Embattled Dreamlands

Winner of the 2021 annual book award of the Central Eurasian Studies Society (CESS). “David Leupold’s exceptional book explores the complex and contested Turkish, Kurdish, and Armenian visions of homeland in the greater Van region of contemporary Turkey. Through a layered analysis of collective violence, constructed national histories, and imagined homelands, Embattled Dreamlands demonstrates how violence and population displacement in the early 1900s produced homeland imaginaries and mutually exclusive interpretations of the past. Based on five years of ethnographic and historical research, Leupold’s rich tapestry of Ottoman and Soviet history, imagined geographies, and national narratives makes unique theoretical contributions to studies of collective memory and provides an insightful and impartial assessment of sectarian and national identities. The book invites us to evaluate critically and carefully our past and its impact on our contemporary imagined worlds.” Embattled Dreamlands explores the complex relationship between competing national myths, imagined boundaries and local memories in the threefold-contested geography referred to as Eastern Turkey, Western Armenia or Northern Kurdistan. Spatially rooted in the shatter zone of the post-Ottoman and post-Soviet space, it sheds light on the multi-layered memory landscape of the Lake Van region in Southeastern Turkey, where collective violence stretches back from the Armenian Genocide to the Kurdish conflict of today. Based on his fieldwork in Turkey and Armenia, the author examines how states work to construct and monopolize collective memory by narrating, silencing, mapping and performing the past, and how these narratives might help to contribute and resolve present-day conflicts. By looking at how national discourses are constructed and asking hard questions about why nations are imagined as exclusive and hostile to others, Embattled Dreamlands provides a unique insight into the development of national identity which will provide a great resource to students and researchers in sociology and history alike.

This major new history of the Ottoman dynasty reveals a diverse empire that straddled East and West. The Ottoman Empire has long been depicted as the Islamic, Asian antithesis of the Christian, European West. But the reality was starkly different: the Ottomans’ multiethnic, multilingual, and multireligious domain reached deep into Europe’s heart. Indeed, the Ottoman rulers saw themselves as the new Romans. Recounting the Ottomans’ remarkable rise from a frontier principality to a world empire, historian Marc David Baer traces their debts to their Turkish, Mongolian, Islamic, and Byzantine heritage. The Ottomans pioneered religious toleration even as they used religious conversion to integrate conquered peoples. But in the nineteenth century, they embraced exclusivity, leading to ethnic cleansing, genocide, and the empire’s demise after the First World War. The Ottomans vividly reveals the dynasty’s full history and its enduring impact on Europe and the world.

"'Raise your voice!' and 'Speak up!' are familiar refrains that assume, all too easily, that all who speak do so for themselves, and that doing so will lead to empowerment, healing, and reconciliation. Marlene Schäfers's Voices that Matter reveals where such assumptions fall short, demonstrating that "raising one's voice" is, in some contexts, an endeavor full of anxieties, struggles, and discontents. In its attention to the voice as form, this book examines not only what voices say, but also how they do so. By focusing on the social labor that voices carry out as they travel, vibrate, and produce sound, Schäfers shows that where new vocal practices arise, they can produce new selves and practices of social relations. Few examples bring this into relief as effectively as the Kurdish context. Written texts have existed mostly on the margins of Kurdish popular culture, whereas oral genres have a long, rich legacy. As Kurdish voices gain increasing moral and political value as metaphors of empowerment, representation, and resistance, these genres are rapidly changing. As she traces the transformations in how Kurdish women relate to and employ their voices, Schäfers illustrates that "gaining voice" is no straightforward path to liberation, especially when one's voice can be selectively appropriated in empty displays of pluralist representation"--

This edited volume brings together ten compelling ethnographic case studies from a range of global settings to explore how people build metalinguistic communities defined not by use of a language, but primarily by language ideologies and symbolic practices about the language. The authors examine themes of agency, belonging, negotiating hegemony, and combating cultural erasure and genocide in cultivating meaningful metalinguistic communities. Case studies include Spanish and Hebrew in the USA, Kurdish in Japan, Pataxó Hãhãhãe in Brazil, and Gallo in France. The afterword, by Wesley L. Leonard, provides theoretical and on-the-ground context as well as a forward-looking focus on metalinguistic futurities. This book will be of interest to interdisciplinary students and scholars in applied linguistics, linguistic anthropology and migration studies.

Is there a traitor at Dreamland? When Muslim extremists are found with a mysterious UAV in the Malaysian part of Borneo, Colonel Danny Freah and his Whiplash team are sent to investigate. They discover that Dreamland's drone technology has been stolen. Who has betrayed them? China is rumored to be involved, as is Russia. But finding out who's really bankrolling the guerrillas means finding someone who knows combat UAVs inside and out. Someone with nothing to lose. Someone like Air Force ace Turk Mako. Yet as Mako and Freah learn, the conspiracy is deeper and darker than either imagined. With the situation worsening, the Whiplash team finds itself in a desperate race to recover their aircraft and capture the perpetrators—without setting off World War III.

What is thinking but the courage to work alone developing concepts that are lasting because they grow out of a living relationship to a subject matter. Academic fashions come and go while the thought of the social anthropologist George Becker remains the contemporary of the future. Here assembled by his student and friend, the psychiatrist Jon Lewis, some of the essential papers unpublished in Beckers lifetime. The range is great: from Female Delinquency to Jonestown. The depth is compelling. The critique of other thinkers in the field are incisive. And a final virtue: the style is clear, without the need for scholarly obfuscations. Walter A Davis, Professor of English Emeritus, Ohio State University. Author of Deaths Dream Kingdom, Deracination and Inwardness and Existence.

The Kurdish question is one of the most complicated and protracted conflicts of the Middle East and will never be resolved unless it is finally defined. The majority of the Kurdish people live in Turkey, which gives the country a unique position in the larger Kurdish conundrum. Society in Turkey is deeply divided over the definition and even existence of the Kurdish question, and this uncertainty has long manifested itself in its complete denial, or in accusations of political rivals of ‘separatism’ and even ‘treason’. Turkey’s Kurdish Question explores how these denial and acknowledgement dynamics often reveal pre-existing political ideology and agenda priorities, themselves becoming political actions. While the very term "Kurdish question" is discussed in the academic literature as a given, a new and systemic study is required to deconstruct and analyze the constitutive parts of this discursive construct. This book provides the first comprehensive study and analysis of the discursive constructions and perceptions of what is broadly defined as the "Kurdish question" in Turkish, European and American political cultures. Furthermore, its new methodological approach to the study of discourse and politics of secessionist conflicts can be applied to many similar intra-state conflict cases. Turkey’s Kurdish Question would suit students and scholars of Middle East studies, Conflict studies and Comparative Politics, as well as Turkish or Kurdish studies. H. Akın Ünver is an assistant professor of international relations at Kadir Has University. This book is based on his dissertation ‘Defining Turkey’s Kurdish Question‘, which has won the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) 2010 Malcolm H. Kerr award for the best dissertation in the field of social sciences.

The twentieth century saw dramatic changes in the once Kurd-dominated Kirkuk region of Iraq. Despite having repeatedly relied on the Kurdish population of Iraq for military support, on three occasions the United States have abandoned their supposed allies in Kirkuk. The Great Betrayal provides a political and diplomatic history of the Kirkuk region and its international relations from the 1920s to the present day. Based on first-hand interviews and previously unseen sources, it provides an accessible account of a region at the very heart of America's foreign policy priorities in the Middle East. In September 2017, Iraqi Kurdistan held an independence referendum, intended to be a starting point on negotiations with the Iraqi Government in Baghdad on the terms of a friendly divorce. Though the US, Turkey, and Iran opposed it, the referendum passed with 93% of the vote. Rather than negotiate, Iraq's Prime Minister Heider al-Abadi issued an ultimatum and then attacked the region. Iraq's Kurdish population have been abandoned, once again, by their supposed allies in the US. In this book, David L. Phillips reveals the failings of America's policies towards Kirkuk and the devastating effects of betraying an ally.