Home Memory, National Identity Formation, and (Neo)Colonialism in Hannah Khalil’s A Museum in Baghdad
Article
Licensed
Unlicensed Requires Authentication

Memory, National Identity Formation, and (Neo)Colonialism in Hannah Khalil’s A Museum in Baghdad

  • Majeed Mohammed Midhin EMAIL logo , David Clare and Noor Aziz Abed
Published/Copyright: October 23, 2021

Abstract

According to Ernest Renan, a nation is formed by its collective memory; it is a country’s shared experiences which enable it to become (in Benedict Anderson’s much later coinage) an “imagined community.” Building on these ideas, commentators such as Kavita Singh and Lianne McTavish et al. have shown how museums play a key role in helping nations to form an identity and understand their past. However, as these critics and those from other disciplines (including postcolonial studies) have noted, museums can also reflect and reinforce the unequal power dynamics between nations which result from colonialism and neocolonialism. This article demonstrates that these ideas are directly relevant to the 2019 play A Museum in Baghdad by the Palestinian-Irish playwright Hannah Khalil. This play is set in the Museum of Iraq in three different time periods: “Then (1926), Now (2006), and Later” (an unspecified future date) (3). Khalil uses specific characters – most notably, Gertrude Bell during the “Then” sections, the Iraqi archaeologists Ghalia and Layla during the “Now” sections, and a “timeless” character called Nasiya who appears across the time periods – to question the degree to which the museum is perpetuating Western views of Iraq.

Works Cited

Al-Shehabi, Omar Hesham. “Contested Modernity: Divided Rule and the Birth of Sectarianism, Nationalism, and Absolutism in Bahrain.” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 44.3 (2017): 333–355. Print.10.1080/13530194.2016.1185937Search in Google Scholar

Alberti, Samuel J.M.M. “Objects and the Museum.” Isis 96.4 (2005): 559–571. Print.10.1086/498593Search in Google Scholar

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1983. Print.Search in Google Scholar

Anon. “Q&A: Hannah Khalil Answers Questions about Her New Play A Museum in Baghdad.” Radical Mischief 11 (2019): 12–15. Print.Search in Google Scholar

Beckett, Samuel. Happy Days. The Selected Works of Samuel Beckett: Volume 2. New York: Grove, 2010. 269–304. Print.Search in Google Scholar

–-. Waiting for Godot. The Selected Works of Samuel Beckett: Volume 3. New York: Grove, 2010. 1–85. Print.Search in Google Scholar

Bhabha, Homi K. “DissemiNation.” Nation and Narration. Ed. Homi K. Bhabha. London: Routledge, 1990. 291–322. Print. Search in Google Scholar

Doyle, Mark. Communal Violence in the British Empire: Disturbing the Pax. London: Bloomsbury, 2016. Print.Search in Google Scholar

During, Simon. “Literature: Nationalism’s Other? The Case for Revision.” Nation and Narration. Ed. Homi K. Bhabha. London: Routledge, 1990. 138–153. Print.Search in Google Scholar

Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. Trans. Constance Farrington. London: Paladin, 1963. Print.Search in Google Scholar

Gill, Joe. “Shakespeare, Museums and Baghdad: ‘I’ll Write What I Wanna Write.’” Middle East Eye, 18 Sept. 2019. Web. 13 Aug. 2020. <https://www.middleeasteye.net/discover/rsc-museum-baghdad-hannah-khalil>.Search in Google Scholar

Hazran, Yusri. “The Origins of Sectarianism in Egypt and the Fertile Crescent.” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 46.1 (2019): 29–49. Print.10.1080/13530194.2017.1370998Search in Google Scholar

Huyssen, Andreas. Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia. New York: Routledge, 1995. Print.Search in Google Scholar

Inoue, Reiko. “The Mound of Sand in Happy Days: Tomb to Womb.” The Harp 14 (1999): 60–69. Print.Search in Google Scholar

Khalil, Hannah. “When I Tell People I’m Irish Palestinian It Always Raises a Few Eyebrows.” The Irish Times, 3 May 2018. Web. 13 Aug. 2020. <https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/when-i-tell-people-i-m-irish-palestinian-it-always-raises-a-few-eyebrows-1.3483126>.Search in Google Scholar

–-. “First Person: Hannah Khalil on Museum as Metaphor in Her New Play for the RSC.” The Arts Desk, 22 Oct. 2019. Web. 13 Aug. 2020. <https://theartsdesk.com/theatre/first-person-hannah-khalil-museum-metaphor-her-new-play-rsc>.Search in Google Scholar

–-. A Museum in Baghdad. London: Bloomsbury, 2019. Print.Search in Google Scholar

Knowlson, James. “What Lies beneath Samuel Beckett’s Half-buried Woman in Happy Days?” The Guardian, 21 Jan. 2014. Web. 31 Oct. 2020. <https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2014/jan/21/samuel-beckett-happy-days-half-buried-woman>.Search in Google Scholar

Kreps, Christina. Museums and Anthropology in the Age of Engagement. New York: Routledge, 2020. Print.10.4324/9780203702208Search in Google Scholar

Maasri, Zeina. Cosmopolitan Radicalism: The Visual Politics of Beirut’s Global Sixties. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2020. Print.10.1017/9781108767736Search in Google Scholar

McQueen, Ann Marie. “A Museum in Baghdad: The New Theatre Production Explores the Story of Gertrude Bell.” The National, 3 Oct. 2019. Web. 13 Aug. 2020. <https://www.thenational.ae/arts-culture/on-stage/a-museum-in-baghdad-the-new-theatre-production-explores-the-story-of-gertrude-bell-1.918584>.Search in Google Scholar

McTavish, Lianne. Defining the Modern Museum: A Case Study of the Challenges of Exchange. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2013. Print.10.3138/9781442660540Search in Google Scholar

–-, et al. “Critical Museum Theory/Museum Studies in Canada: A Conversation.” Acadiensis 46.2 (2017): 223–241. Print.10.1353/aca.2017.0029Search in Google Scholar

Pollock, David C., and Ruth E. Van Reken. The Third Culture Kid Experience: Growing Up among Worlds. Yarmouth: Intercultural Press, 1999. Print.Search in Google Scholar

Renan, Ernest. Essais de morale et de critique. Paris: Calmann Lévy, 1859. Print.Search in Google Scholar

–-. “What is a Nation?” Nation and Narration. Ed. Homi K. Bhabha. London: Routledge, 1990. 8–22. Print.Search in Google Scholar

Singh, Kavita. “The Museum Is National.” India International Centre Quarterly 29.3–4 (2002–2003): 176–196. Print.Search in Google Scholar

Sodaro, Amy. “Memory, History, and Nostalgia in Berlin’s Jewish Museum.” International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 26.1 (2013): 77–91. Print.10.1007/s10767-013-9139-6Search in Google Scholar

Tarzi, Nazli. “Baghdad Comes to Stratford in RSC-commissioned Play.” Middle East Monitor, 10 Sept. 2019. Web. 13 Aug. 2020. <https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20190910-baghdad-comes-to-stratford-in-rsc-commissioned-play/>.Search in Google Scholar

Walliss, Jillian. “Exhibiting Environmental History: The Challenge of Representing Nation.” Environment and History 18.3 (2012): 423–445. Print. 10.3197/096734012X13400389809418Search in Google Scholar

Webster, Annie. “A Museum in Baghdad, and an Interview with Its Author, Hannah Khalil.” Arts Cabinet, 2 June 2020. Web. 13 Aug. 2020. <https://www.artscabinet.org/repository/a-museum-in-baghdad-and-an-interview-with-its-author-hannah-khalil>.Search in Google Scholar

Published Online: 2021-10-23
Published in Print: 2021-11-02

© 2021 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Frontmatter
  2. Frontmatter
  3. “It Can’t Happen Here”: Howard Brenton’s The Churchill Play
  4. “My Skin Is Not Me”: The Transformations of William Shakespeare’s Othello in Ann-Marie MacDonald’s Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet) and Djanet Sears’s Harlem Duet
  5. “You Don’t Know Who This Man Is”: Hospitality and Trauma in Alexandra Wood’s The Human Ear
  6. Family Matters: Trauma and the Legacy of War in James Allen Moad II’s Outside Paducah: The Wars at Home
  7. When Young Playwrights Are Kept Awake Because of History: Cultural Memory and Amnesia in Recent American Plays
  8. This Is England 2021: Staging England and Englishness in Contemporary Theatre
  9. Memory, National Identity Formation, and (Neo)Colonialism in Hannah Khalil’s A Museum in Baghdad
  10. Book Reviews
  11. Emily Klein, Jennifer-Scott Mobley, and Jill Stevenson, ed. Performing Dream Homes: Theater and the Spatial Politics of the Domestic Sphere. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019, xvi + 238 pp., €84,99 (hardback), €71,68 (ebook).
  12. Michael Shane Boyle, Matt Cornish, and Brandon Woolf, ed. Postdramatic Theatre and Form. London: Methuen, 2019, xii + 266 pp., £52.50 (hardback), £26.09 (paperback), £37.12 (PDF ebook).
  13. Sarah J. Ablett. Dramatic Disgust: Aesthetic Theory and Practice from Sophocles to Sarah Kane. Bielefeld: transcript, 2020, 199 pp., €38.00 (paperback), €37.99 (PDF ebook).
  14. Clare Finburgh. Watching War on the Twenty-First Century Stage: Spectacles of Conflict. London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2017, xv + 355 pp., £76.50 (hardback), £26.99 (paperback), £21.59 (PDF ebook).
  15. Kim Solga. Theory for Theatre Studies: Space. London: Bloomsbury, 2019, 208 pp., £45.00 (hardback), £11.69 (paperback), £9.35 (ebook).
  16. Shonagh Hill. Women and Embodied Mythmaking in Irish Theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2019, x + 257 pp., £75.00 (hardback).
  17. Marco Galea and Szabolcs Musca, ed. Redefining Theatre Communities: International Perspectives on Community-Conscious Theatre-Making. Bristol and Chicago: Intellect, 2019, 262 pp., £76.00 (hardback).
  18. Roxanne Rimstead and Domenico A. Beneventi, ed. Contested Spaces, Counter-Narratives, and Culture from Below in Quebec and Canada. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2019, 348 pp., $71.25 (hardback), $71.25 (ebook).
  19. Jenn Stephenson. Insecurity: Perils and Products of Theatres of the Real. Toronto, Buffalo, and London: U of Toronto P, 2019, viii + 286 pp., $75.75 (hardback), $57.75 (ebook).
  20. Molly Mullen. Applied Theatre: Economies. London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2019, xiv + 265 pp., £38.31 (hardback), £31.10 (paperback), £22.58 (Kindle ebook).
  21. William C. Boles, ed. After In-Yer-Face Theatre: Remnants of a Theatrical Revolution. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, xvi + 251 pp., £79.99 (hardback), £63.99 (ebook).
  22. Daphne P. Lei and Charlotte McIvor, ed. The Methuen Drama Handbook of Interculturalism and Performance. London: Methuen Drama, 2020, 280 pp., $157.00 (hardback), $126.00 (PDF ebook), $126.00 (EPUB/MOBI ebook).
  23. Stephen Greer. Queer Exceptions: Solo Performance in Neoliberal Times. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2019, ix + 222 pp., £80.00 (hardback), £20.00 (paperback), £20.00 (ebook).
Downloaded on 29.9.2025 from https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/jcde-2021-0025/html
Scroll to top button