Creativity as a response to chaos: innovation and imagination in post-2003 Iraqi literature and art

Abstract

My study focuses on Iraq, and, more specifically, on the creative works of fiction and art that emerged in the years following the 2003 US invasion when chaos became a reality. Analysing these works will show how their emergence and flowering during the period after the war, as well as the decades of censorship and stagnation prove the existence of a viable connection between chaos, creativity, and knowledge. In other words, I will show how the violence and disorder in the post-war period stimulated creativity in two Iraqi authors and artists. [...] Their works show how imagination can spring from chaos to describe it, embrace it, or suggest certain ways to resist it.