Ethnographic narratives as living archives among the Iraqi diaspora

Iraqis in Iraq and the diaspora, through their life experience and interpretation of events, can be a site of a living archive. They possess knowledge about how national and imperial events impacted people on the ground, and about daily life and struggle to reckon with the past and the present, imagine the future and carve a sense of belonging through storytelling. The ability to provide a personal account of the events they lived through becomes a venue to challenge their portrayal as sectarian subjects in mainstream media. In this article, I argue that life stories can serve as anticolonial methodology, techniques of representation and empowerment, and sites of knowledge production about daily lives and struggles. As a living archive, life stories act as a platform to bear witness, challenge essentialist misconceptions, expose colonial and imperial realities and constitute individuals as subjects empowered to provide an account of their own lives.