Based on interviews conducted in Amman and Damascus in 2008-2009 with a number of self-defined Iraqi “intellectuals” (muthaqqafin) who spent their formative years at the University of Baghdad in the 1990s, this paper explores their participation, within alternative intellectual circles, to the production of a highly conceptual counter-hegemonic discourse that did not translate, at the time, into any direct form of political opposition. They had to defer the time, space and realm of their involvement with Iraqi politics. In the post-Ba'thist era these former “alternative intellectuals” are engaged in a transnational field of Iraqi civil society activism from safe bases in Amman or Damascus.
The conditions and practicalities of their current involvement and the the link that they consciously make between their past experiences and their present praxes engages with issues of memory and identity in an era of diaspora and national reconstruction. |
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