Imagining Kurdistan

Ozlem Galip is a Lecturer at the Institute of Oriental Studies, University of Oxford. She holds a PhD in Kurdish Studies from the University of Exeter. Her main research interests are Kurdish literature, novelistic discourse, migration and diaspora studies. She is also the UK correspondent of the Kurdish newspaper Yeni Ozgur Politika which is based in Germany.

Table of Contents*

Introduction
Kurdistan and beyond Kurdistan: The Search for a Homeland
Kurds as Descendants of the Medes: The Building of a Myth
Kurdistan before the Nineteenth Century
The Colonial Division of Kurdistan: First World War
The Kurdish Diaspora: Formation of Diasporic Identity and Politics of Homeland

II.An Overview of Kurdish Politics: Wars, Uprisings and Movements
The Hamidiye: Kurdish Tribal Militias in the Ottoman Empire
From Unrest to Uprising: Sheikh Said Uprising and Others
The Emergence of Kurdish socialist movement and PKK’s hegemony Since 1960s

III.Kurdish Literary and Cultural Productions: From Oral Literature to Digital Media
Rituals of Oral Story telling: Dengbej, Epics and Songs
Writing in Exile: The Emergence and Development of Kurdish Novel
Kurdish Imagined Community from Afar through TV Satellite and Internet

IV.Imagining Kurdistan in Diasporic Novelistic Discourse: Realist and Critical Reflections
The Experiences of Displacement: Diaspora as a ‘Temporary Space’
Ideological and Political Orientations of the Novelists within the
Narratives.
Diasporic Imagining of Kurdistan: Under the Lens of Realist and Critical Portrayal
Diasporic Memory: From the Individual’s Narratives to the Collective Past

V.Kurdish Novelistic Discourse from Turkish Kurdistan: The Lands of Destruction and Struggle
The Territorialisation of Kurdistan: Imagined ‘Greater Kurdistan’
Fictionalising Kurdistan in Different Time Zones
The Meanings of Unattainable ‘Home-land’: Beloved Woman and A Land of Longing

VI. Kurdish Novels From Turkish Kurdistan to its Diaspora: Factual or Symbolic?
The Impact of Diverse Political Ideologies On the Portrayal of Kurdistan
The Perception of ‘Home-land’: the Constant Sense of ‘Outsideness’ and Yearning

VII. Conclusion