Re-Conceptualising Kurdish Identity
Posted on 24. May, 2009 by KSSO in Seminar
Seminar: Re-Conceptualising Kurdish Identity: From Self/Other to Subject/Other Dialectic
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Speaker:
Dr. Bakhtiar Sajjadi, Assistant Professor at the Department of English Language and Literature and General Linguistics, University of Kurdistan
DATE: 28th May 09 @ 7:00 pm
VENUE: SOAS, Room L67
Abstract:
One of recent popular approaches concerning the construction of Kurdish identity, which has also attracted a vast number of Kurdish intelligentsia, is based on a politically oriented theory that brings into consideration the self/other opposition as the major structure in the construction of Kurdish identity. The present seminar seeks to argue for a theoretical approach based on which Kurdish identity is first studied within the area of Kurdish subject-ivity and not as a whole entity opposed to its other. Hence, otherness in this theory is to be examined within the identity of the Kurdish subject and not outside of it.
The argument of the present seminar moves from a matter of politics to a question in critical and cultural studies. Whereas Kurdish identity has been always thought of in terms of Kurdish culture, folklore, language, literature, and arts, Kurdish subject embodies the ideological representation of Kurdish identity. Hence, there is here a move from our general understanding of Kurdish identity to a critical investigation into the identity of the Kurdish subject.
The identity of the Kurdish subject is not only host to a number of ‘others,’ but also constructed by them because of their representation in Kurdish identity. The present seminar proposes that the Kurdish subject faces three ostensibly distinct but actually similar ‘others,’ which are: 1) Big External Other, which is the dominant ethnic majority, 2) Big Internal Others, which are the different ideological discourses in Kurdish identity, and 3) Small Internal Others, which are the manifestations of Big Internal Others in the subjectivity of the Kurdish subject.
The rational ego of the Kurdish subject is in conflict with these three sets of others, and, accordingly, it occupies only a small space in Kurdish subject-ivity. The three sets of others are so powerful that have given an ideological character not only to the Kurdish subject-ivity but also to the Kurdish rational ego that calls for independence and freedom.
Biography
Bakhtiar Sajjadi is Assistant Professor at the Department of English Language and Literature and General Linguistics, University of Kurdistan, Sine, Iran. He has taught courses on contemporary literary and cultural theory and criticism, history of British and American literature, critical terminology, and research methodology. He earned his first doctoral degree in 2007, and his dissertation was on the relation between critical philosophy and literary theories in modern criticism. He is currently working on his second PhD thesis at the University of Exeter, UK, where his main area of research is on ‘subject-ivity’ and the ways identity of the subject is constructed.
Among his publications are An Analytical Glossary of Literary and Critical Terms (in Kurdish, co-authored with Mohamad Mahmudi, 2003) and The Paradigm of Cultural Development (in Kurdish, 2004). He has also translated four books from English and Persian into Persian and Kurdish; two recent translations are Nation and Narration: A Study of Persian and Kurdish Narrative Discourse, by Dr. Hashem Ahmadzade, (in Persian, 2007), and Makhail Bakhtin: Passion of Dialogue, Laughter, and Freedom, selected essays by Bakhtin et al, (in Kurdish, 2008). In 2002, he was elected as Member of Kurdish Language Academy in Iran.
Prof Sadjadi is a promising figure in the history, art, philosophy and literature of the Kurds. This shows a glorious move, however unnoticed, into the making of a more of modern approach towards the studies conducted on the Kurdish question and Kurdish identity in general. The rational ego of the Kurds, as exemplified in the sketch of the very abstract, shows a detailed examination of the cultural strata which gives birth to it. This of course is a personal take off and uptake of what suggested therein. Hail Precocious Prof; Hang there.