Foucauldian rituals of justice and conduct in Zainab Salbi’s Between Two Worlds

Abstract

This article explores the Iraqi-American life writer Zainab Salbi’s memoir Between Two Worlds: Escape from Tyranny; Growing up in the Shadow of Saddam (2005) in the light of a Foucauldian framework to examine both visible and invisible tactics of power once exercised by Saddam Hussein’s authoritarian regime. The Foucauldian analysis of juridical forms and sovereign power as features of governmentality and political rationality are useful in understanding Salbi’s narration of Saddam Hussein’s use of the law and law-like regulations for perpetuating his authoritarian domination. I argue that through the ritual exercise of justice and conduct, the portrayed tyrant achieves the subjugation and constitution of individuals as well as the control of groups. The article suggests that by documenting her life story in an act of Foucauldian indocilité, or conscious insubordination, Salbi desubjugates the established politics of truth, and in so doing, detaches herself from the various modalities of subjectivity that the specific strategies of governmentality seek to formulate and impose on her as an Iraqi individual.