A compelling study of the trajectories of development, human and territorial, Sara Pursley's Familiar Futures approaches the history of Iraq through the unravelling of conflicting temporalities to explore the articulations of selfhood and the production of subjectivity after World War I. Pursley examines the conceptualization of time and its immediate and residual impact on the experiences of subjects and their articulation of anticipated futures. These articulations differed as the temporalities that singled them converged, fissured, and reproduced in a perpetually familiar future. Iraq's plural futures are familiar because they were produced within colonial temporalities that positioned Iraqis as having been liberated from an oppressed past, were living in a developing present, and must strive towards a ‘developed’ future. Pursley gives us a kaleidoscopic narrative to explore the configuration of time in relation to the articulation of sex differences, subjectivity, and the on-going pursuit of modernity. In seven chapters and an epilogue, Familiar Futures explores and contextualizes the genealogy of the development of sexual difference to explore modernization in relation to Iraq's political history.
Beginning with the British occupation Pursley positions colonial-linearity as one of the first temporal reference points of a ‘familiar future’ for mandated Iraq. This familiarity is beneficial to British and Iraqi officials as both groups traced and measured the development of Iraq based on a reconceptualised past and present that was defined along bio-psychological discourse of human maturation, i.e. ‘developing’ and ‘developed’. To the British, Iraq was in a state of arrested-development: a concept noted in the limitation and even thwarting of education projects, but also in the mobilization of violence to address the ‘primitive’ subject. To Iraqi statesmen; however, Iraq required state-mandated social reforms to galvanize development and aid in the on-going quest towards a ‘developed’ future. While their conceptualization differed, British colonialists and Iraqi officials mobilized the ‘development’ trope for ultimately the same purpose: to design specific Iraqi subjects. As such, these temporalities rendered its subjects as perpetually ‘trapped in the future’ (12).
In operation “control without occupation,” the first of 130 air bombing raids that occurred between 1921 to 1932, the British used Iraq as a target practice to demonstrated the latest technological modes of warfare and subjugation. To justify the disturbing destruction and the ‘bulk number’ of civilian casualties cause by the air bombing raids, Pursley notes that the British attributed the killing of women and children ‘not to the difficulty of discerning targets… but rather to the underdevelopment of sexual difference in Iraqi society’ (44). Therefore, the use of airplanes to carpet bomb Iraqi towns, further distinguished the British from the nameless, and even sexless, scorched Iraqi bodies who were obliterated in their own limited present by the forces of the future.
To Iraqi statesmen, the linearity of colonial time offered a beneficial structure for a revolutionary future. The opportunity to produce healthy, and suitable citizens capable of obtaining sovereignty was also conceptualized along the development trope Pursley offers. Sex differentiation, Pursley points out, was a frequent tactic mobilized for the production of ideal subjects. American segregationists modelled their present as a possible future for Iraq's education reform. By the 1930s, a team of US educationists advocated for the “gendering of the Iraqi school experience,” which yielded varying results. When a ‘generation of educated Iraqi women who were resistant to marriage, domesticity, and motherhood,’ mobilized against gendered curricula, the Ministry of Education responded by expanding ‘home economics requirements at the secondary and higher education levels’ (104). However, some Iraqi statesmen opposed the American segregationist model with its sex- and geographical- based segregation by linking such projects to colonialism. Nonetheless, these models were viewed as beneficial by opposing camps who considered education reform as an opportunity for the production of ideal Iraqi women. Iraq's educational development emerged from a colonial-linearity that aimed to yield specific subjects: its opposition evidently indicates that Iraqi women ‘believed they could better serve the nation's interest by overthrowing the existing political order than by learning how to efficiently manage a household’ (105).
The state of scholarship on Iraq is such that very few studies have consulted the country's rich archives or conducted research within its borders. Of course, Pursley anticipated this otherwise minor critique by noting that the ‘very limited state of scholarship on Iraq means that many available sources remain unexamined and many of those that have been examined remain open to alternate readings’ (28). Familiar Future will interest scholars engaged with economic development projects, gender studies, postcolonial studies, national imaginaries, and the manufacturing of subjectivity. In a Koselleckian tradition, Pursley not only offers us a tantalizing critique of modernization and modernity, but also challenges us to rethink the boundaries between history, historiography and theory: an opportunity to reflect on the positioning of the history of Iraq within interdisciplinary theories.
