Worlding a peripheral museum, evental time in the Middle East, and the fabulation of the people-to-come: an analysis of Hannah Khalil’s A Museum in Baghdad

Abstract

Museum-building as a violent act of world-making constitutes the allegorical crux of Hannah Khalil’s A Museum in Baghdad. This article, accordingly, explores the aesthetic, ethical, ontological, and political aspects of the treatment of nationhood, identity, and time/history in Khalil’s work by critically engaging with various theories of time/temporality elaborated by some of the prominent thinkers working on the philosophy of event—including Badiou, Deleuze, and Benjamin. Furthermore, predicating part of its argument on Cheah’s postulation of temporality as the very dimension, means, and mode through which a counter-hegemonic mode of world literature can be practiced, the essay offers a close reading of the play to demonstrate how its decolonial politics and ethics reside in its evental treatment of time, the evental relationship it establishes between time and space, and an evental understanding of “contemporaneity” (and the present moment) attested by the dynamics of relationship it evokes between the past, present, and future. As such, this essay establishes how A Museum in Baghdad can be characterized as a work of “world literature” by revealing the play’s dialectical focalization of two pivotal points: First, the uneven relational dynamics between the imperial-colonial core of the Global North and Iraq as a peripheral site of resource extraction and as a zone of sacrifice. And second, the aporetic imbrications of the longue durée and cyclical dynamics of phallogocentric, (neo-)colonial, and post-colonial acts of dispossession, extractivism, and subjection/subalternization—inflicted both by the national state and colonial powers—along with the traumatic memories and effects they have instigated.

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