Neoliberal contradictions, necrocapitalist nightmares: questions of human agency and free will in Aḥmad Saʿdāwī’s Frankenstein in Baghdad

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article argues that the major fantastic conceit, the Whatsitname (the shisma), in Ahmad Sa'dāwī's novel, Frankenstein in Baghdad, functions as an allegory for the repressed totality of necrocapitalist rationality in the postcolonial global South. Sa'dāwī's novel seemingly privileges postmodern and neoliberal ideologemes such as individual choice that blame the death and violence in Iraq on people's actions and representations. Nonetheless, the novel paradoxically attributes the human condition and the consequences of human actions to invisible structural forms of power and larger-than-life supernatural powers namely, the Whatsitsname as an allegory for necrocapitalism, that ultimately undermine human agency and freedom. I will examine the ways in which this tension is articulated in the novel through the production of the fantasy of a unified nation, homoerotic desire, and class politics. The novel ultimately reflects Iraqi subjects' deeper ontological anxieties about the circulation of their bodies in the necrocapitalist market.