Postcolonial Islamic feminist Nadia Jones-Gailani, in her book Transnational Identity and Memory Making in the Lives of Iraqi Women in Diaspora, connects history, migration studies, and feminist work on Iraqi women’s memory-making and identity politics through oral history in crafting a research methodology for this ethnographic study. Jones-Gailani analyses women's understanding of their identities through their emotional attachment to and alienation from Iraq, applying a self-reflexive personal account and interdisciplinary perspective. She connects the voices of women in history-making and conceptualizes sensorial metaphors as a form of feminist expression by which Iraqi-diaspora women understand the idea of home and construct multiple ways of being Iraqi. This book contributes to appreciating feminist histories that mainstream history has overlooked, and it genders the migration experience. Moreover, it challenges the male-centered and hegemonic approach of historical records and the dynamics of power structures.
In the process of creating this self-reflexive ethnography, Jones-Gailani unfolded her researcher identity and allowed it to shift in response to changing temporalities and topographies. She criticizes the ethnic absolutism that sees Muslim women as homogenous groups, which overlooks the role of different positionalities and identities and thus emphasizes the sameness of Muslim women in North America. Ethnic absolutism creates an imaginary link among different groups based on a presumed commonality and thereby marginalizes racial and ethnic minorities. In the book, Jones-Gailani shows how religious and ethnic identities are variable for women in the Iraqi diaspora, where women hold differing ideologies of identity. She argues that the North American academy applies a limiting multicultural paradigm to Muslim women that does not help to bring out the differences in this population and that reinforces the marginalization of other cultures (15).
Transnational Identity and Memory Making in the Lives of Iraqi Women in Diaspora criticizes the way Western discourse had shaped a unified idea of third-world Muslim women who are united through an imagined sisterhood and ummah identity, focusing on valuing the headscarf as a cultural representation and sign of solidarity. In contrast, Jones-Gailani reorients the gender role of Muslim women in the diaspora, showing that wearing the headscarf does not reflect a shared experience across time and space. In the diaspora, the experience of Muslim women is different from their lives in their home countries, which empowers them with new modes of freedom and agency. This study explores the effect of the local on global processes, showing how Iraqi women negotiate a multilayered identity in a new context of dispersion in the diaspora.
Transnational Identity and Memory Making contains five chapters that detail the author’s ethnographic method and reflect on how being Iraqi means different things to different women, revealed in their heterogeneous narratives. The first chapter focuses on the Ba'ath socialist narrative that promotes a century-long process of Sunnification and the myth of a common origin, showing how the Ba'ath regime rewrote the women's movement in Iraq, exploited political cleavages among women activists, and undermined many grassroots women's movements. Referring to narratives by two Iraqi women, Leyla and Zeynab, who believe the Shia in Iraq are outsiders who are taking their country from them, Jones-Gailani shows that history-making by women is not neutral or non-political. She argues that narratives of personal experience are not separated from political manipulations and oppression of ethnic minorities.
Chapter 2 connects different narratives of Shia, Chaldean, and Kurdish women. Here the book provides a counternarrative of simultaneous inclusion and exclusion, remembering and forgetting. She shows how narrating expresses the speaker's religious, political, and ethnic identity. Different narrators can tell the same story differently based on their identity and political orientation. This chapter promotes the narratives of non-Sunni, Iraqi migrant women to give them a voice in the face of the meta-Sunni myth of common origin, and in this way performs an act of resistance against the hegemony of Ba'ath nationalism. Non-Sunni Iraqi women claim they are authentic Iraqi, even though they were not in Iraq from its beginning. The author’s aim seems to be one of providing an alternative narrative to stand against statist collective memory. Jones-Gailani alerts the reader that this counternarrative does not arise out of political innocence, but constitutes, instead, a strategic interactive social and cultural practice.
Chapter 3 reflects on the methodological concerns of feminist transnational work. This chapter discusses the author’s position as an ethnographer and how, over time, different experiences have shifted and influenced her understanding. Finally, she offers an honest self-presentation as a feminist postcolonial researcher who is vulnerable and unsatisfied, much like the women she interviewed. Here she embraces vulnerability, and her better understanding of vulnerability; she reflects on her informants, preserving their anonymity, thereby showing her sincere concern for the safety of the people she studied.
In chapter 4, Jones-Gailani reconceptualizes women's understanding of memory through foodways, a powerful arena for discussing the home, the past, and Iraqi identity. Cooking and cookbooks in the diaspora offer comfort and nostalgia for home. She connects history-making with food-making, showing how Iraqi women in the diaspora share their knowledge and memories by sharing food with North Americans. Like the counternarrative of minority Iraqi women, the food they prepare can also challenge the power structure through acts of remembering. The author sees preparing Iraqi food in the diaspora as a form of resistance.
The fifth chapter explores the generational shift in regard to Iraqi women's modesty and marriage, critically examining how traditional values about women's bodies and modesty create tension in the diasporic context for second- and third-generation women who do not feel the same connection with their tradition as the previous generation. Outside of the family, women who carry traditional Islamic values of modesty and wear headscarves to represent their values and identity face a different, external pressure. In this space of tension, wearing a headscarf can be seen as a feminist act. At last, Jones-Gailani analyses the challenges Iraqi Muslim women face in negotiating two different worlds and worldviews.
In conclusion, Transnational Identity and Memory Making in the Lives of Iraqi Women in Diaspora richly examines political and public discourses on transnationalism, women's narratives of social and political identity, and their take on the shaping of identity in different geographic settings and contexts of political resistance. It locates women's voices in the history of Iraqi migration, emphasizing the role of oral history in creating alternative histories of ethnicity, race, and sexuality. Finally, it offers a grassroots model for studying the migration of Muslim women in the diaspora, a model that could prove to be influential for future scholarship in migration studies.
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[Review length: 1083 words • Review posted on December 04, 2023]