Welcome to a K3 seminar with Michael Degerald, Visiting Researcher, Center\nfor Middle Eastern Studies, Lund University<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The title of the talk is:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Heritage, archives,\nand state power: Digital traces of Iraq’s cultural and political history in\nstate media and publications.<\/em><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n It will take place on Wednesday, September 4 at 10.15-12.00\nin The K3 Open Studio, NIC 0541, Niagara.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Below you will find an\nabstract for the talk.<\/p>\n\n\n\n During the course\nof my dissertation research, I made pdf copies of dozens of Arabic magazines,\nbooks, and journals published by the Iraqi state. With the help of a grant from\nthe Simpson Center for the Humanities at the University of Washington, I\nconstructed a digital archive to make these texts available to others to\nfacilitate research. These sources have value for modern Iraqi history, but yet\nmore lurks under the surface. These publications speak to a variety of topics\nand were part of a large scale, \u2018pre-digital\u2019 attempt to shift Iraqi and\ninternational public opinion. While they are clearly part of Iraqi cultural\nheritage, they can be quite racist and toxic in their rhetoric and represent\nthe work of a government many Iraqis would understandably like to forget. <\/p>\n\n\n\n In addition to the\ndiscourses they contain, the texts themselves have stamps and markings that represent\ncomplex geographies of power traversed by the books from their publication to\ntheir various locations in collections outside of Iraq. The USA acquired many\nsuch publications for its research libraries, but Iraq also sponsored their\ndissemination, with many bearing stamps that say they were gifts from the Iraqi\ngovernment. Digging into the US acquisitions finds some of them related to\ninternational wheat sales and book acquisitions under PL-480, shedding light on\nfar more than seemingly obscure books. The answer of just how those books came\nto the USA speaks to trends shaping Middle Eastern studies, postcolonial\ndevelopment, and our ability to study media history and the history of the\nmodern Middle East most broadly. What does it mean to work with texts that were\nmanipulated by multiple states for their own ends? And where do I fit, as an\noutsider studying Iraq?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Welcome to a K3 seminar with Michael Degerald, Visiting Researcher, Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Lund University The title of the talk is: Heritage, archives, and state power: Digital traces of Iraq’s cultural and political history in state media and … Continue reading