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

Abstract

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

Blood for bread: Necro‐labor, nonsovereign bodies, and the state of exception in Rojhelat

“…The Iranian state deploys the space/borderland as a weapon of mass destruction or as a technology of death (see De León, 2015; Mbembe, 2019), where the exception becomes the norm and where the sovereign power carves its permanent presence on bodies reduced to a condition of legal unnameability and unclassifiability (see Açiksöz, 2020). In this sense, the borderland resembles Agamben's notion of a camp where certain lives/bodies, owing to their ethnolinguistic differences (see Rosa, 2019; Thangaraj, 2022) and deemed nonconforming to sovereign metrics of peoplehood, are securitized and therefore become expendable and disposable.…”

“…The rise of the IRI in 1979 only exacerbated the anti‐Kurdish politics established by the previous regime, the Pahlavi dynasty (1941–1979). Drawing on the Orientalist archaeology of knowledge, the Pahlavi state sought to create a pure Iran (Burton, 2021) and equated ethnicity, language, culture, and the “peoplehood” of the entire nation with the Aryan race/Persian‐ness (Mohammadpour & Soleimani, 2022; Thangaraj, 2022; Vaziri, 1993, 67–69). Both the IRI and Pahlavi regimes have placed the politicization of cultural differences at the heart of their ideology and advanced a project of state‐building centered on imposing a policy of one country, one nation, one language (see Matin‐Asgari, 2018; Mohammadpour & Soleimani, 2019; Soleimani & Mohammadpour, 2019).…”

“…In Iran, the sovereign community, the Persians , through forging and structuring a singular and exclusive national identity premised on the Persian language and the Shi'i religion, has constructed and marginalized its ethnic “other” (see Cronin, 2003). As anthropologist Stanley Thangaraj (2022) has demonstrated, the practice of ethnolinguistic othering in the Middle East has given birth to a form of “racialization” similar to what African Americans and Indigenous communities have historically experienced under colonial rule. Fatma Göçek (2015), Barış Ünlü (2016), Mahsuq Kurt (2021), and Mohammed Salih (2021) have also examined how the interplay of nationhood, language, and ethnicity in Turkey has generated an internal cultural imperialism centered on Turkish supremacy and the othering of non‐Turks.…”

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

“…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.…”

Masculinities

“…Anthropological investigations of masculinities, while challenging simple binary logics of gender, must also systematically decipher the local context and local intimacies with gender performance while accounting for the role of colonialism, imperialism, race, and transnationalism in suturing masculinities both in the Western and non-Western contexts (Thangaraj 2015(Thangaraj , 2020(Thangaraj , 2022. For example, Harjant Gill (2020) illustrates the multiple masculine, ethnic, and religious comportments and practices embodied by Punjabi Sikh men as they traverse national boundaries.…”