Defining the nation: Kurdish historiography in Turkey in the 1990s

The subject of this article is Kurdish historiography in Turkey in the 1990s and especially the way in which it constructs, defines and reworks Kurdish national identity.1 Although a number of studies exist regarding the relationship between historiography and national identify in the presence of a central state, the Kurdish national movement has not yet been the subject of such inquiry.2 The sources used are articles from the only Kurdish daily newspaper published in Turkey and partly in Germany (Özgür Gündem [Free Agenda] and its successors), which has hitherto not been a subject of research. Using these sources I will show that Kurdish national history has been a topic of great debate among Kurdish intellectuals. On the basis of analysis of this debate I will put forth the following arguments: (i) the discursive space of this historiography has been mainly determined by the Turkish national discourse in its popular version, and (ii) identity in the Kurdish society has been constructed mainly around the core layer of ethnicity, whereas it was based on religion or class in preceding periods.