The Radical Instability of the Present

Abstract

This article uses Muhammad Khudayyir's novel-memoir Basrayatha as a loose theoretical framework to explore the ramifications of a not-yet-built infrastructure, tracing how late Ottoman officials, intellectuals, and engineers thought about the not-yet-built Baghdad Railway and the land it was meant to transform. Examining how railway boosters, Ottoman officials, and engineers located the region's “truth” and future in a lost past, the article argues that making this connection depended on cultivating material and discursive absence in the “ruined” present. The article highlights how practical techniques for making place into the kind of “space” where homogenous time could march forward coexisted with grandiose visions of future prosperity inspired both by the distant past and by the present of places like Egypt. In contrast to analyses that have emphasized the uncertainty of past and/or future, this article argues that the present was the problem because it was fundamentally unknowable—and that this very unknowability allowed railway advocates to absent the extended present of ruin from an idea of the truth of Iraq, instead drawing a direct line between past and future prosperity.