The Stage of Adolescence: Anticolonial Time, Youth Insurgency, and the Marriage Crisis in Hashimite Iraq

Abstract

Modern understandings of childhood and adolescence, as a number of scholars have shown, are intertwined with histories of European colonialism. There has been less focus on how these categories shaped and were shaped by global processes of decolonization. This article contributes to such an inquiry, by exploring how adolescence was mobilized in Iraq from its 1921 foundation under British Mandate rule to the 1958 anticolonial revolution that toppled the British-backed Hashimite monarchy. The historically peculiar mandate system of semicolonial rule established by the League of Nations after World War I was itself based on certain parallels between adolescence as a stage of psychological and national life posited by European and American social scientists at the turn of the century. Both colonial and anticolonial discourses on adolescence in Hashimite Iraq were thus inevitably riven with the tensions, homologies, and incommensurabilities of this temporal-spatial category, which was simultaneously normalizing and constitutively conflictual. Leyla Neyzi writes of nationalist discourses in republican Turkey: “The notion that educated youth would take the lead in the construction of modern nation-states emerged out of Enlightenment ideas about progress.” I do not contest this assertion as such, and will make a similar point below in the context of Hashimite Iraq. Yet one risk of this kind of analysis is its potential for constructing “youth” as a homogeneous attribute of the “modern,” emerging in eighteenth-century Europe before making its plodding, predictable way across time and space until it finally conquers the globe in more or less the same shape it was in when it departed Europe a century or two previously. In failing to break with the spatialization of time on which Westernization/ modernization paradigms are based, this narrative would ignore the eventfulness of lived global time, starting with the eighteenth-century colonial relations through which Enlightenment ideas about progress emerged. In the twentieth century, changing conceptions of childhood, adolescence, and youth were not repetitions of the Enlightenment; they were effects first of local and global struggles over colonialism and decolonization and then of the dawning of the Cold War “age of development” after 1945. I am not arguing