Political Undesirables - by Zainab Saleh

About the Book

"Political Undesirables considers the legal making and unmaking of citizenship in Iraq, focusing on the mass denaturalization and deportation of Iraqi Jews in 1950-51 and Iraqis of Iranian origin in the early 1980s. Since the formation of the modern state of Iraq under British rule in 1921, practices of denaturalization and expulsion of citizens have been mobilized by ruling elites to curb political opposition. Iraqi politicians, under both monarchical and republican rule, routinely employed the rhetoric of threats to national security, treason, and foreignness to uproot citizens they deemed politically undesirable. Using archival documents, ethnographic research, and literary and autobiographical works, Zainab Saleh shows how citizenship laws can serve as a mechanism to discipline the population. As she argues, these laws enforce commitment to the state's political order and normative values, and eliminate dissenting citizens through charges of betrayal of the homeland. Citizenship in Iraq, thus, has functioned as a privilege closely linked to loyalty to the state, rather than a right enjoyed unconditionally. With the rise of nativism, right-wing nationalism, and authoritarianism all over the world, this book offers a timely examination of how citizenship can become a tool to silence opposition and produce precarity through denaturalization"-- Provided by publisher.

Book Synopsis

Political Undesirables considers the legal making and unmaking of citizenship in Iraq, focusing on the mass denaturalization and deportation of Iraqi Jews in 1950-51 and Iraqis of Iranian origin in the early 1980s. Since the formation of the modern state of Iraq under British rule in 1921, practices of denaturalization and expulsion of citizens have been mobilized by ruling elites to curb political opposition. Iraqi politicians, under both monarchical and republican rule, routinely employed the rhetoric of threats to national security, treason, and foreignness to uproot citizens they deemed politically undesirable.

Using archival documents, ethnographic research, and literary and autobiographical works, Zainab Saleh shows how citizenship laws can serve as a mechanism to discipline the population. As she argues, these laws enforce commitment to the state's political order and normative values, and eliminate dissenting citizens through charges of betrayal of the homeland. Citizenship in Iraq, thus, has functioned as a privilege closely linked to loyalty to the state, rather than as a right enjoyed unconditionally. With the rise of nativism, right-wing nationalism, and authoritarianism all over the world, this book offers a timely examination of how citizenship can become a tool to silence opposition and produce precarity through denaturalization.

Review Quotes

"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

About the Author

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, 2020).