Projekt

"Dust That Never Settled: Ideology, Ambivalence, Disenchantment and the Legacy of the Iran-Iraq War in Arabic and Persian Fiction" is a comparative study of how Iraqi and Iranian writers and filmmakers have treated the Iraq-Iran War, from the eruption of the conflict, in 1980, to the present day. In bringing together Arabic and Persian fiction from this period, this project creates a new framework for the study of the two modern literary traditions (Arabic and Persian) and the modern literatures of the Middle East through the lens of the war and its politically contentious legacy. It argues that the eight-year war between Iran and Iraq created similar material and intellectual conditions for literary production in both countries and as such, the literature of the war is a rich area for comparative literary study between modern Arabic and Persian literatures. Critically, however, it demonstrates how writers in the postwar period, relied on similar thematic concerns and aesthetic techniques to challenge the militant, ideological literatures of the war produced during the 1980s. The book charts out ways in which two national literatures, which are rarely brought together, converge and diverge, as Iranian and Iraqi writers wrote and rewrote the story of the war between their two countries. In looking at the cultural legacy of this brutal war until the present day, the book examines how writers and filmmakers from the two countries continue to wrestle with the politically contentious issue of the legacy of the Iran-Iraq War. This approach to the topic focuses on the ways in which writers have treated the issue of martyrdom vis-à-vis state discourses and how prose writers, poets and filmmakers have used mourning as a way to deal with the legacy of the war and challenge the heroic militarism of Iraqi and Iranian state discourses. Critically, the book examines how memory of the war and Iraqi and Iranian cultural production has both contributed to and challenged the rise of sectarian discourse in the region since 2003.

• Georges Khalil

  Forum Transregionale Studien
  Berlin
  

• Amir Moosavi

  New York University
  Department of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies
  Graduate School of Arts and Sciences
  New York
  USA