Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Table of Contents
- Preface
- 1 Connecting Modernities: A Global Update
- Part I Modernity as We Know It: Narratives of Modernity across the Disciplines
- Part II Modernity under Fire: Critiques, Challenges, and Revisions
- Part III In the Shadow of the Pandemic
- Part IV Imagining New Global Frameworks: Democracy and Modernity-to-Come
- Index
7 - Criticism of “Colonial Modernity” through Kurdish Decolonial Approaches
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 April 2022
- Frontmatter
- Table of Contents
- Preface
- 1 Connecting Modernities: A Global Update
- Part I Modernity as We Know It: Narratives of Modernity across the Disciplines
- Part II Modernity under Fire: Critiques, Challenges, and Revisions
- Part III In the Shadow of the Pandemic
- Part IV Imagining New Global Frameworks: Democracy and Modernity-to-Come
- Index
Summary
Abstract
Western modernity with its colonial application has created an identity trauma and patriarchal domination of the memory of colonized and oppressed peoples. Critiques from colonized territories encourage us to reread the colonial epistemes of modernity, whether or not centered on the West. The Kurdish political movement thus defines a new interpretation of modernity based on the critique of colonialism and global capitalism: “democratic modernity.” This chapter problematizes the relations between modernity, the nation state, the destruction of ecology, social confinement, the relationship of the forces of these relations, but above all the modalities by which it becomes possible to act on them to break the “stalemate” of the modernity of thought in the twenty-first century.
Keywords: Kurdish space; Kurdish modernity; subaltern modernity; democratic modernity; decoloniality; stateless society
This article aims to question the complex reading of modernity in the Kurdish space and its critical decolonial approaches to the power and “knowledge”1 of “colonial modernity” in the Middle East, but especially in Turkey. The colonially-constructed entity known as Kurdistan involves a certain intellectual contradiction among the dominant societies in the Middle East (Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Syria) which contributes to the practice of coloniality (Vali 2011, introd. and 1–25, and Hawzhen Rashadaddin, 2015). The intellectual thought of colonial modernity in the Middle East in regard to the Kurdish region follows and has one thing in common with the thought of colonial practice: an act of concealment and ignorance of Kurdish existence. Jacobin intellectuals of the dominant society regard the Kurds as a part of those dominant societies (Beşikçi 2013a; Eagleton 1963; Bozarslan 2001b; Henning 2018; Yeğen 2014 and 1999). In this approach, the reflection of dominant and colonial modernity lies in the political and cultural authoritarianism which marks racial relations and the balance of power over the Kurds and their territory. Indeed, using the terms “subaltern modernity” and “decoloniality” calls into question this expression of colonialism. That is to say, this questioning gives us another possibility by encompassing the past and present of a colonial racial power system in the Middle East based on a political-cultural denial and an epistemic interiorization of the “Other society” and its knowledge (the knowledge of aboriginal people).
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- Global Modernity from Coloniality to PandemicA Cross-Disciplinary Perspective, pp. 159 - 186Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2022