Diasporic Futures and Transnational Hope Among Iraqis in Sweden and Denmark

Abstract

Based on ethnographic fieldwork among Iraqis in Sweden and Denmark, this paper examines diasporic narratives of hope that surrounded the removal of the Saddam Hussein regime in 2003 as well as the mass protests that swept Iraq in 2019, situating this hope against an overarching narrative of despair, expressed as a simultaneous sense of stuckedness and cyclical repetition. By approaching hope as a diasporic orientation, this paper invites us to think about diasporic subjectivities in terms of affective pulls and proximities in space and time, that shift and intensify as notions of what is possible change radically in the country of origin. Moreover, I suggest, an attentiveness to diasporic narratives of hope as an affective politics broadens our understanding of the collectivities in which diasporic subjects inscribe themselves and how notions of belonging are constructed.