Since its emergence in the 1920s, Iraqi-Kurdish theatre was used as a tool of national identity building and modernisation. It promoted literacy, education and women's rights and became one of the most visible forms of Kurdish cultural nationalism by exploring folklore, myths, legends and local history and by celebrating heroes of the past. As time went on, by staging anti-feudalist and anti-monarchist plays, theatre became engaged in representing and legitimising the wider political movement in Iraq that ultimately led to the overthrow of the monarchy in 1958. Between 1975-1991, even under strict censorship during the Baath rule, Kurdish theatre continued to promote Kurdish nationalism and resistance through the use of Kurdish folk culture and literature. This book is based on dramatic texts from the period, interviews with Kurdish theatre artists, Kurdish theatre histories, historical documents, and journalistic accounts. It illustrates the ways in which theatre participated in the Kurdish national struggle and how it responded to political changes in different historical periods. It is the first book dedicated to Kurdish theatre and complements the latest research that examines theatre in its wider socio-political context.

The aftermath of the 22 July 2009 election : economic development versus language rights -- The closure cases against the AKP and DTP : Ergenekon and mother tongue education -- Islamists versus Kurdish nationalism -- Renewed intensified armed conflict -- Differences among Kurdish nationalist movements and increased campaign rhetoric -- The "war of words" takes center stage -- Into 2009 : Ergenekon atrocities and the election -- The Davos dèmarche and its aftermath -- The campaign heats up and spreads to the Kurdistan regional government -- Into the home stretch -- Week to go.

Folklore has been a phenomenon based on nostalgic and autochthonous nuances conveyed with a story-telling technique with a penchant for over-playing and nationalistic pomp and circumstance, often with significant consequences for societal, poetic, and cultural areas. These papers highlight challenges that have an outreaching relationship to the regional, rhetorical, and trans-rhetorical devices and manners in Kurdish folklore, which subscribes to an ironic sense of hope all the while issuing an appeal for a largely unaccomplished nationhood, simultaneously insisting on a linguistic solidarity. In a folkloric literature that has an overarching theory of poetics – perhaps even trans-figurative cognitive poetics due to the multi-faceted nature of its application and the complexity of its linguistic structure – the relationship of man (and less frequently woman) with others takes center stage in many of the folkloric creations. Arts are not figurative representations of the real in the Kurdish world; they are the real.

This 2006 book analyses the Kurdish question through the lens of social movement theory.

The Kurds, once marginal in the study of the Middle East and secondary in its international relations, have moved to centre stage in recent years. The contributors to The Kurdish Question Revisited offer insights into how this once seemingly intractable, immutable phenomenon is being transformed amid the new political realities of the Middle East.

The position of the 19 million Kurds is an extremely complex one. Their territory is divided between 5 sovereign states, none of which have a Kurdish majority. They speak widely divergent dialects, and are also divided by religious affiliations and social factors. It has taken the tragic and horrifying events in Iraq this year to bring the Kurds to the centre of the world stage, but their particular problems, and their considerable geo-political importance, have been the source of growing concern and interest during the last two to three decades. There is a remarkable dearth of reliable and up-to-date information about the Kurds, which this book remedies. Its contributors cover social and political issues, legal questions, religion, language, and the modern history of Kurds in Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Syria and the Soviet Union. The Kurds will be an invaluable source of reference for students and specialists in Middle East studies, and those concerned with wider questions of nationalism and cultural identity. It also offers extremely useful background information for those with a professional concern for the numerous Kurdish immigrants and asylum seekers in Western Europe and North America.

This book investigates the forgotten years of Kurdish nationalism in Iran, from the fall of the Kurdish republic to the advent of the Iranian revolution. An original and path-breaking investigation of the period, it sheds light not only on the historical specificity of the phenomenon of nationalism in exile, but also on the political processes and practices defining the development of Kurdish nationalism in the post-revolutionary era. Although nationalist landmarks such as the Kurdish republic in 1946 and the resurgence of the movement in the revolutionary conjuncture of 1978-79 have attracted the attention of historians and social scientists in recent years, little is known about the three decades of Kurdish nationalism in exile between these two events. This analysis draws on contemporary poststructuralist theory to question the concept of the minority in democratic and constitutional theory, arguing that it is an effect of the discursive linkage between sovereign power and the dominant ethnic-linguistic identity in the nation-state. This text will appeal to a wide academic audience ranging from the fields of Kurdish, Iranian and Middle East Studies to ethnicity, nationalism, government, and political science.

The Cambridge History of the Kurds is an authoritative and comprehensive volume exploring the social, political and economic features, forces and evolution amongst the Kurds, and in the region known as Kurdistan, from the fifteenth to the twenty-first century. Written in a clear and accessible style by leading scholars in the field, the chapters survey key issues and themes vital to any understanding of the Kurds and Kurdistan including Kurdish language; Kurdish art, culture and literature; Kurdistan in the age of empires; political, social and religious movements in Kurdistan; and domestic political developments in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Other chapters on gender, diaspora, political economy, tribes, cinema and folklore offer fresh perspectives on the Kurds and Kurdistan as well as neatly meeting an exigent need in Middle Eastern studies. Situating contemporary developments taking place in Kurdish-majority regions within broader histories of the region, it forms a definitive survey of the history of the Kurds and Kurdistan.