S ara P ursley . Familiar Futures

Sara Pursley’s Familiar Futures: Time, Selfhood, and Sovereignty in Iraq is a welcome addition to the growing literature on Iraqi history. It is ambitious in scope and covers a range of hitherto underresearched topics, such as development, education, and sexual differentiation in the period from the creation of the state in 1920 until shortly after the 1958 revolution. The author offers a stimulating discussion of these topics that shows command of a vast array of theories and historical perspectives, especially more recent trends emerging in the fields of postcolonial and gender studies. The aim of the book, according to the author, “is to explore a number of different sociohistorical or discursive moments in mid-20th-century Iraq in which sexual difference and/or familial life were particularly charged objects of reform in the name of the nation’s sovereign and developed future” (27–28). These “moments” take the shape of differently themed chapters, some of...

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