Interpreters of Occupation: Gender and the Politics of Belonging in an Iraqi Refugee Community (Gender, Tradition, and Politics within the Center East)

Through the Iraq Warfare, hundreds of younger Baghdadis labored as interpreters for US troops, changing into the entrance line of the so-called Warfare on Terror. Deployed by the navy as linguistic in addition to cultural interpreters―translating the “human terrain” of Iraq―members of this community urgently honed identification methods amid suspicion from US forces, fellow Iraqis, and, not least of all, each other. In Interpreters of Occupation, Campbell traces the experiences of twelve people from their younger maturity as members of the Ba’thist era, to their work as interpreters, by way of their navigation of the US immigration pipeline, and at last to their resettlement in the USA. All through, Campbell considers how these women and men grappled with problems with belonging and betrayal, each on the battlefield in Iraq and within the US-based diaspora.

A nuanced and richly detailed ethnography, Interpreters of Occupation offers voice to a era of US allies by way of their various and vividly rendered life histories. Within the face of what some thought of a nationwide betrayal in Iraq and their experiences of otherness inside the USA, interpreters negotiate what it means to belong to a diasporic group in flux.