The fiction of nationalism: Newroz TV representations of Kurdish nationalism

Abstract

Benedict Anderson’s seminal work on imagined communities has opened a multitude of explorations in how mass media construct and represent social identities in relation to nationalism. Depicting and at the same time creating social groups, media representations are permeated by questions of inclusion and exclusion. As a result, it is important to study media representations of social identities as strategic ideologies that debilitate or stabilize, support or condemn a specific identity discourse. In this study, we explore how Kurdish identity has been represented in Newroz TV, one of the most popular satellite TV channels among Iranian Kurds. Findings show that Kurdish nationalism is first defined in opposition to Persian, Arabic (as in Syria and Iraq) and Turkish national identity. However, the resulting images are permeated by partisan ideological divisions among Kurdish political groups.