Kurdish Matters: Signaling New Epistemologies of Difference

Thangaraj, Stanley

doi:10.29333/ejecs/240

Cited by 7 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 40 publications

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“…There are thirty million to forty million Kurds in Turkey, Syria, Iran, and Iraq, with large diasporas in Europe (Demir 2017;Eliassi 2013) and a growing diaspora in the United States (de Rouen 2019). Nashville has the largest US Kurdish community, with nearly 20,000 Kurds from mostly Iraq and some from Iran (Arpacik 2019;Thangaraj 2019) Another group of several thousand formally educated Iraqi Kurds came post-1996 on "Special Immigrant Visas" (SIVs), which are reserved for people working with the US military, USAID, and NGOs as interpreters, translators, and guides. Several doctors and engineers also came as asylum seekers.…”

Section: Social Background and Methodologymentioning

confidence: 99%

“We share the same ancestry”: US Kurdish diasporas and the aspirational and ascriptive practices of race

Thangaraj

2022

American Anthropologist

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The conflating of the Southwest Asian and North African (SWANA) region with Arabs is a common trope that also governs how we study West Asia and West Asian diasporas in the United States. I ethnographically highlight the lives of Kurds in mainly Nashville, Tennessee, and the northeastern United States while foregrounding their racial aspirations that disrupt essentialized depictions of the SWANA region and challenge the nation-state's racial ascriptions. The use of the "Indo-European" language family as racial classification in opposition to Arabs, the quotidian practices of racializing Kurds through the "Muslim-looking" racial formation, and the everyday forms of solidarity with Arab Americans during this period of the global war on terror provide traction on the ways the ascriptions of race and aspirations to race influence Kurdish identity formation. Through evocations of "Indo-European-ness," Kurdish Americans conceptualize transnational and transhistorical forms of whiteness/Europeanness/Aryan-ness and racialized difference from Arabs, offer critiques of nation-states, and accentuate dynamic forms of racial consciousness. Kurds simultaneously engage with ethnological understandings that are naturalized as racial difference at the very moment they must also manage the racial hysteria post-9/11. With increased xenophobia and Islamophobia, Kurds challenge their racializations by embracing nonwhiteness that opens possibilities for coalition-building with Arab Americans and various racial "Others."race, language families, anthropology of the United States, Aryan-ness, Kurdish diaspora RESUMENEl fusionar la región de SWANA con los árabes es un tropo común que también gobierna cómo estudiamos Asia Occidental y las diásporas de Asia Occidental en los Estados Unidos. Enfatizo etnográficamente las vidas de los kurdos en Nashville, Tennessee y el noreste de los Estados Unidos principalmente, mientras resaltando sus aspiraciones raciales que interrumpen las representaciones esencializadas de la región de SWANA y reta las adscripciones raciales del Estado-nación. El uso de la familia de lenguas "indoeuropeas" como una clasificación racial en oposición a los árabes, las prácticas cotidianas de racialización de los kurdos a través de la formación racial "de aspecto musulmán", y las formas cotidianas de solidaridad con los árabes americanos durante este período de guerra global contra el terrorismo proveen tracción en las formas en que las adscripciones de raza y aspiraciones a la raza influyen la 104

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Section: Social Background and Methodologymentioning

confidence: 99%

“We share the same ancestry”: US Kurdish diasporas and the aspirational and ascriptive practices of race

Thangaraj

2022

American Anthropologist

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“…In addition to the sizeable population of primarily Mexican and Central American economic immigrants, Nashville also has a significant refugee population. The city is home to the largest Kurdish population in the US, with Iraqi Kurds initially arriving in the 1970s to escape anti-Kurdish state violence and later to escape further targeting due to collaboration with the US military during the Gulf Wars (Arpacik 2019, 45;Thangaraj 2019;Thangaraj 2022). There are now sizeable populations of Somali, Sudanese, Burmese, and Bhutanese families.…”

Section: The Country Cosmopolitan: Nashville and The New Southmentioning

confidence: 99%

An Escalade, a Briefcase, and Respect: Latinx Youth’s Imaginings of Middle-Class Status and a Cosmopolitan Good Life in Nashville, Tennessee

Flores

2024

anthropologica

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Latinx immigrant-origin youth in Nashville, Tennessee—who are poised to be the first in their families to achieve middle-class status—strive toward a cosmopolitan future of professional work and disposable income. This social and economic mobility is imagined in relation to the racialization and stigmatization of Latinx people as exclusively working-class labourers and as the objects of a Southern, white cosmopolitan gaze. Through their aspirations, youth challenge existing local and global regimes of labour, consumption, and difference. With respect to work, youth seek to remake the white professional world in ways specific to their Latinx experience. In so doing, they reclaim the value of Latinx labour. They also look to engage in specific kinds of material accumulation that, while leading to tangibly more comfortable lives individually, also make their worth visible to others. Finally, youth’s views of a future defined by their ability to cross cultures and borders repositions their ethno-racial and linguistic difference as an asset rather than a liability. Moreover, this global orientation reorients cosmopolitanism away from a position of exclusively white and elite status. Collectively, these imaginings reveal that while middle-class aspirations may reinforce a colour line of class, they also potentially remake existing racialized hierarchies of class, mobility, and cosmopolitanism.

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“…The representations of Kurdistan emerging from the KFM in Europe offer a rich example of such a socio‐material combination. The Kurdish diaspora is not internally homogenized (Thangaraj, 2019), but presents multiple fractures, reflecting the multiple divisions existing at home. Nonetheless, the KFM‐related political forces ‘have developed considerable ideological influence and organizational structures in all parts of Kurdistan in Turkey, Syria, Iran and Iraq’ (Matin, 2021, 3); thus they can be taken as the most representative.…”

Section: Tracing the Circulation Of Ideasmentioning

confidence: 99%

Diaspora as socio‐material assemblage: Political agency in the Kurdish freedom movement's representations of homeland

Ventura

2023

Global Networks

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The proliferation of diasporas has expanded the intricate web of political relations on a global scale. Transnationality has increasingly replaced methodological nationalism, and relationality blurred diaspora's boundaries. This article argues for framing diasporas as socio‐material assemblages to capture the political agency of diasporas in action in a transnational space. This highlights diasporas’ ability to forge their transnational political actorness and to expand their power of attractiveness. By tracing ideas and things behind the essential task of representing the homeland, this research explores the connections of the Kurdish freedom movement in Europe, making three main arguments. First, it outlines the existence of transnational infrastructures of solidarity, which highlight a multi‐ethnic plurality at work. Second, it illuminates the diasporas’ role in the south–north flow of knowledge and political influence. Third, the article examines the desire which stabilizes the assemblage and makes the circulation of ideas possible and smooth.

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Kurdish Matters: Signaling New Epistemologies of Difference

Cited by 7 publications

References 40 publications

“We share the same ancestry”: US Kurdish diasporas and the aspirational and ascriptive practices of race

“We share the same ancestry”: US Kurdish diasporas and the aspirational and ascriptive practices of race

An Escalade, a Briefcase, and Respect: Latinx Youth’s Imaginings of Middle-Class Status and a Cosmopolitan Good Life in Nashville, Tennessee

Diaspora as socio‐material assemblage: Political agency in the Kurdish freedom movement's representations of homeland

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