Traversing Disciplinary Boundaries, Globalizing Indigeneities: Visibilizing Assyrians in the Present | The Weekly Read

The Weekly Read for June 8, 2024, is “Traversing Disciplinary Boundaries, Globalizing Indigeneities: Visibilizing Assyrians in the Present” by Mariam Georgis. The article appears in “Indigenous Feminisms Across the World, Part 1,” a recent special issue of Meridians (23:1), guest edited by Basuli Deb.

Read this article for free through July 31, 2024.
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Cover of Indigenous Feminisms Across the World Part 1, a special issue of Meridians volume 23, issue 1. Features an artwork depicting a female figure, barbed wire, and poppy flowers. The artwork, a collaboration between the artist Dana Barqawi and the writer Hind Shoufanie, is adorned with gold leaf, thread and newspaper clippings.

Abstract
The author’s work spans the disciplinary boundaries of political science, Middle East studies, Indigenous studies, and their subfields. Broadly situated within critical theoretical bodies of knowledge, she focuses on an Indigenous nation in what is today known as Iraq. Her work is grounded within particular and fragmented locations that blur various lines and multiple layers of coloniality. This article offers a critical reflection of the invisibility in working on Indigeneity in southwest Asia within the structural imperatives of the academy. It takes up each of these themes by examining the fields of international relations and Iraqi studies to show how the story of Assyrians is invisible or unintelligible across these fields of political science and Middle East studies. Moreover, what the Assyrian story tells us about these disciplines and the multiplicity of coloniality (Patel 2019) is also rendered invisible. Despite the absence of Assyrians from Indigenous studies, the author sees this field as a site from which to potentially globalize Indigeneities. Specifically, she uses Indigenous feminism to construct a more nuanced framework into Assyrian histories, a framework that uses the lens of colonialism, land theft, erasure, and genocide to reframe the Assyrian experience as a remnant of the colonial global order.

Meridians, an interdisciplinary feminist journal, provides a forum for the finest scholarship and creative work by and about women of color in US and international contexts. The journal engages the complexity of debates around feminism, race, and transnationalism in a dialogue across ethnic, national, and disciplinary boundaries.

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