“Cauldron of Conspiracy”: Conspiratorial Tropes as Modes of Critique in Ḥabībī’s The Pessoptimist and Saʿdāwī’s Frankenstein in Baghdad

Abstract This article uses the concepts of “conspiracy” and “conspiracy theory,” along with their literary tropes, to theorize resistance to the colonial ideals of modernity in Israel and Iraq and to contest the oppressive developmental temporalities associated with this modernity. By analyzing Imīl Ḥabībī’s al-Mutashāʾil ( The Secret Life of Saeed, the Pessoptimist , 1974) and Aḥmad Saʿdāwī’s Frānkishtāyn fī Baghdād ( Frankenstein in Baghdad , 2013), I show how tropes of conspiracism and conspiratorial thinking are deployed in both of these novels to critique myths of linear progress—often used to justify the Israeli occupation and the U.S. invasion—despite the divergent historical periods and contexts out of which the two texts emerge. In their act of contestation, the novels leverage alternate temporalities in connection to conspiracism, such as the cyclical time of suffering and exploitation, or the apocalyptic time that offers release from said suffering through ending time altogether. Yet in both cases the tropes of conspiracy are ultimately shown to have little explanatory or emancipatory value and high human cost. Both novels thus thematize the analytic and critical limits of conspiracism.