COSMOPOLITANISM AND IRAQI MIGRATION: ARTISTS AND INTELLECTUALS FROM THE "SIXTIES AND SEVENTIES GENERATIONS" IN EXILE

Edward Said (2000, p. 173) defines exile as "the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home: its essential sadness can never be surmounted." It is challenging to discuss complex migration routes and processes without systematically attributing a positive or negative value to the contrasting experiences characterizing them. Indeed, the multitude of elements wrapped up within migration studies — losses from the country of origin, encounters and exchanges as well as the creation of new combined identities — makes the design of an analytical framework challenging for scholars. This paper tries to show how these difficulties can be tackled by adopting a biographical perspective, leading the researcher to consider a plurality of "belongings", with the migrant clinging to a sense of belonging to country of origin and to destination and transit countries, as well as potential forms of hybrid identities. The case of artists and intellectuals who left Iraq during the 1960s and 1970s illustrates the existence of transnational collective dynamics in exile. By generating and analyzing life stories among those migrants, this study aims to explore the notion of cosmopolitanism as an analytical tool (Beck, 2004), a set of practices and values and an imaginaire. This may enable the researcher to transcend the communitarian focus that sometimes seems "natural" when regarding Iraqi society.