Roots and Routes: Kurdish Literature as World Literature

Abstract

Over the last two decades, the literary world has seen many new works by Kurdish writers and poets who have authored works of fiction, memoir and collections of poetry in the English language. This thesis, Roots and Routes: Kurdish Literature as World Literature, is the study of this body of work. As the first comprehensive study to cover the existing and emerging Kurdish Anglophone writings, this study introduces these writings into the arena of world literatures in English. However, it also identifies these works as a new literary canon in the realm of Kurdish literature. This study is an attempt to investigate why and how these Anglophone Kurdish writings emerged, who their intended readers are, and what roles these writings play or can play. To find answer to these questions, this study examines both the contexts out of which and in which these writings have emerged. It positions them in the historical and geopolitical contexts they have emerged from and examines the new and broader cultural, literary and socio-political contexts in which they have been produced, circulated and received. Looking at these two contexts, this study finds that these writings have created and can continue to create new spaces of global engagement with the Kurdish question(s) and Kurdish people. It asserts that these writings entail a kind of activism and create an arena of struggle and Kurdish voice of resistance beyond their imposed national borders, in the wider context of the world. It is within this context that this study argues for this body of work as a new discursive space of negotiation and recognition of the Kurdish questions and Kurdish people in global and transnational contexts. In its reading of the texts, this study, drawing on various theoretical frameworks and taking a reception-based or readerly pragmatics approach, aims to explore how these texts interact with their implied readers and the ways they might be read. It seeks to explore not only why but also and more significantly how these writings of different genres bear witness to Kurdish traumatic history and act as testimony. In short, it looks at both politics and poetics of witnessing and testimony in the emerging Anglophone writings by Kurdish diaspora authors.