Note from Non-People: A Conversation with Serhat Tutkal and Hevin Karakurt on Kurdish History, Language, Culture

Today it’s a special honor to welcome 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 languages and territories. In this way, she works on the question of how a literature of a collective that shares neither one nation nor any one language might function. Before coming to Stanford, she worked as a researcher in the Swiss National Science Foundation funded research project “Half-Truths. Truth, Fiction, and Conspiracy in the ‘Post-Factual’ Age”, at the University of Basel.

Serhat Tutkal is a Kurdish academic. He is a postdoctoral researcher funded by the Secretariat of Science, Humanities, Technology and Innovation (Secihti) in Mexico. He has a PhD from Universidad Nacional de Colombia (Bogotá) with a dissertation on the legitimation and delegitimation of Colombian state violence. He mainly works on violence, racism, and dehumanization in West Asia and Latin America