This volume deals with the Iraqi cultural production under and after Baathist rule, a research field which, in comparison to Iraqi history and politics, has attracted relatively scant scholarly attention. The contributors depict the impact of dictatorship, sanctions, and successive wars on Iraqi culture, analyze the predominant narratives and counter-narratives in Iraqi culture, as well as considering the effect of the demographic shift to exile and diaspora. Further contributions deal with the fragmentation of Iraq’s political culture and artistic representations of diverse identities and historical memories. And last but by no means least, the volume asks how the strategies of those intellectuals who supported and legitimized official politics during the Baathist rule can be approached and studied critically with a view to gaining a better understanding of how official culture functioned.
„It is a fitting conclusion to the three critical sections of the volurne, as it suggests a view of the dialectic of home and exile in respect to the theme of translation across languages and the critical potential such an exchange can make to an understanding of the critical and creative work of Iraqi writers. As Pflitsch notes in respect to Fatah's later novel Onkelehen, for the exiled Iraqi refugee Iraq itself "remains completely alien to him and shows up the limits of his own understanding". It is of course precisely the conflicting cultural horizons of these limits that the volume as a whole situates as a site of research
and creative writing practices.“
Von Norman Saadi Nikro
In: De Gruyter, S. 234-237.
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„It is of couse precisely the conflicting cultural horizons of these limits that the volume as a whole situates as a site of research and creative writing practices.“
Von Norman Saadi Nikro
In: OLZ 109, (2014), S.234-237.
Literatures in Context is a peer-reviewed book series devoted to Near Eastern and North African literatures. The editors want the title of the series to be understood programmatically. They presuppose a concept of world literature that includes Near Eastern and North African literatures. What is more, they assume that literatures are in many ways marked by intertextuality, that they constitute readings of extremely diverse earlier texts, and that they are posited within a field of tensions, much broader than their respective national language. For the earlier eras of Near Eastern and North African literatures, this field of tensions geographically covers the regions of the Southern and Eastern Mediterranean and Asia Minor. In modern times, it has become a space of interaction that has long since included “global” Western literatures (and realities). This does not imply that the modern Near Eastern and North African literatures have severed themselves from their predecessors. Instead it is precisely the tension between different sets of references in modern Near Eastern and North African literatures, or their “local historical context”, which is a great part of their attraction, that remains a crucial field of research for the modern scholar.
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