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By Yasmeen Hanoosh.When articulating their identity in the United States, IraqiCatholic immigrants and refugees often reference an association between theirmonumental history, the progress of modernity, and the identity label“Chaldean.” These identity benchmarks are often exported back home throughvarious political and social networks of remittance. Among the politicalagendas of this construction of identity is setting Chaldeans apart fromIslamic and Arab discourses associated with Iraqi ethno-religious majorities(Sunni and Shiite Arabs and Kurds) and bringing them conceptually closer to theChristian west, particularly in the diasporic locale of the United States wherethey must contend with Islamophobia. TheChaldeans examines the ancient-modern inflections in contemporary Chaldeanidentity discourses, the uses of history as a collective commodity forsustaining a positive community image in the present, and the uses of languagerevival and monumental symbolism to reclaim association with Christian andpre-Christian traditions. Going beyond the customary definition of theChaldeans as an Aramaic-speaking Catholic minority from the ancient land ofMesopotamia, the book also engages with the modern contexts that go into mutingthe Chaldean, particularity in Iraq, and augmenting this particularity to thewestern diaspora. Yasmeen Hanoosh, The Chaldeans: Politics and Identity in Iraq and the American Diaspora, New York: Bloomsbury, 2019.Although theirnumbers in Iraq have significantly dwindled in the past three decades due tosectarian violence, displacement, and westward migration, the modern Chaldeanscontinue to form the largest Christian group in the Arab country. In theAmerican diaspora, Chaldeans also constitute the largest non-Muslim Iraqigroup. Sizable, Arabic-speaking and boasting a long native history thatpredates the creation of the Iraqi nation-state, the Chaldean community hastraditionally articulated its Mesopotamian belonging and political demands inways that contrast significantly with the demands and articulations of otherChristian minorities from Iraq, most notably the Assyrians. The two EasternChristian groups share common religious and ethnic origins, yet since thebeginning of their gradual conversion to Catholicism in the fifteenth century,the Chaldeans have been diverging geographically and doctrinally from theAssyrians. The linguistic and social distinction was so great by the twentiethcentury that the Assyrians who were displaced by Ottoman massacres and theexigencies of World War I were settled in Iraqi camps as foreign refugees at atime when the Chaldeans occupied nearby villages as Iraqi citizens. The collective memory and identity of the Assyrians,their relationship to the nascent Iraqi state, and their demands for autonomousnationhood have been the subject of several notable studies.[1] A striking questionemerges in this context: why have the concomitant Chaldeans—a larger and moreestablished Eastern church and community—not been the subject of similaracademic scrutiny? The Chaldeansanswers this question and redresses the scholarly gap by turning to thepolitics of religious and ethnic belonging at home and in the diaspora. In theprocess, it provides the first multi-site history of the modern Chaldeans. Understanding how members of the Chaldeancommunities reconstruct and appropriate their Christian and pre-Christianhistory and the strategic utility they designate for its use in the present iskey to understanding the contentious modern history of these communities. Theimportance of the complicit, European- and American-enabled heritage of modernChaldeans and Assyrians is twofold. Significantly, we may be on the verge ofwitnessing the erasure of Christianity in Iraq. Moreover, this heritage has shapedthe articulation of collective Assyrian and Chaldean identities and theconception of self both at home and in the diasporic settlements. To whatextent were the appellations “Chaldean” and “Assyrian” transmitted fromantiquity, revived, invented and reinvented in modern times? This is a pivotal questionwhich the book explores by forging a new inquiry into the intersectionality ofcolonial influence, nation-building, westward migration, and transnationalnetworking. Recentidentity debates within the Chaldean and Assyrian communities and their historicalorigins and political or religious motivations reveal different notions andbeliefs about descent, appropriate identity labels, social definitions andinterpretations of the past. These identity debates have been in conflict witheach other since the earliest recorded usage of the appellation Chaldean inmodern history. Retracing the origins of the appellations “Chaldean,”“Nestorian,” “Aramean,” and “Assyrian” demarcatesthe historical periods or events during which the labels overlapped ordiverged. Understanding their genealogy is pivotal for understanding thechurches and communities that make up the historic Iraqi-Christian presence. Theformative imperialist relations responsible for West-East dichotomies and theintermediary position these native Christian institutions and communities servewithin those divides helps reconstruct this marginalized history that criticallylocates some of the earliest hegemonic dynamics leading to the current identitariancrisis in the Arab world. By highlighting the intervention of institutionalpowers such as the Roman Church and other organized Western Christian missionsto the Middle East, the book marks some of the earliest sectarian politics thataugmented the tensions between ethno-religious majorities and minorities in themodern Middle East.&#160; First-Grade Syriac reading book, 20,000 copies issued by the Iraqi Ministry of Education, 1974.As the first monograph to combinethe study of Chaldeans both in Iraq and the American diaspora, The Chaldeansconsiders the contexts of theoriginary country (Iraq), the American diaspora and the global transnationalsocial networks forged between Chaldeans in these locales, providing a broadaccount of the community’s historically-shifting political and ethnic profile,one that transcends the nation-centric models of belonging and bridges thedivide between native historiographies, migration studies, and diasporastudies. The Chaldeans inhabit and negotiate multiple locales and continuallyreinvent their collective identity in accordance with geopolitical exigencies.By showing this, the book sheds new light on the concepts of minority,modernity, ethnic identity, sectarianism and islamophobia as they relate tocitizenship in Iraq and the United States. Though each bookchapter deals with a distinct historical case and representational mode ofChaldeanness, the themes are each deployed across the chapters and thereby tiedtogether. The first half of the book reconstructs the evolution of the dominantversion of modern Chaldean identity, which heavily depended on external agencyand shifts of governance patterns before, during, and after the Ottoman Period.The second half of the book focuses on the transitions to the identityarticulations and inner power dynamics of communities and individuals who identifythemselves as Chaldeans today. The conclusion brings together this external andinternal agency, underlining the discursive relationship between the two. Theparallel presentation of central and peripheral modes of Chaldeannessaccentuates the power dynamics that animate the U.S.-based Chaldean collectiveand inflect it with the manifold shades of Chaldeanness it exhibits publiclybut negotiates privately today. Twocritical contacts between the local Christians of Mesopotamia and the West tookplace in the nineteenth century: the encounters with the Catholic, Anglican andProtestant Christian missions and the encounter with French and Englisharcheological missions. These missions fostered new associations between theenclaves of Christians among whom they proselytized in Mesopotamia and theancient Chaldeans and Assyrians whom they knew through Biblical accounts andencountered anew through excavation finds. The Catholics had the capacity toinaugurate Chaldeanness in official religious discourses and to fortify theposition of the Chaldeans, as a dhimmi minority, within the IslamicOttoman state. Anglican missions brought in the notion of “discovery,” wherebymountaineer communities of Eastern Christians came to the attention of themissionaries as “primitive” enclaves of “protectors” of “pure” faith andresulted in bestowing the Assyrian title upon the Christian mountaineercommunities. The American Protestant mission reveals how the encounter with theWest resulted in the consolidation of “Biblical Syriac,” self-reliance and theidea of ethnic nationhood. The archeological missions and their groundbreakingdiscoveries of the sites of ancient Assyria and Babylonia situate the formativeyears of the ancient-new Chaldean and Assyrian identities within a parallelcontext to the significant cultural transformations that were taking shape inEuropean societies during the Victorian era. These excavations aroused popular,literary and institutional interest in contemporary Christian Mesopotamiancommunities, among the European publics who construed them as the purportedcontinuations of the ancient empires that were being uncovered and displayed inthe Louvre and the British Museum. Moving into the twentieth century, situating Iraq’sChaldeans within the political context of the nascent nation-state of Iraqreveals how under Hashemite, Communist, and Ba‘thist rule the livelihood of theChaldean communities and their Church depended on the right interplay betweenreligion and politics, with Chaldeannessas an ethnicity falling outsideof the confines of legally-recognized affiliations. For instance, the 1970constitution recognized “the legitimate rights of all minorities in the contextof Iraqi unity,” a statement that enacted the legal recognition of the existenceof five Christian communities (Chaldeans, Assyrians, Syrian Orthodox, Armeniansand Latins) as religious minorities, while the various ethnicitiesthese groups professed elsewhere (in diaspora or during other historicalperiods) were subsumed under the new unifying identity of “Iraqi citizen”.Restrictions on collective identifications cumulatively affected the ways inwhich Chaldeans related to their homeland, reviving and reinforcing theirconceptual affinity with the Christian west. The author chanting next to Patriarch Paul Cheikho in the last first communion he was to attend in Baghdad before his death. St Joseph Church, July 1988. Photo: privateJuxtaposing the Iraqi context to that of SoutheastMichigan, which is home to the largest and most visible concentration ofChaldeans outside of the Middle East, reveals the interplay between Chaldeans’religious markedness in Iraq and their ethnic markedness in the U.S. InMichigan, the Chaldean communities are situated among the oldest and largestpopulation of Arabs in North America, where most nationalities, religions andethnicities from the Middle East are represented. It is estimated that 58 percent of the Middle Eastern population in Michigan is Christian, and that 35 percent of this population is from Iraq. These figures place the Chaldeancommunity as one of the largest sections of the Middle Eastern ethno-religiouspopulation of the state. As a Christian group in Michigan, Chaldeans experiencebelonging to the religious majority, a fact that stands in significant contrastwith the status of the Chaldeans in Iraq and other Middle Eastern transitcountries, where they have chronically been part of the religious minority. Thealternation between religious and ethnic minority status of the same group ofpeople becomes significant as we recount its transnational politicaloutcomes.&#160; Iraq’s largest Christian group and one of Greater Detroit’soldest and largest Iraqi immigrant communities, the Chaldeans have always livedon a political crossroad. The shift from being a religious minority in Iraq tobecoming an ethnic minority in the United States overtime prompted forging newcollective identity narratives and alternative political alignments in the hostcountry. JamesClifford’s rooted-routing dualorientation is well exemplified bythis displaced minority, who, on the one hand, fights for citizenship and equalrights in the place of settlement, and, on the other, continues to live with asense of loyalty to the ancestral land of Iraq, the remaining Chaldeans there,and to a reimagined brand of monumental history. This dual orientation ofUS-based Chaldean transnational activity is complicated further by aconflicting institutional investment in helping Chaldeans leave andsettle in Iraq at the same time. While institutional players of thetwenty-first century call for a “safe haven,”—an administratively autonomousChaldean settlement in the ancestral land—they simultaneously aid theseremaining Chaldeans to leave the ancestral land as expediently as possibleby strategically lobbying on their behalf in the United States. The bookmoves to the present context tosynchronically examine the group as an ethno-religious minority with activemulti-national affiliations. Chaldeans’ transnational identity as a diasporiccommunity in the United States serves as the pivotal theme in the contemporarycontext. A transnational social field perspective reveals the particular socialand conceptual locales where transnational activity is situationallyenacted.&#160; The traditional sites of thefamily, church, and co-ethnic institutional networks emerge in theiroverlapping capacity as transnational social fields.&#160; Through this framework, the U.S.-basedChaldean community are further understood in light of undertakings such as theethnic business, transnational marriages, and religious networking, and also inlight of political projects such as voting in the Iraqi parliamentaryelections, the Nineveh Plain Settlement for Christians in Iraq, and thecampaign to change U.S. immigration policies to provide a more favorable asylumcategory for Christian Iraqi refugees.&#160;These transnational projects underscore the transnational life of theU.S.-based Chaldean community and also stage the emergence of an elite Chaldeanclass, and an influential body of “culture-makers” from that class capable ofmarshaling community resources and networking successfully on the local levelto publicize and carry out large-scale projects on the global level. [1] E.g. John Joseph, The Modern Assyrians of the Middle East: Encounters with Western Christian Mission, Archaeologists, and Colonial Powers (Brill 2000); Adam Becker, Revival and Awakening: American Evangelical Missionaries in Iran and the Origins of Assyrian Nationalism (U of Chicago 2015); Sargon Donabed, Reforging a Forgotten History: Iraq and the Assyrians in the Twentieth Century (Edinburgh UP 2016); Madawi al-Rasheed, Iraqi Assyrian Christians in London: The Construction of Ethnicity (Edwin Mellen 1998). Yasmeen Hanoosh is an Iraqi-born writer, literary translator, and an Associate Professor of Arabic at the Department of Word Languages and Literatures of Portland State University. She holds a PhD (2008) in Arabic Studies from the University of Michigan. She specializes in the literatures and history of ethno-religious minorities in the Middle East, and also in Arabic literary translation. Her English translations of Arabic fiction have appeared in various literary journals and publications, including World Literature Today,&#160;Banipal, and&#160;The Iowa Review. Dr. Hanoosh’s translation&#160;Closing His Eyes&#160;(Abbas), received an NEA translation fellowship in 2010, and her translation of&#160;Scattered Crumbs (al-Ramli) won the Arkansas Arabic Translation Prize in 2002. In 2009/2010, she was a fellow of the research program Europe in the Middle East—the Middle East in Europe (EUME).Citation: Yasmeen Hanoosh, The Chaldeans: Politics and Identity in Iraq and the American Diaspora, in: TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research, 30.04.2019, https://trafo.hypotheses.org/18452. 