The Iraqi Baʿth state’s Anfāl operations (1987-1991) is one of the twentieth century’s ultimate acts of destruction of the possibility of being human. It remains the first and only crime of state in the Middle East to be tried under the 1948 UN Genocide Convention, the 1950 Nuremberg Principles, and the 1969 Iraqi Penal Code and to be recognized as genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes in Baghdad between 2006 and 2007. Being Human: Political Modernity and Hospitality in Kurdistan-Iraq offers an unprecedented pathway to the study of political violence. It is a sweeping work of anthropological hospitality, returning to the Anfāl operations as the violence of political modernity only to turn to the human survivors’ hospitality and acts of translation—testimonial narratives, law, politics, archive, poetry, artworks, museums, memorials, symbolic cemeteries, and infinite pursuit of justice in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. Being Human gathers together social sciences, humanities, and the arts to understand modernity's violence and its living on.   

This book focuses on the ethical, aesthetic, and scholarly dimensions of how genocide-related works of art, documentary films, poetry and performance, museums and monuments, music, dance, image, law, memory narratives, spiritual bonds, and ruins are translated and take place as translations of acts of genocide. It shows how genocide-related modes of representation are acts of translation which displace and produce memory and acts of remembrance of genocidal violence as inheritance of the past in a future present. Thus, the possibility of representation is examined in light of what remains in the aftermath where the past and the future are inseparable companions and we find the idea of the untranslatability in acts of genocide. By opening up both the past and lived experiences of genocidal violence as and through multiple acts of translation, this volume marks a heterogeneous turn towards the future, and one which will be of interest to all scholars and students of memory and genocide studies, transitional justice, sociology, psychology, and social anthropology.

The Iraqi Baʿth state’s Anfāl operations (1987-1991) is one of the twentieth century’s ultimate acts of destruction of the possibility of being human. It remains the first and only crime of state in the Middle East to be tried under the 1948 UN Genocide Convention, the 1950 Nuremberg Principles, and the 1969 Iraqi Penal Code and to be recognized as genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes in Baghdad between 2006 and 2007. Being Human: Political Modernity and Hospitality in Kurdistan-Iraq offers an unprecedented pathway to the study of political violence. It is a sweeping work of anthropological hospitality, returning to the Anfāl operations as the violence of political modernity only to turn to the human survivors’ hospitality and acts of translation—testimonial narratives, law, politics, archive, poetry, artworks, museums, memorials, symbolic cemeteries, and infinite pursuit of justice in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. Being Human gathers together social sciences, humanities, and the arts to understand modernity's violence and its living on.   

This book focuses on the ethical, aesthetic, and scholarly dimensions of how genocide-related works of art, documentary films, poetry and performance, museums and monuments, music, dance, image, law, memory narratives, spiritual bonds, and ruins are translated and take place as translations of acts of genocide. It shows how genocide-related modes of representation are acts of translation which displace and produce memory and acts of remembrance of genocidal violence as inheritance of the past in a future present. Thus, the possibility of representation is examined in light of what remains in the aftermath where the past and the future are inseparable companions and we find the idea of the untranslatability in acts of genocide. By opening up both the past and lived experiences of genocidal violence as and through multiple acts of translation, this volume marks a heterogeneous turn towards the future, and one which will be of interest to all scholars and students of memory and genocide studies, transitional justice, sociology, psychology, and social anthropology.