Modern Chaldeans are an Aramaic speaking Catholic Syriac community from northern Iraq, not to be ... more Modern Chaldeans are an Aramaic speaking Catholic Syriac community from northern Iraq, not to be confused with the ancient Mesopotamian civilization of the same name. First identified as \u27Chaldean\u27 by the Catholic Church in the sixteenth century, this misnomer persisted, developing into a distinctive and unique identity. In modern times, the demands of assimilation in the US, together with increased hostility and sectarian violence in Iraq, gave rise to a complex and transnational identity. Faced with Islamophobia in the US, Chaldeans were at pains to emphasize a Christian identity, and appropriated the ancient, pre-Islamic history of their namesake as a means of distinction between them and other immigrants from Arab lands. In this, the first ethnographic history of the modern Chaldeans, Yasmeen Hanoosh explores these ancient-modern inflections in contemporary Chaldean identity discourses, the use of history as a collective commodity for developing and sustaining a positive community image in the present, and the use of language revival and monumental symbolism to reclaim association with Christian and pre-Christian traditions
... To the friendship of all, a considerable debt of gratitude is due. I am thankful to Scattered... more ... To the friendship of all, a considerable debt of gratitude is due. I am thankful to Scattered Crumbs for hav-ing acknowledged some of what the Iraqi people have suffered. YasmeenHanoosh Page 8. Page 9. Scattered Crumbs Page 10. Page 11. ...
I am an Assyrian today, tomorrow, forever, and I am proud of it.-Raphael BidawidChaldean Patriarc... more I am an Assyrian today, tomorrow, forever, and I am proud of it.-Raphael BidawidChaldean Patriarch of Babylonia, 19741Any Chaldean who calls himself Assyrian is a traitor, and any Assyrian who calls himself Chaldean is a traitor.-Emmanuel DallyChaldean Patriarch of Babylonia, 20062Disputes, negotiations, and resolutions regarding the representatively "accurate" appellations for the modern Chaldeans and Assyrians are not confined to the two patriarchs' statements above. They dot the diasporic history of the two Eastern Christian communities throughout the twentieth century and extend well into the present. In the diasporas of Europe and the United States, where most of the communities are now settled, Syriac studies and Assyriology developed as the two authoritative scholarly tradi- tions of writing about Eastern Christianity. The appellation debate has also found its way into various contemporary religious and political discourses at home (present-day Turkey, Iraq, Ira...
An engineer by training, Murtedha Gzar is one of Iraq’s youngest yet most accomplished novelists.... more An engineer by training, Murtedha Gzar is one of Iraq’s youngest yet most accomplished novelists. Gzar’s second novel, Mr. Asghar Akbar, has been described as a magical ethnography of the Shiite city of Najaf as well as an innovation in Arabic narrative modes. Reminiscent of García Márquez’s Macondo, Gzar’s magical version of Najaf disrupts the conventions of narration that dominate Iraqi fiction. Three sisters, Nazma, Wahidiyya, and Maaina, narrate the events of the novel synchronously. They tell the story of their grandfather by rearranging the letters on the lead sorts (pieces of type) that make up the remains of a decayed printing press, the legacy of their grandfather, Asghar Akbar. By type-narrating the story of the horse genealogist who settled in Najaf during the nineteenth century, later to become the city’s most acclaimed family genealogist, they commit typos that affect the development of the plot. In the process, they take the reader on a giddy ride through the political...
The prerogative to narrate the experience of marginal identities, particularly ethno-religious on... more The prerogative to narrate the experience of marginal identities, particularly ethno-religious ones, appeared only in the post-occupation era in Iraqi fiction. Traditionally, secular Iraqi discourse struggled to openly address “sectarianism” due to the prevalent notion that sectarian identities are mutually exclusive and oppositional to national identity. It is distinctly in post-2003 Iraq—more precisely, since the sectarian violence of 2006–2007 began to cut across class, civil society, and urban identities—that works which consciously refuse to depict normative Iraqi identities with their mainstream formulations become noticeable. We witness this development first in the Western diaspora, where Iraqi novels exhibit a fascination with the ethno-religious culture of the Iraqi margins or subalterns and impart a message of pluralistic secularism. This paper investigates the origins of the taboo that proscribed articulations of ethno-religious subjectiviti...
Modern Chaldeans are an Aramaic speaking Catholic Syriac community from northern Iraq, not to be ... more Modern Chaldeans are an Aramaic speaking Catholic Syriac community from northern Iraq, not to be confused with the ancient Mesopotamian civilization of the same name. First identified as \u27Chaldean\u27 by the Catholic Church in the sixteenth century, this misnomer persisted, developing into a distinctive and unique identity. In modern times, the demands of assimilation in the US, together with increased hostility and sectarian violence in Iraq, gave rise to a complex and transnational identity. Faced with Islamophobia in the US, Chaldeans were at pains to emphasize a Christian identity, and appropriated the ancient, pre-Islamic history of their namesake as a means of distinction between them and other immigrants from Arab lands. In this, the first ethnographic history of the modern Chaldeans, Yasmeen Hanoosh explores these ancient-modern inflections in contemporary Chaldean identity discourses, the use of history as a collective commodity for developing and sustaining a positive community image in the present, and the use of language revival and monumental symbolism to reclaim association with Christian and pre-Christian traditions
... To the friendship of all, a considerable debt of gratitude is due. I am thankful to Scattered... more ... To the friendship of all, a considerable debt of gratitude is due. I am thankful to Scattered Crumbs for hav-ing acknowledged some of what the Iraqi people have suffered. YasmeenHanoosh Page 8. Page 9. Scattered Crumbs Page 10. Page 11. ...
I am an Assyrian today, tomorrow, forever, and I am proud of it.-Raphael BidawidChaldean Patriarc... more I am an Assyrian today, tomorrow, forever, and I am proud of it.-Raphael BidawidChaldean Patriarch of Babylonia, 19741Any Chaldean who calls himself Assyrian is a traitor, and any Assyrian who calls himself Chaldean is a traitor.-Emmanuel DallyChaldean Patriarch of Babylonia, 20062Disputes, negotiations, and resolutions regarding the representatively "accurate" appellations for the modern Chaldeans and Assyrians are not confined to the two patriarchs' statements above. They dot the diasporic history of the two Eastern Christian communities throughout the twentieth century and extend well into the present. In the diasporas of Europe and the United States, where most of the communities are now settled, Syriac studies and Assyriology developed as the two authoritative scholarly tradi- tions of writing about Eastern Christianity. The appellation debate has also found its way into various contemporary religious and political discourses at home (present-day Turkey, Iraq, Ira...
An engineer by training, Murtedha Gzar is one of Iraq’s youngest yet most accomplished novelists.... more An engineer by training, Murtedha Gzar is one of Iraq’s youngest yet most accomplished novelists. Gzar’s second novel, Mr. Asghar Akbar, has been described as a magical ethnography of the Shiite city of Najaf as well as an innovation in Arabic narrative modes. Reminiscent of García Márquez’s Macondo, Gzar’s magical version of Najaf disrupts the conventions of narration that dominate Iraqi fiction. Three sisters, Nazma, Wahidiyya, and Maaina, narrate the events of the novel synchronously. They tell the story of their grandfather by rearranging the letters on the lead sorts (pieces of type) that make up the remains of a decayed printing press, the legacy of their grandfather, Asghar Akbar. By type-narrating the story of the horse genealogist who settled in Najaf during the nineteenth century, later to become the city’s most acclaimed family genealogist, they commit typos that affect the development of the plot. In the process, they take the reader on a giddy ride through the political...
The prerogative to narrate the experience of marginal identities, particularly ethno-religious on... more The prerogative to narrate the experience of marginal identities, particularly ethno-religious ones, appeared only in the post-occupation era in Iraqi fiction. Traditionally, secular Iraqi discourse struggled to openly address “sectarianism” due to the prevalent notion that sectarian identities are mutually exclusive and oppositional to national identity. It is distinctly in post-2003 Iraq—more precisely, since the sectarian violence of 2006–2007 began to cut across class, civil society, and urban identities—that works which consciously refuse to depict normative Iraqi identities with their mainstream formulations become noticeable. We witness this development first in the Western diaspora, where Iraqi novels exhibit a fascination with the ethno-religious culture of the Iraqi margins or subalterns and impart a message of pluralistic secularism. This paper investigates the origins of the taboo that proscribed articulations of ethno-religious subjectiviti...
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