Idle Days and Nights: Leisure, Entertainment, and Everyday Life in Modern Iraq.
Presentation by Pelle Valentin Olsen, CMES and Department of History, Lund University
By examining modern Iraqi history through the lens of leisure, this talk offers an entirely new perspective as it explores the institutions, practices, distractions, and discourses of leisure that occupied increasing space and time in the life of many Iraqis in the twentieth century. Iraqi children, students, nightclub performers, politicans, teachers, police officers, parents, cinema entrepreneurs, intellectuals, and musicians all play a part in this history. We follow these characters, who belonged to different social and economic classes, as they moved between cafés, cinemas, censorship offices, schools, nightclubs, libraries, and private homes. By accompanying these diverse historical actors as they sought out and debated ways to spend their free time, my book manuscript in progress, on which this talk is based, contributes to current and emerging debates on leisure, cultural production, modern modern Iraqi history, and archives. It demonstrates leisure’s centrality to many of the broader discussions on morality, productivity, nationalism, gender, and sexuality that characterised the first half of Iraq’s and the Middle East’s twentieth century.
COFFEE, TEA, AND PASTRIES ARE SERVED AFTER EACH SEMINAR.
ALL WARMLY WELCMOME!
Photo: Students at Baghdad College (1934). Jesuit Archives & Research Center, Saint Louis, Missouri.
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