Browsing by Subject "Struggle"

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Broken (his)tories inside restored walls : Kurds, Armenians and the cultural politics of reconstruction in urban Diyarbakir, Turkey
(2014-06-25) Sengul, Serap Ruken; Ali, Kamran Asdar, 1961-; Visweswaran, Kamala; Stewart, Kathleen C; Speed, Shannon; Cvetkovich, Ann
An old and long-contested city located in Northern Mesopotamia, Diyarbakır was multiply decimated and refashioned throughout the twentieth century. After serving as a coordinating center of the Armenian Genocide, the city became a strategic target of Turkish Republican policies of Turkifying history, space and the Kurds, and then the epicenter of Kurdish struggle as of 1970s. Since the 2000s, a comprehensive politics of reconstruction organized around an oppositional idiom of multiculturalism has brought Diyarbakır’s ancient urban historical heritage to the fore of the conflict between the Kurds and the Turkish state. In this process, a wide range of critical actors, including Kurdish dissidents, articulated for Diyarbakır a powerful “city of culture” image for reclaiming the city’s violently foreclosed non-Turkish (Kurdish) and non-Muslim (Armenian) heritages. However, the revelatory promise of this new representational regime was limited by rendering the meaning and significance of all phenomena that circulated in the city as witness to Diyarbakir’s cosmopolitan cultural heritage. As a result, the disquieting histories of political violence of the recent past often remained suppressed. Furthermore, because the city as exterior space is typically coded as male, this narrative put forward an archive of Diyarbakir’s past and present as essentially male, imagined and narrated through a middle-class male gaze, experience and voice. Based on eighteen-months of fieldwork begun in August 2006 followed by archival and secondary research at multiple sites, this dissertation critically analyzes the cultural politics of reconstruction in Diyarbakır by unpacking its culturalist and classed overdeterminations. Specifically, I take this politics as an entry point into differently embodied histories and experiences of Kurdishness, Armeniannes, and manhood involved in the processes of Turkish state-making and Kurdish nation-building in the city for the past century. I do this by tracing alternative genealogies of four gendered figures, namely Kirve, “the uncircumcised terrorist,” șehir çocuğu, and qirix, which have effectively marked male experiences of violence, oppression and struggle from time of the Armenian genocide to the present. This work contributes to ethnography of the Kurds, Armenians and the Turkish state, as well as to literatures on state sovereignty, nationalism, gender and masculinity, and urban geographies of (post)conflict.
The future of Alcântara is not (just) rocket science : quilombola epistemologies and the struggle for territoriality
(2021-08-31) Pereira Júnior, Davi; Sletto, Bjørn; Wagner, Alfredo; Paixão, Marcelo; Hale, Charles; Torres, Rebecca
This dissertation provides a narrative of events from the point of view of quilombola communities. Part of my concern is to show how quilombolas think, feel, and interpret the acts of violence perpetrated against them and against their territories by the nation state, but I also seek to show how quilombolas feel and live their territories, their identity, and their collective existences. I analyze how the processes of resistance to threats to territories were built and nurtured from their collective territorialities, and how territorial epistemologies contribute to the formation of ethnic territories. I also analyze the emergence of social movements to show how the quilombolas have established a network of relationships that allow them to act at different levels, both nationally as well as internationally. I describe how they managed to access and transform international human rights mechanisms such as the OAS Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and ILO Convention 169 into political arenas where they play a leading role. My principal goal is to show how the quilombolas have resisted the state for over 40 years based on the affirmation of their identity. This affirmation of identity, which is built on their remaining in their territories, has allowed the quilombolas to reproduce their way of life. However, territorial insecurity due to the lack of effective territorial rights has made it difficult for communities to plan their future.