The last three decades in Iraqi history can be summarized in these words: dictatorship, war and occupation. After the fall of Saddam's regime Iraqi novelists are not only writing about the occupation and current disintegration of Iraq but are also revisiting previous wars that devastated their lives. Ikram Masmoudi examines how recent Iraqi fiction about war depicts the Iraqi subject in its relation to war, coercion, subjugation and occupation. The theoretical concept of the Homo Sacer, the killable, as defined by Giorgio Agamben, is used to explore the lives and the experiences of different...

Exploring the ways in which writers utilize the spaces of the city - joining the factual with the imaginary - this book shows how idiosyncratic perceptions of Beirut are produced, generating an infinite number of Beiruts.
The city emerges as interactive, dynamic and historical, a place that is created from the streets, buildings, and monuments as well as through performance and social interaction. By referring to factual places in Beirut, the novels produce a strong reality effect through a mimetic mode of expression. Simultaneously, these texts reveal that Beirut is an unstable locale...