Zainab Saleh is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Haverford College. She is the author of Return to Ruin: Iraqi Narratives of Exile and Nostalgia (Stanford, 2021).
Description
"Political Undesirables offers a brilliant exploration of the stripping away of the citizenship of minoritized targeted religious, ethnic, and ideological communities in Iraq, interrogating the legal denaturalization that culminated in their expulsion. Rather than treat the events as on the margins of the nation-state, Zainab Saleh places the expulsions at the analytical center of Iraq's history throughout its century-long independent existence.Interweaving archival and ethnographic research, Saleh offers an insightful close reading of the different singular laws initiated by various regimes, examining them comparatively, in their brutal efficacity and perverse coherency. The precarity of the right to citizenship of indigenous populations construed as 'foreign' and as 'internal enemies, ' Saleh powerfully demonstrates, persists in present-day discourses of return and repatriation, most visibly in the Jewish-Iraqi case, of the euphemistic naturalizing, as it were, of denaturalization itself. In this much-awaited book, Saleh takes the reader on a painfully revelatory journey into the methodical inscription of violence, while also finding remedial possibilities in more inclusive forms of affiliation within diasporic networks, illuminating the disappearances that still haunt." --Ella Shohat, author of On the Arab-Jew, Palestine, and Other Displacements "Elegantly argued and absorbing, Political Undesirables underscores how citizenship practices can be deployed as forms of state and colonial governmentality. Zainab Saleh provides invaluable analysis and conceptual tools to grapple with our urgent times." --Attiya Ahmad, The George Washington University "Lucid, timely, and foreboding, Political Undesirables reveals how shifting legal regimes in Iraq have weaponized political belonging to exile, silence, and discipline. Drawing on archives, biography, and ethnography, Zainab Saleh convincingly offers a stark warning about the precarity of citizenship." --Aomar Boum, University of California, Los Angeles