Iraq’s archive fever

Abstract

This article contemplates Iraq’s archive fever, a repositioning of Freud’s death-drive as prescribed by Jacques Derrida, to contextualize the feverish obsession with Iraq’s archives. It promotes a grammar to describe the ways in which western institutions have consistently legitimized the dismembering of Iraqi archives in order to oversee and profit from digitization projects. This process is an orientalist pursuit to command Iraq’s history through the restructuration and transplantation of archives along with the exclusion of Iraqis from accessing its new form. This critique begins by describing the etymologies of archive fever, then shifts to highlight the discourse on the transposing of Iraq’s archive and concludes with an examination of masters and doctoral research to study how graduate students in Iraq overcame archival plunder and dislocation. The prevalence of source material in Iraq constitutes the building blocks of Iraqi graduate students’ theses and dissertations, underscoring the fallacies of digitizing plundered records.