Book talk - Being Human: Political Modernity and Hospitality in Kurdistan-Iraq

The Iraqi Baʿth state’s Anfāl operations (1987-1991) is one of the twentieth century’s ultimate acts of destruction of the possibility of being human. It remains the first and only crime of state in the Middle East to be tried under the 1948 UN Genocide Convention, the 1950 Nuremberg Principles, and the 1969 Iraqi Penal Code and to be recognized as genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes in Baghdad between 2006 and 2007. In his new book, Dr Fazil Moradi offers an unprecedented pathway to the study of political violence.

In this book, Being Human: Political Modernity and Hospitality in Kurdistan-Iraq, violence is always at play as hosting the unexpected visitor, that is, whatever comes with the narration of the memories of violence turns the listener’s body into a home of violence. Filling the book are survivor witnesses who take space with the freedom to narrate memories and assess political violence critically, but also lives, situations, artworks, archives, memorials, cemeteries, museums, aesthetic exhibitions, and ecological ruins that are joined in unconditional silence. On several occasions the act of facing each other, shaking hands, and making eye contact becomes the only possible exchange of hospitality, as when the human survivor refuses to or cannot speak or no longer holds their memories of irreversible loss. It is a book of anthropological hospitality that shows how in the afterlives of the violence of political modernity, being human is tied up with ruins and dust, homelessness and loneliness, with lasting bodily, social, and psychic injury caused by the modern/ity’s chemical warfare agents, with memories of sexual violence, rape, massacre, and irredeemable losses, with infinite mourning and survival, and with an everyday call for ethical and legal justice and rights.

Find out more and purchase the book via this link. 

Speakers

Presenter - Fazil Moradi is a visiting associate professor in the Faculty of Humanities, Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study, University of Johannesburg; an associate researcher at the Institute for Social Anthropology, Austrian Academy of Sciences; and an affiliated scholar at the Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Crimes against Humanity at the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies, Graduate Center—CUNY. 

Moderator - Professor Bahar Baser, Durham University 

Discussants -

• Dr Ibrahim Sadiq, Soran University 

• Dr Stephen McLoughlin, Coventry University

Registration will close two hours before the event begins.