Architects, Exiles, and Megalomaniacs: Lawrence Weschler and the Post-Totalitarian Turn

Abstract

In recent decades, the American journalist Lawrence Weschler—a frequent contributor to The New Yorker and McSweeney’s—established himself as one of the most prolific and imaginative writers on the “post-totalitarian” turn: that is, on the startling revival or persistence of totalitarian and authoritarian regimes around the globe. This essay explores his engagement with the rise and fall of Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, whose rule Weschler filtered through successive treatments of two exile architects—Kanan Makiya, one of the most prominent and controversial critics of Hussein’s regime, and his father, Mohamed, who returned to Iraq to work for the dictator. Weschler’s portraits of these figures—a collaboration which helped him construct a cultural, transnational account of their journeys from Baghdad to London and to the US—became fundamental to the increasingly experimental ways Weschler began to track authoritarianism’s global resurgence, including back to the American scene.