Chaldeans in America: The Shifting Spaces of an Iraqi Minority’s Discourses

Yasmeen Hanoosh

What are the various ways Chaldean-Americans construct their national and ethnic identities and affiliations with the American mainstream and the Iraqi homeland? This paper seeks to address this question by underscoring the shifting confines of the Chaldean identity among a group of Christian-Iraqi immigrants in the United States. It examines how ethnic identities are articulated in literary and other non-textual practices, and in shifting contexts and locales. For particular politically and socially motivated reasons, the current climate in the US and in Iraq makes it more viable for members of this community to assert a “Chaldean” identity rather than a “Christian-Iraqi” or “a Christian-Arab” identity, which had been more frequently, and is still to some extent, in use. This ancient-new appellation – Chaldean – suggests, among other things, a desire to distance the group from a stigmatizing political discourse on Arabs and Muslims. This discourse has pervaded in American and world media after the events of September 11, 2001 and has been perceived by many individuals in the diasporic community as particularly threatening to their collective livelihood. In the following space I look at cultural narratives, language ideology, museumizing trends and victimology as mechanisms applied by the group to sustain a favorable collective identity in the US.

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