TRANSLATING GENRE: POST-2003 IRAQI FICTION AND CRITIQUES OF INTERNATIONAL LAW

This dissertation explores Iraqi fiction written in Arabic and published in English translation since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion and occupation. Reading in both Arabic and English, I focus on texts that Anglophone publishers market as genre fiction. Iraqi writers, I contend, use genre fictional conventions purportedly derived from U.S. and European traditions at the same time that they alter these conventions by adapting them to the setting of occupied Iraq. A model of unidirectional U.S. and European genre influence does not accurately capture this dynamic, nor does understanding Iraqi writers as simply appropriating U.S. and European genre conventions for critical purposes. Instead, I trace the nuanced ways in which the Iraqi authors I study distort such genre fictional categories by manipulating formal elements and expectations, by using the affordances of the Arabic language, and by drawing from earlier Arab and Islamic traditions and forms. This distortion, I suggest, illuminates how genre fictional conventions corresponding to U.S. and European marketing categories reflect, encode, and extend universalizing presumptions that animate doctrinal international law as it was used to legitimize the invasion and occupation. Altering familiar genre conventions to tell stories critical of the war, then, offers Iraqi writers a mechanism to articulate a critique of international law within the pages of fictional texts that circulate among Anglophone readers precisely by virtue of their engagement with genre fictional labels. Both law and literature, in this account, feature shared epistemological and material conditions that have licensed and legitimated asymmetric U.S. state violence in Iraq.

Author dc:creator

• Firmani, Mark

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Saint-Amour, Paul

• Arts and Humanities
• American Languages, Literatures, and Cultures
• Law

Language dc:language.iso

en

Repository record dc:identifier.uri

https://repository.upenn.edu/handle/20.500.14332/60394

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:repository.upenn.edu:20.500.14332/60394