Kurdish People, History and Politics – serie

This volume, a contribution to the emergent interdisciplinary field of Kurdish Studies, is an engagement with the politics, culture and history of the Kurds. Sections of the book treat the Kurds in medieval and modern history, including the contemporary ‘Arab Spring’, as well as their language, culture and geography and historiographical issues. Individual chapters focus on the rich cultural history of the Kurds, their language, literary history, their political struggle for self-determination and the participation of women in the resistance movement, and on the encounters of missionaries with Kurdish society as well as on the poetics and politics of the Kurds and Palestinians. The first section examines the contribution to Kurdish scholarship of Professor Amir Hassanpour to Kurdish scholarship, and this anthology is dedicated to his memory. Professor Hassanpour was a prominent Marxist scholar whose revolutionary commitment to preserve, enrich and expand Kurdish history, culture and struggle is inspirational.

The author demonstrates sophisticated knowledge and understanding of Kurdish history and of postcolonial, poststructuralist, and related literary theories. This book gives rich contextual detail about Turkish, Iranian, and Iraqi nation states, in which Kurds live and where, the author argues, they are systematically oppressed. The central argument in the book is that the Kurds represent an Orient within, and one that has been neglected in literary studies till now. The book places postcolonial theory in dialogue with literary critical depictions of Kemalist, Persian, and Ba’athist nationalisms in modern Turkey, Iran, and Iraq. It is argued that the ‘adaptive modernities’ of these states, constituted by Western modernity in the Middle Eastern context, embody Western colonialism in miniature. It argues that the Kurds are rendered colonial subjects within the borders of these states as portrayed by the texts under study. This book interrogates the polarizing ideology of nationhood which underpins these nation-states’ modernity and explores how the Kurds are inferiorized; it examines the ways in which Kurdish literary characters are oppressed and liquidated by means of the inhumane laws of state sovereignty and the ways in which they are rendered homeless within and beyond these countries; and it explores literary depictions of nationalist patriarchy, which exploits women in general and Kurdish women in particular.