Relations Between Cultural Institution and Literature in Baʻthist Iraq: Modern Iraqi Prose Poetry of the 1990s under War, Sanctions, and Dictatorship

Abstract

Since taking power over Iraq in 1968, the Baʻth regime attempted to control the cultural institution and monopolize the fields of culture, arts, and media. In the 1990s, a new generation of writers and prose poets tried to escape from the cultural institution’s domination over cultural production and from submitting to Baʻth teachings, ideas, and ideologies. As this generation of Iraqi poets has not been studied, this research uncovers and analyzes the subject. In this study, I argue that Iraqi prose poets of the 1990s contributed to expressing the poet’s subjectivity in order to confront war, sanctions, and dictatorship and to reject the state’s authority over cultural production and the literary field. This study focuses on Iraqi prose poems of the 1990s, the phenomenon of photocopy books, and the poet’s role in promoting aesthetic, artistic, social, and cognitive values and changing the traditional structure of the writer’s relationship to the cultural institution. This study also addresses three essential points related to the literary field, the cultural institution and transformations of genre and form: First, this study addresses works from the 1990s that brought about a new kind of awareness that combined rejection and confrontation based on a new understanding of the writer’s relationship to the cultural institution and the artistic and aesthetic characteristics of poetry. Second, this study addresses the development and transformation of literary genre and form to reflect developments and transformations both aesthetically and technically and to reflect the evolution and transformation of new perceptions and discourses in culture, society, and politics. Last, this study addresses how literature became a political tool of the Baʻth Party and the state to serve its ideology and to dictate internal and external political orientations.