Revolutionary Meaning-Making in the Context of War and Counterinsurgency with Dilar Dirik

CRITIQUE Seminar, co-badged with GENDER.ED.

This lecture explores the role of anti-colonial and revolutionary art and history-writing in the Kurdistan Freedom Movement.

The international terror-labelling of the PKK is a major political obstacle for genuine and free intellectual and political engagement with what is one of the longest-standing and constantly growing anti-colonial movements in the world today. Over the past decade, in the context of the war in Syria, the Kurdish struggle has sparked interest among different political and intellectual circles, from anti-systemic social movements to states and state-affiliated institutions, including intelligence services and militaries. Unfolding on a frontline of geopolitical confrontation, Kurdistan and the Middle East are simultaneously sites of decolonization and complex forms of neo-colonial intervention. As such, ideologically charged battles for narratives continue to have great implications for knowledge production and understanding.

Taking a radical social history approach, the lecture sheds light on the ways in which the Kurdistan Freedom Movement conceives and produces self-determined historiography, with a particular focus on its works in the realm of art and culture. The movement strategically curates and reproduces community, history, meaning, and politics based on its revolutionary value system, in an atmosphere shaped by criminalization and counterinsurgency. Through this, it advances its theoretical and practical efforts to resist capitalism and patriarchy and to build popular self-determination based on its ideological paradigm, whose stated pillars are radical democracy, women's liberation and ecology.

The lecture closes with a discussion of epistemological, historiographical, and political implications of tensions within revolutionary meaning-making in the context of imperialist intervention in the region, as well as reflections on the ethics and politics of knowledge production on movements affected by counterinsurgency, in a global climate of political repression.