Futures past nation, gender, time in Jawad Salim’s monument to freedom

Abstract EN

Contemporary accounts of the Iraqi revolution of 14 July 1958, from across the political-ideological spectrum, report strikingly similar experiences of déjà vu.

Many sources, both foreign and Iraqi, confirm the recollections of a British observer that “the Revolution, when it came, corresponded so closely to the opinion that had formed before, that everything that happened seemed, in its turn, to be what one had already been taught to expect.”(1) Paradoxically, it was the familiar unfolding of the events as a revolutionary future that many Iraqis had previously imagined—or a “future past,” to borrow Reinhart Koselleck’s phrase(2)—that enabled them to be so widely experienced as an absolute temporal rupture, the end of one time and the beginning of another.(