Iraq and the Work of the Frame

This chapter explores framing of the global border regime in Jamal Penjweny's documentary video “Forgotten Women”, photography series Saddam is Here, and anthropologist Zainab Saleh's Return to Ruin: Iraqi Narratives of Exile and Nostalgia. The chapter reflects on how Penjweny and Saleh theorize the border regime not in the narrow sense of its involvement in the act of migration but in its embedded function as a troubling framework of international law in organizing Iraqi lifeworlds, interfering in their leaving and residing, living and dying, thinking and making.