Writing Urban Warfare

Abstract

This chapter explores how urban warfare has been depicted by contemporary Iraqi fiction in the wake of the 2003 Iraq War. Through close readings of Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad and Shahad Al Rawi’s The Baghdad Clock, it argues that the perspectives of pedestrians in these novels work to expose and disrupt the imaginative geographies imposed on post-2003 Baghdad by Coalition military forces. Bringing pedestrian perspectives on urban environments as conceptualized by Michel de Certeau into conversation with more recent work in human geography by those such as Derek Gregory and Stephen Graham, the chapter demonstrates that the pedestrian remains an integral figure in literary urban studies with unique potential to expose the militarization of everyday life through evolving forms of warfare.