14. Reconfiguring the Kurdish Nation on YouTube : Spatial Imaginations, Revolutionary Lyrics, and Colonial Knowledge Andrea Fischer-Tahir Abstract Around the globe, colonized nations and indigenous peoples make use of colonial photography of the nineteenth and early 20th century to provide documentation of oppression, slavery, and extinction, as well as of resist- ance and survival. In Iraqi Kurdish nationalist discourse, for example, this mode of representation can be observed from the 1960s and the first Kurdish modern guerrilla war. The digital age has multiplied the pos- sibilities of translocating knowledge and has promoted Kurdish national aspirations for a nation state. Yet, this chapter will show that colonial images of the Kurdish bodies and of Kurdistan’s geography still have use value in identity discourses shaped by the aid of social media and mobile media, which bears witness to the simultaneity of modes of representation. Keywords: Youtube, Kurdistan, cultural memory, nation Marx wrote in 1852 that women and men ‘make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; […] but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past’ (1972, p. 115). As Marx is still popular in Kurdish nationalist discourse, at least among its left wing,1 I will take him as a point of departure to discuss aspects of nationalist space production in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (Herêm-î Kurdistan), or as the Kurds alternatively call it, South Kurdistan (Kurdistan-î başûr). However, this 1 Recently, Capital has been translated from Persian into Kurdish Sorani; to this day, Kurdish leftists, at least in Iraq, have relied on the Arabic or Persian translations. Strohmaier, A. and A. Krewani (eds.), Media and Mapping Practices in the Middle East and North Africa: Producing Space. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021 doi 10.5117/9789462989092_ch14 300 ANDREA FISCHER-TAHIR chapter more or less leaves aside the conflicts over new borders established by the Kurdish movement, as well as over resources (oil, gas, and water, for example) and political power that usually preoccupy studies on Kurdistan in Iraq (Stansfield 2003; Natali 2010; Zedalis 2012). Instead, this chapter predominantly deals with the discursive side of space-making and with representations of history and geography in discourses on Kurdish identity. This chapter will first expound the problems of Kurdistan in geography – that is, ‘the Kurds’ place’ in metageographies (Lewis and Wigen 1997), on the one hand, and Kurdish representations challenging the hegemonic geographical order, on the other. The second section will provide some notes on the issue of colonialism in the context of Kurdistan, and it will shed light on the colonial heritage in imaginations of Kurdistan and the Kurds, shifting the analytical perspective from the ‘perceived’ to the ‘conceived space’ (Lefebvre 1991). In the third section, I will discuss a YouTube video representing a Kurd- ish anthem as well as photographic documents of Kurdish revolts between 1918 and 1991. The discussion aims to identify and contextualize imaginations of geography and history in this particular discourse. The question is to what extent cultural heritage and colonial knowledge are constructed as opposition or to what extent these different corpora of ‘substantive assertions and ideas’ to ‘act on the world’ (Barth 2002, p. 2) become harmonized to conceive of Kurdistan as a geographical entity of historical legitimacy. The discussion will exemplify how those constraints resulting from pre-existing circumstances structure practices of representation. It will become clear that the specific experience of European as well as of internal colonialism in the context of Kurdistan resulted in an ambivalent relationship to European colonialism and its respective discourses ‘to tame’ the unfamiliar Oriental (Said 2003, p. 54). Metageography and Dissident Geography The number of Kurds in the MENA (Middle East and North Africa) region, Caucasus, Central Asia,2 and the diaspora in Europe varies between 36 and 45 million, depending on sources such as official state censuses, assess- ments of human rights groups, or international organizations such as the European Commission. In their homeland, Kurds make up approximately 85 per cent of the population.3 The problems of assessments in terms of 2 For Kurds in the Caucasus and for deportations to Central Asia, see Müller 2000. 3 See: http://www.institutkurde.org/en/info/the-kurdish-population-1232551004 (last accessed 17 November 2020). ReOF C N IGURING THE KURDISH NATION ON YOUTUBE 301 numbers predominantly result from politics of marginalization, oppres- sion, and cultural assimilation pursued by the Iranian, Turkish, Iraqi, and Syrian states since their respective independence. In Turkey, for example, the existence of Kurds has been denied for many decades, whereas state politics in Iraq involved the vague acceptance of cultural difference to the Arab main population as well as genocidal persecution.4 In contrast to the statistical numbers and the relatively compact territory of settlement, Kurds are labelled ‘minority’ not only in the administrative logic of the states where they live but also in international political and academic imaginations of the MENA region. The term ‘minority’ is deeply embedded in legal discourses on the protection and rights of non-dominant groups within states, defined in terms of nation, ethnicity, religion, language, and/or indigeneity. Yet, the definition of majorities and minorities depends on scale (Derichs 2017, p. 35) as well as on the system of reference; namely, the geographical order of the world. Martin W. Lewis and Kären E. Wigen argue that there is a ‘set of spatial structures through which people order their knowledge of the world: the often unconscious frameworks that organize studies of history, sociology, anthropology, economics, political science, or even natural history’ (1997, p. ix). They call these imaginations about the segmentation of the world into continents, subcontinents, world regions, and states ‘metageographies’. These frameworks, however, are the result of historical processes – namely, capitalism, colonialism, and nation-building – and at the same time these frames persist due to geopolitical power relations, normalization, and educa- tion; the prevailing Eurocentrism inherent to knowledge production; and the authoritative ‘myth of the nation state’ (Lewis and Wigen 1997, p. 7). From my perspective, it is striking that despite the constructivist turn in studies on nations and nationalism and the canonic status of Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities, inquiry in social science and the hu- manities continues to rely on internationally recognized nation states as a system of reference. Consequently, when ‘minorities’ manage to establish command over areas of their settlement, these territories are still conceived of as anomalous, if not as a security problem or threat to the regional order (Nolutshungu 1996; Caspersen and Stansfield 2011). One such ‘anomaly’ is the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. This administratively and politically semi-independent unit is first and foremost the outcome of a decades-long struggle of the Kurdish movement, a movement that is in itself heterogeneous and conflictual, and at the same time transnationally entangled with strands of the Kurdish movement in Turkey, Syria, and 4 For an overview of Kurdish history, see McDowall 1996. 302 ANDREA FISCHER-TAHIR Iran. Governed by the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) since 1992, the territory comprises 73,000 spare kilometres, making up 20 per cent of Iraqi territory. The borders of the region are disputed, under constant pressure, and subject to military conflict. These borders, however, are the result of the Kurdish uprising in March 1991 and the events that followed in that spring: brutal repression of the revolt by the Iraqi regime, international humanitar- ian intervention, establishment of a no-flight zone under predominantly US protection, and negotiations between the Kurdish parties and the Iraqi regime (Cook 1995). In May 1992, the Kurds elected their own parliament and constituted the Kurdistan Region, whose borders coincide more or less with the borders of the governorates of Dohuk, Erbil, and Sulaimaniya. During the war of 2003, which led to the overthrow of the Iraqi regime, and during the war against the Islamic State since 2014, the Kurds have expanded their territory. In September 2017, the Kurdistan Regional Government held a referendum for independence with more than 90 per cent of the votes cast agreeing to separation from Iraq. The Iraqi central government, as well as Iran and Turkey reacted promptly with embargo, political isolation of the KRG and military reconquest of Kirkuk and other parts of South Kurdistan. Indeed, Kurds in Iraq speak about the area in question as ‘Kurdistan’, ‘region’ (herêm), ‘homeland’ (welat), or ‘South Kurdistan’ (Kurdistan-î başûr). This latter term partly results from British and French colonial partition of the Middle East. Kurdish geography describes the homeland of the Kurdish people as situated in West Asia (xorawe-î asiya) and segmented into North, West, East and South Kurdistan, with each of the single parts ‘under the command’ (bindestî) of Turkey, Syria, Iran, and Iraq, respectively. Alternative views add to Greater Kurdistan a Northeastern part; namely, the Kurdish settlements in the Caucasus. The territory comprises between 475,000 and 506,000 square kilometres, depending