Poetry / Infrastructure / Climate Change: Ecologies of War and Energy in the Middle East

Drawing on her ethnographic book project on the Iraqi-exile led, U.S. supported project to restore Iraq’s marshes, Professor Guarasci's paper will think about Iraq's marshes with Muzaffar al-Nawab, one of Iraq’s most beloved revolutionary poets. In the mid-twentieth century al-Nawab lived in the southern marshes of Iraq where he conducted educational outreach for a faction of the communist party. Al-Nawab’s poems feature meditations on nature, particularly on Iraq’s wetlands expanse and riverine ecology, its genealogical connection to civilizations past, and the relationship of this swampy environs to political movements in Iraq. Al-Nawab is sometimes called a “guerrilla” poet: his poems critique the corruption of authoritarian regimes and were banned in almost every Arab country. Her paper will show how his work insists on the connection between nature and revolution. In 2016 UNESCO declared Iraq’s marshes a World Heritage Site. Once drained by Saddam Hussein, Iraqi exiles in partnership with the US government subsequently re-flooded and conserved the marshes during the occupation. She will argue that twenty-first century environmental reformers insist on the apolitical nature of their work. Al-Nawab helps us see otherwise. 
 

Drawing on her recently published book Spaceship in the Desert: Energy, Climate Change, and Urban Design in Abu Dhabi  (Duke University Press, 2019), Professor Günel's paper will discuss how, in 2006 Abu Dhabi launched an ambitious project to construct the world’s first zero-carbon city: Masdar City. In Spaceship in the Desert Gökçe Günel examines the development and construction of Masdar City's renewable energy and clean technology infrastructures, providing an illuminating portrait of an international group of engineers, designers, and students who attempted to build a post-oil future in Abu Dhabi. While many of Masdar's initiatives—such as developing a new energy currency and a driverless rapid transit network—have stalled or not met expectations, Günel analyzes how these initiatives contributed to rendering the future a thinly disguised version of the fossil-fueled present. Spaceship in the Desert tells the story of Masdar, at once a “utopia” sponsored by the Emirati government, and a well-resourced company involving different actors who participated in the project, each with their own agendas and desires.