Wednesday, February 21, 2024 @ 6:00 pm-8:00 pm

Lecture

Dr Eva Miller on ‘Eden in America: Exhibiting, Performing, and Imagining Iraq between Two Nations’

This talk will explore the journeys of people, objects, and dreams between Iraq and the United States from the 1890s to the 1950s, as Iraqis and Americans, elite and otherwise, collaborated in imagining, displaying, selling, and interpreting Iraq. In Chicago, New York, and Baghdad, Iraq was conjured as a land with a special relationship to the origins of civilization and of humankind, central to an Arab golden age, the real location of the Arabian Nights, evoking pleasure, magic, and luxury—not coincidentally, the same rewards promised by the American Consumer Capitalist Dream. We will take a whirlwind journey through great moments of the development of this shared fantasy: enterprising immigrants running ‘Oriental’ pavilions at the Chicago Columbian Exposition of 1893; American academics displaying the fruits of excavations in Iraq at the Chicago Century of Progress Exposition in 1933; Iraqi government officials plying hungry 1939 New York World’s Fair consumers with date cocktails, date waffles, and date sandwiches; the young King Faisal II touring 1952 America in a cowboy hat, photographing skyscrapers, Ford Motor cars, and Hollywood film sets; and finally Chicago-trained architect Frank Lloyd Wright coming to Baghdad in 1957 to present the king with a plan for the city as a futuristic utopia localised to its Iraqi setting: ziggurat parking garages for an Orientalist fantasyland nurtured by Wright’s boyhood enchantment with the Arabian Nights and Faisal II’s dreams of Western modernity.

Eva Miller is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow in the History Department at UCL. Her research focuses on how the ancient Middle Eastern past, and objects discovered in Iraq and Egypt, have been used by modern Western cultures to forge their own identities, whether through identification, exhibition, appropriation, or historical narrative.