Interpreters of Occupation: Gender and the Politics of Belonging in an Iraqi Refugee Network by Madeline Otis Campbell (review)

Recipient of the 2017 AMEWS Book Award Honorable Mention

Madeline Otis Campbell’s Interpreters of Occupation provides an intimate account of the United States’ gendered and imperialist practices in the Middle East. Her narrative revolves around the experiences of ten mostly young, university-educated, English-speaking Iraqi women and men hired as interpreters for the US occupation forces. As violence escalated in Iraq, interpreters’ role as conduits of US power in the region put their lives in danger, leading them to seek asylum in the United States. It is through Campbell’s temporary contract working for the US refugee admissions program that she first meets her interlocutors. Deploying a multisited methodology, initially traveling to Iraq to meet asylum claimants and then maintaining contact with them once they resettled in New England, Campbell traces their processes of subjectivation and resubjectivation across several boundaries—first inside and outside US bases in Iraq and then between the state borders of the United States and Iraq. Exploring how interpreters negotiate a compromising set of positions—as both Iraqi nationals and employees of the US army—Campbell thinks of the interpreters’ subjectivities as sites where the configuration of their “gendered agency” (cf. Mahler and Pessar 2001, 200) can be observed. In her analysis, Iraqi interpreters’ labor of translation also constitutes an exercise in subject formation (61) that emerges out of the encounter between the interpellations of US power structures and their strategic renderings of Iraqi culture.

One of the book’s greatest strengths is its success at describing the convergences between US imperial feminist traditions and the dominant gendered models of a “war generation” (27–36) of Iraqis preoccupied with male protection of women. The first chapter succinctly and effectively describes the generational contingency and fluidity of dominant Iraqi gendered roles through time, as well as their coconstitution with larger colonial, nationalist, and imperialist projects in the region. The chapters that follow depict Iraqi interpreters’ reckoning with the mistranslation of these fluid and historically situated gendered social relations into rigid and orientalist representations of Iraqi gender roles, both under US occupation (chaps. 3 and 4) and within the United States’ employment, legal, and bureaucratic practices (chaps. 5 and 6).

Even though the narrative engages with more male than female interlocutors (three women and seven men), Interpreters of Occupation provides close consideration of the contrasting experiences of Iraqi male and female interpreters. Illuminating how the patriarchal logics of US imperialism permeate Iraqi women’s lives, the third chapter provides a nuanced description of the double bind that Iraqi female interpreters face while working on US military bases. Specifically, Campbell shows how Iraqi women employed by US occupation forces are caught between either assuming the role of “liberated women”—a subject position ironically inhabited by becoming agreeable or indifferent to male harassment—or adopting the subject position of “a good Iraqi girl”: actively rejecting undesired sexual advancements yet risking becoming ostracized, even demonized, as a potential threat to security. Then, focusing on the experience of male interpreters, chapter 4 argues that the “hyperpatriarchy” (37) of a postoccupation Iraq allows for a sense of fraternity between American and Iraqi men that enables male interpreters to forge “cultural forms of belonging” (173–77) within and between Iraq and the United States that are inaccessible to their female counterparts. Moreover, in describing men’s reckoning with their inability to live up to a masculine “responsibility to protect” (114–55), especially vis-à-vis the families they left behind in Iraq, the author exposes the internal contradictions of this hyperpatriarchy, as experienced by interpreters in navigating the material conditions of their transnational becoming.

The author presents the fact that Iraqi female interpreters tend to consider their residence in the United States more permanent than male interpreters consider theirs as evidence against a common assumption in migration and transnational gender studies that women are generally more tied to “home” than men...