Introduction to the Dissertation

Waking the Jinn: Cultural Memories, Writings, and Assemblages

The Project

My dissertation explores how situating assemblage as a key writing concept in overlooked cultural matrices extends our understanding of that term, as well as writing more generally. Working within a cultural rhetorics framework, this project examines how particular writing spaces make specific contributions to rhetoric and composition and technical communication studies’ disciplinary understandings of assembled/ing writing (that is, the product and/or process of borrowing, repurposing, and transforming existing textual materials to compose new texts). More specifically, I use qualitative and quantitative coding to examine how assemblage and writing circulate shared memories within and across one of the first Iraqi Jewish cemeteries in New York. Established four years after the Farhud, a series of violent anti-Jewish pogroms that took place in Baghdad, Iraq, in 1941, the cemetery is an important cultural writing space for members of my community, many of whom fled their ancestral homeland in the 1950s and 60s. Synthesizing disciplinary definitions of assemblage as a writing metaphor alongside stories about jinn (genies) and key elements of Jewish rhetorics, I aim to offer another example of assemblage located outside of a strictly disciplinary context and informed by key tenets of cultural rhetorics.

Primary Research Questions

  • What does the cemetery as a specific writing space contribute to our disciplinary understanding of assemblage? How does cultural rhetorics expand our understanding of writing theories and practices, as well as where they emerge?

  • How do writing theories and practices emerge from and respond to lived experiences? What is the significance of overlooking the experiences of particular communities or grounding writing theories and practices in one set of experiences?

  • How does writing and documentation design facilitate community by materializing and circulating public and private memories, and how do users rhetorically embody these texts?

  • How does writing mark readers as members of insider and outsider groups in the process of circulating and obscuring information, and to what effect?

Ethical Commitments

א. To the Discipline

It is my ultimate hope that this work will serve as a needed reminder that cultural rhetorics and communities have long understood the connections between culture, writing, and memory. By positioning disaporic Jewish traditions as rigorous sources of knowledge, I also aim to model a way for students from marginalized communities to see themselves in their work so that they do not, like my younger self, believe their cultural experiences and knowledge to be irrelevant to scholarly research.

ב. To the Iraqi Jewish Community

Iraqi Jewish community leaders in New York have claimed at various times that the community is “facing extinction” (“Jews of Iraq, A Will to Survive”). In 2005, the president of the Babylonian Jewish Center said in a meeting that,

Seven years ago, when we established our synagogue, we managed to unite the Iraqi [Jewish] Community in a way which has not been possible in a very long time. And this is what we are most proud of. We have been successful in pushing back our own extinction for at least 20-30 years. We achieved our initial goal. Now we have to help our children and the future generation to achieve theirs. (“BJC Expansion Project”; emphasis mine)

I hope that by citing sources from and about my community as well as adding to a growing list of resources documenting different aspects of contemporary Iraqi Jewish life, this manuscript will contribute in some small way to the preservation or at least circulation of Iraqi Jewish culture.