"Note from Non-People": Kurdish History, Language & Culture with SERHAT TUTKAL & HEVIN KARAKURT

About this episode

The episode discusses Kurdish history, culture, and the impact of statelessness and violence on identity, featuring insights from scholars Serhat Tutkal and Hevin Karakurt.

How does the literature of a collective that shares neither one nation nor any one language function? What can the study of state violence in Latin America teach us about the dehumanization occurring in West Asia? And how do we imagine paths out of generations of violence to build new utopias? In this episode of the Speaking Out of Place podcast, Professor David Palumbo-Liu talks with Serhat Tutkal and Hevin Karakurt to Speaking Out of Place. These two scholars engage in a broad discussion of Kurdish history, culture, politics, literature and language, with particular attention to issues of statelessness, identity, and violence. We talk about the current moment with regard to Turkey, Syria, Palestine, and the US-Israel war on Iran and beyond. We use as a starting poet Serhat’s remarkable essay, “Note from Non-People,” and then move to a discussion of his work on dehumanization. We end with imagining paths out of cycles of violence and dehumanization, and consider specifically the way we might imagine new sorts of utopias and vistas of life-affirmation. Hevin Karakurt is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at Stanford University, where she studies Kurdish literature across…

People in this episode

Host: David Palumbo-Liu

Guests: Serhat Tutkal, Hevin Karakurt

Topics covered

• Kurdish history
• language and culture
• statelessness
• identity
• violence
• utopias

Keywords

• Kurdish literature
• state violence
• dehumanization
• cultural identity
• utopias
• Comparative Literature

Mentioned in this episode

Books & works: Note from Non-People

Places: Turkey, Syria, Palestine, US-Israel, Iran

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