The Global Migration Context and the Contemporary Iraqi Novel

Abstract

This chapter discusses narratives of migration experiences articulating the migrant subjectivity as depicted in three contemporary Iraqi novels of migration published after 2003: Shākir al-Anbārī’s Namiq Spencer and I, ʿAlī Badr’s The Musician of the Clouds, and Janān Jāsim Ḥallāwī’s Scant Air. It investigates and traces the changes affecting the aesthetics and politics of representing migration from a postcolonial modernist perspective to a global context characterized by perennial wars, border violence, and xenophobia. The analysis and discussion of these novels demonstrate the shift from the postcolonial to the global in the main areas of interest, including the trope of cultural encounter and the idea of the return, themes established and developed in iconic Arabic migration novels of the twentieth century such as Season of Migration to the North. Today, migration experiences of Iraqis are triggered by the trauma of the continuing violence at home and shaped by the politics of increased border control, rejection, and disillusion.