Chaldeans

Yasmeen Hanoosh is associate professor of Arabic Studies at Portland State University, USA. She received her PhD. in Arabic Language and Literature from The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (2008). She has contributed chapters to several peer-reviewed edited collections and her research on Iraqi literature and Arabic literary translation has been published in Arab Studies Journal and the Journal of Arabic Literature.

The Chaldeans offers a superbly textured account of the shifting interplay of religious, racial, national, and ethnic designations and self-designations of community identity, moving compellingly from the late Ottoman era to the present. Addressing the modern revival of ancient Mesopotamian civilization, Hanoosh develops a densely complex narrative of the fraught ideological politics swirling around “Iraq’s Christians," especially as articulated vis-à-vis Arabness and Islam. In this astute analysis of the efforts to stabilize definitions of belonging, the book insightfully captures the tensions and paradoxes embedded not simply in regional but rather in transnational processes of minoritization.

• DedicationFiguresAbbreviations Acknowledgements Introduction 1. On the Politics of Appellation: The Making of the Modern Chaldeans 272. Archaeology, Philology and Mission: The Modern History of Ancient Chaldean History3. Arab/Chaldean/Assyrian Distinctions: Political Survival in the New Nation State of Iraq 4. From Religious to Ethnic Minority: Between Iraq and America in the Twentieth Century5. Family, Marriage and Ethnic Economy: A Transnational Social Field Perspective6. The Modern Chaldean Church: Global Circuits of Ecclesial Power 7. A Safe Haven Dream: Home between Detroit and the Nineveh Plain8. Chaldeanness: The Official Narrative and its Changing Displays Epilogue: Centre and Peripheries of Chaldeanness in the Twilight of the Nation State Appendix: Appellations and LanguagesNotesWorks CitedIndex