This article examines Haifa Zangana’s Packaged Lives: Ten Stories and a Novella as a literary intervention into the sociology of intellectuals, hence, bringing cultural sociology into conversation with literary analysis. Drawing on Patrick Baert’s positioning theory and performative frameworks, the article investigates the text’s staging of the roles, dilemmas, and shifting positions of exiled Iraqi intellectuals. The article situates Zangana’s characters within the sociopolitical and institutional landscapes of Arab intellectual life in diaspora, and traces the effect of displacement, political violence, and transnational accountability in reconfiguring intellectual agency. The positioning theory and performative frameworks informed analysis reveals three recurrent tensions in the text. These tensions involve the struggle to reconcile public engagement with personal needs. They also include critiquing homeland without reiterating Orientalist narratives, self-Orientalizing. The third tension is negotiating integrity in western contexts that ennoble certain interventions. These dynamics reveal forms of engagement that are episodic, reactive, and strategically withheld. These forms go beyond fixed categories of activism, withdrawal, or complicity. The article analyzes the fictional characters as composite figures who represent and condense ongoing debates among exiled Arab intellectuals.
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