American Studies

This essay demonstrates that texts by Iraqi/Arab writers conceive the US invasion and occupation of Iraq as an assault on both biological and cultural life. It argues that in occupied Iraq, the very act of writing constitutes a performative survival of neocolonial necropolitics. Thus, Philip Metres’ abu ghraib arias employs visual poetry to bear witness to the suffering of Iraqi civilians subjected to torture at Abu Ghraib prison, by rendering visible what was repressed owing to trauma or silenced in the official investigation. Meanwhile, other literary works express distress about the destruction of Iraq’s cultural archive, since the arts have constituted a precious repository of Iraqi self-knowledge and spiritual nourishment throughout the country’s history of foreign domination and political tyranny. Reflecting on the bomb attack on Baghdad’s ‘Street of the Booksellers’ in 2007, poet Dunya Mikhail delivers a powerful invocation of literature’s longevity even after its material manifestations have been erased. Sinan Antoon’s novel The Corpse Washer (2013) highlights the ubiquity of death in post-2003 Iraq and its paralysing effect on the creative faculties as it tells the story of Jawad, an aspiring sculptor who gives up his artistic ambitions to follow in his father’s footsteps as a corpse washer.

Conspiracy theories flourish in highly diverse environments and answer to vastly different human needs, desires, and imaginations. Currently they are particularly prominent in the United States and in the Middle East, the two areas the conference intends to focus on. The rise of the United States to the leading imperial power has gone hand in hand with a proliferation of conspiracy theories that locate the conspiring forces within the federal government or big companies. The theories that have thrived in the Middle East, by contrast, imagine foreign conspirators, because the region has been on the receiving end of the international power system in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In both cases, these suspicions are not entirely unfounded. Anti-government conspiracy theories in the United States, scholars have argued, have since World War I often been triggered by officially formulated conspiracy theories or even real conspiratorial actions on behalf of the government. Similarly, the Middle East has seen some classical cases of political conspiracy perpetrated by exterior forces, perhaps the most notorious one being the coup against the Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953, which was orchestrated and financed by the CIA. The origins of conspiracy theories in the region, though, can be traced back much further, and the questions is yet unanswered in how far it is appropriate to link their emergence to real conspiracies.
Focusing on two regions that are, despite all their differences, inextricably connected in multifarious ways, the conference adopts a comparative approach to the study of conspiracy theories. It seeks to bring to the fore the specific characteristics of each cultural context as well as the ways in which conspiracy theories travel from one region to the other, how one region figures in the theories of the other, and how events in one region resonate with conspiracy theories circulating in the other. As a result, the conference will contribute to our understanding of Middle Eastern as well as U.S.-American variants of conspiracy theories as well to our understanding of the forms and mechanisms of such theories in general.