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The Existential Threat of Academic Bias: The Institutionalization of Anti-Assyrian Rhetoric

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 November 2022

Sargon Donabed*
Affiliation:
Department of History and Cultural Studies, Roger Williams University, Bristol, RI, USA

Extract

Epistemic violence, that is, violence exerted against or through knowledge, is probably one of the key elements in any process of domination. It is not only through the construction of exploitative economic links or the control of the politico-military apparatuses that domination is accomplished, but also and, I would argue, most importantly through the construction of epistemic frameworks that legitimise and enshrine those practices of domination.1

Type
Roundtable
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press

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References

1 Galván-Álvarez, Enrique, “Epistemic Violence and Retaliation: The Issue of Knowledges in Mother India,” Atlantis Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies 32, no. 2 (2010): 11Google Scholar.

2 Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Vintage Books, 1978), 2.

3 Ibid, 116.

4 Concerning appropriation of Mesopotamian heritage by Iraq see Mariam Georgis, “Nation and Identity Construction in Modern Iraq: (Re)inserting the Assyrians,” in Unsettling Colonial Modernity in Islamicate Contexts, ed. Siavash Saffari et al. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Scholars, 2017), 82, referring to the seminal work of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan Education UK, 1988): 24–28.

5 See Sargon Donabed and Daniel Tower, “Reframing Indigeneity: The Case of Assyrians in Northern Mesopotamia,” Perspectives on History, 56, no. 1 (2018):18–20.

7 J. F. Coakley, The Church of the East and the Church of England (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1992), 366n12. The italics are my addition.

8 Adam H. Becker, “The Ancient Near East in the Late Antique Near East: Syriac Christian Appropriation of the Biblical Past,” in Antiquity: Jewish and Christian Pasts in the Greco-Roman World, ed. Gregg Gardner and Kevin Osterloh (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2008), 393.

9 Aaron Michael Butts, “Assyrian Christians,” in A Companion to Assyria, ed. Eckart in E. Frahm (Malden: Wiley, 2017), 605–6.

10 Eric Davis, Memories of State: Politics, History and Collective Identity in Modern Iraq (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005), 62–63.

11 Paul Knabenshue, US ambassador to Iraq, to Secretary of State, “Suppression of Assyrian Revolt,” 23 August 1933, no. 165, 890g.4016 Assyrians/82, General Records of the Department of State, Division of Near Eastern Affairs, National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD.

12 Khaldun Husry, “The Assyrian Affair of 1933 (I),” International Journal of Middle East Studies 5, no. 2 (1974): 170.

13 Khaldun Husry, “The Assyrian Affair of 1933 (II),” International Journal of Middle East Studies 5, no. 3 (1974): 353.

14 Ibid., 352.

15 Satiʿ al-Husri, “al-Khidma al-‘Askariyya wa-l-Tarbiya al-‘Amma,” a speech delivered in Baghdad in 1934, in Mudhakkirati fi al-ʿIraq, (Beirut: Dar al-Taliʿa, 1967–68), vol. 2, 312–13.

16 Sargon Donabed, “Persistent Perseverance: A Trajectory of Assyrian History in the Modern Age,” in Routledge Handbook on Minorities in the Middle East, ed. Paul Rowe (New York: Routledge, 2018), 115–17.

17 See Sargon Donabed and Shamiran Mako, “Ethno-Cultural and Religious Identity of Syrian Orthodox Christians,” Chronos 19 (2009): 69–111; and Mardaean Isaac, “The Assyrian Identity, the Assyrian ‘Nation,’ and their Representation in Syriac Studies,” Journal of Assyrian Academic Studies 27, no. 1–2 (2013): 5–35.

18 Portions of the last two paragraphs are drawn from Donabed, “Persistent Perseverance,” 115–17.

19 Melding these two paths draws inspiration from stories shared in the collection of essays by Peter Krause and Ora Szekely, Notes from the Field: A Guide to Navigating Fieldwork in Political Science (New York: Columbia University Press, 2020).

20 Sargon Donabed, Reforging a Forgotten History: Iraq and the Assyrians in the Twentieth Century (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), 39. The italics have been inserted for this article.

21 Ibid.

22 Nelida Fuccaro, review of Reforging a Forgotten History: Iraq and the Assyrians in the Twentieth Century, by Sargon George Donabed, American Historical Review 121, no. 4 (2016), 1395.

23 Donabed, Reforging, 3.

24 Ibid., 22.

25 Ibid., 69.

26 Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies, 3rd ed. (London: Zed Books, 2021), xx.

27 Hormuzd Rassam, Asshur and the Land of Nimrod (London: Curts and Jennings, 1897), 167.

28 Ibid.

29 The book was Adam Becker's Revival and Awakening: American Evangelical Missionaries in Iran and the Origins of Assyrian Nationalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015).

30 Thomas Laurie, Woman and Her Saviour in Persia (Boston: Gould and Lincoln, 1865), 83.

31 Smith, Decolonizing, 1.

32 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin White Masks (London: Pluto, 1986), 38.

33 Lorde, Audre, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (New York: Random House, 2012), 112Google Scholar.

34 Smith, Decolonizing, 37.

35 Ibid.