Collateral Damages (tracing The Debts And Displacements Of The Iraq War)

By (author) El-Shaarawi, Nadia
Description:
More than twenty years after the US-led invasion and occupation of Iraq, there has yet to be a meaningful public reckoning with the war. Collateral Damages brings Iraqi stories—which have been systematically excluded from dominant Western narratives of the war—to the fore. Drawing on a decade of ethnographic fieldwork, Nadia El-Shaarawi traces Iraqis'' experiences of the 2003 invasion and the violence and displacement that followed, from urban exile in Cairo to efforts to rebuild by pursuing third-country resettlement—often in the very country responsible for them becoming refugees. Iraqis'' theorizations of war and displacement illuminate how prevailing histories and memories of both the Iraq War and the larger Global War on Terror can be understood as imperial unknowing—epistemological and relational practices by which imperial power produces conditions of ignorance, hubris, obfuscation, and a willful turning away. Iraqis'' accounts draw attention to that which empire prefers to keep hidden and offer possibilities for knowing the social and political effects of war differently.

 
Table of contents:
Contents
 
Acknowledgments
Note on Transliteration
 
Introduction: Departure
1. "Bad History": Imperial Unknowing and the Iraq War
2. War Archive: Telling and Listening to War Stories
3. Living in the Transit City: Seeking Refuge, Refusing Refugeeness
4. Negotiating Humanitarian "Solutions" to Displacement: Iraqis'' Experiences of the Refugee Resettlement Process in Cairo
5. Allies and Enemies: Resettlement and the Conditionality of Iraqis'' Relations with US Empire
Conclusion: Arrival
 
Notes
References
Index
Review quote:

“Collateral Damages is not a polemic but an act of witness. . . . Clear, courageous, and profoundly humane, it stands as one of the few works that give the Iraq War’s survivors back their voice and their dignity”

Review quote:

“A compelling and theoretically rich ethnographic study of Iraqi refugees who were displaced to Egypt in the aftermath of the 2003 US invasion and occupation of Iraq.”

Biographical note:
Nadia El-Shaarawi is Associate Professor of Global Studies at Colby College.
Primary cover copy:
"Heartbreaking accounts of Iraqis living through imperial violence and forced migration are set in the context of a deeply original framing of both war and humanitarianism. As these metastasizing features of contemporary life are still invisible to or ignored by the citizens of the United States, Nadia El-Shaarawi''s book is a brilliant and ever more necessary read."—Catherine Lutz, Department of Anthropology, and cofounder, Costs of War project, Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, Brown University

"This beautifully written book starts with an irony that has been rendered unknowable: the United States resettles and offers humanitarian aid to those displaced by its own imperial violence. This is conveyed as generosity rather than as a debt to those who have been displaced. El-Shaarawi''s deeply insightful, nuanced ethnography of Iraqi refugees waiting for resettlement expands both temporal and epistemological frames to show the connections between the war on Iraq and humanitarianism—a tying together that renders visible US complicity and responsibility. A must-read from a leading scholar of the turn to temporality in migration studies."—Miriam Ticktin, Professor of Anthropology, and Director of the Center for Place, Culture and Politics (CPCP), CUNY Graduate Center

"Collateral Damages is a beautifully crafted ethnography that is exceptional in its breadth of scholarly insight. It depicts with great care the prismatic complexity of temporal experience and the psychic investment st