how corporeality was interrupted by and instrumentalised in war propaganda, and how new representations in fiction respond to the two spheres in conflict.

The modern history of Iraq is punctuated by a series of successive and radical ruptures (coups d'etat, changes of regime, military adventures and foreign invasions) whose chronological markers are relatively easy to identify. Although researchers cannot ignore these ruptures, they should also be encouraged to establish links between the moments when the breaks occur and the longue durée, in order to gain a better understanding of the period.Combining a variety of different disciplinary and methodological perspectives, this collection of essays seeks to establish some new markers which will open fresh perspectives on the history of Iraq in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and suggest a narrative that fits into new paradigms. The book covers the various different periods of the modern state (the British occupation and mandate, the monarchy, the first revolutions and the decades of Ba'thist rule) through the lens of significant groups in Iraq society, including artists, film-makers, political and opposition groups, members of ethnic and religious groups, and tribes.