Traversing Disciplinary Boundaries, Globalizing Indigeneities

Abstract

The author’s work spans the disciplinary boundaries of political science, Middle East studies, Indigenous studies, and their subfields. Broadly situated within critical theoretical bodies of knowledge, she focuses on an Indigenous nation in what is today known as Iraq. Her work is grounded within particular and fragmented locations that blur various lines and multiple layers of coloniality. This article offers a critical reflection of the invisibility in working on Indigeneity in southwest Asia within the structural imperatives of the academy. It takes up each of these themes by examining the fields of international relations and Iraqi studies to show how the story of Assyrians is invisible or unintelligible across these fields of political science and Middle East studies. Moreover, what the Assyrian story tells us about these disciplines and the multiplicity of coloniality (Patel 2019) is also rendered invisible. Despite the absence of Assyrians from Indigenous studies, the author sees this field as a site from which to potentially globalize Indigeneities. Specifically, she uses Indigenous feminism to construct a more nuanced framework into Assyrian histories, a framework that uses the lens of colonialism, land theft, erasure, and genocide to reframe the Assyrian experience as a remnant of the colonial global order.