Audible Futures: Scenes of Sonic Encounter in Cold War Kurdistan, 1923–2023

Author

Nicholas S. Glastonbury, The Graduate Center, City University of New YorkFollow

Date of Degree

9-2023

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Program

Anthropology

Advisor

Mandana Limbert

Committee Members

Karen Strassler

Katherine Verdery

Bruce Grant

Subject Categories

Broadcast and Video Studies | Communication Technology and New Media | Comparative Literature | Critical and Cultural Studies | Ethnomusicology | Film and Media Studies | Folklore | Human Geography | Mass Communication | Near and Middle Eastern Studies | Near Eastern Languages and Societies | Other International and Area Studies | Radio | Slavic Languages and Societies | Social and Cultural Anthropology | Soviet and Post-Soviet Studies

Keywords

sound studies, Middle Eastern Studies, empire, cold war, music, Kurdish studies

Abstract

This dissertation examines a century of cultural politics in Kurdistan, from 1923 to 2023, and it does so from a relatively marginal vantage point in most histories of Kurdistan: that of the Soviet Caucasus. It takes as its primary object the cultural and political itineraries of sonic media and listening in Kurdistan, from Soviet Kurdish radio broadcasting and pirated cassettes to postsocialist archives, DJ booths, and streaming music. These itineraries map not only the emergence and circulation of Kurdish notions of tradition, heritage, and cultural memory, but also the methods of counterinsurgency deployed by the states that occupy Kurdistan. In so doing, it shows how, over the course of a century, sonic media came to serve as technologies of cultural persuasion and vectors of Kurdish political affect.

1923 was a world-historical year for Kurdish history, not just because of the Treaty of Lausanne or even because of the establishment of the Republic of Turkey, but also because 1923 was the year in which the Soviet Union established an autonomous Kurdish administrative region (Kurdistanskiy uyezd) known popularly as Red Kurdistan. The Soviet nationalities policies (korenizatsiia) also took on substance and force in 1923, following a party congress in April of that year, and they had their greatest linguistic success in the republics of the southern Caucasus where most Soviet Kurds lived. In the space of greater Kurdistan, then, 1923 was a watershed year, setting the stage for the macropolitical and sociocultural structures that would inflect the scenes of sonic encounter explored throughout this dissertation.

Arguing that sound is always a social relation, I rely on counterpoint as both method and narrative structure to capture the resonances and dissonances of different media forms across space and time. I show how remediations of older media forms proliferate over time, even as intellectual property regimes, new media forms, and techniques of state discipline atomize listening publics. By following the dialectical interplay between the form and content of media, Audible Futures shows how sound exemplifies the insurgent and processual nature of social life and cultural practice.

The Soviet Caucasus offers a useful vantage point for exploring the origins of twentieth and twenty-first century Kurdish cultural politics for four reasons. First, it was cut off by the Iron Curtain from the rest of Kurdistan, riven as it was by ethnonationalist states, which insulated Kurdish intellectual cultural production there in crucial ways. Because of the aforementioned nationalities policies, Kurdish cultural production was afforded a degree of autonomy enjoyed nowhere else in Kurdistan: the first Kurdish novel, for instance, was published in the Soviet Union. Kurdish cultural producers consequently availed themselves of an opportunity to produce ethnographic and folkloric work that shaped the eventual emergence of Radio Yerevan’s Kurdish service, which I discuss below. Second, and relatedly, the Soviet Union played a significant role in both geopolitical conflicts and in the formation of Kurdish political imaginaries in the rest of Kurdistan. Beyond its involvement in supporting the rebellion that led to the Mahabad Republic or its supplying of materiel to Kurdish insurgent groups (including the PKK), the Soviet Union was also a hospitable destination for Kurdish intellectuals and political figures exiled from the rest of Kurdistan. The Soviet Caucasus thus served to incubate political figures in a tradition of Marxism-Leninism that would eventually percolate back into the cultural and political space of the rest of Kurdistan. Thirdly, the horizon of Kurdish politics from the Soviet Union seldom involved the telos of Kurdish nation-state. While the exact intentions of Kurdish cultural producers in the Soviet Caucasus are difficult to locate in archival materials because they were required to toe the party line, the works they produced envision national independence through the lens of internationalist socialism rather than the nation-state. Such a vision of independence reverberates with contemporary Kurdish critiques of the nation-state as a “bankrupt” form, and indeed cast retrospective light on the political horizons of earlier Kurdish cultural and political formations. Lastly, the unique perspective of postsocialism affords an unconventional but very useful view onto the residual forms of empire that continue to be exerted in Kurdistan. Soviet collapse has remade the landscape of Kurdish cultural production in the Soviet Caucasus for the worse: ethnonationalisms in the post-Soviet Caucasus, especially in Azerbaijan and Armenia, have relegated Kurdish cultural and political life even more to the margins (no longer are there quotas for the representation of non-titular minorities in political posts, as there had been in the Soviet era), while public spaces for Kurdish discourse have dwindled (through, for instance, the reduction of Kurdish-language broadcast hours on radio and television and the privatization of publishing). But it has also renegotiated the stakes of Soviet archival materials in ways that invite broader considerations of empire’s multiple and overlapping forms in Kurdistan writ large. The colonial domination of Kurdistan over the past century has ramified through imperial residues at the level of the nation-states of Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Sweden. But it is also legible at a more regional or global scale: as I discuss in the conclusion, for instance, present-day conflict over whether to admit Finland and Sweden to NATO amid the Russian war on Ukraine have been snarled by the abiding nature of the “Kurdish question” in ways that mirror early cold war diplomacy. From the perspective of the post-Soviet Caucasus, then, we can appraise the ongoing exertions of empire at several scales, ranging from the national and the regional to the global. In short, such a perspective opens up avenues for thinking not just the past and future of the cold war, but the past and future of empire itself.

Drawing on theories and methods from anthropology, history, ethnomusicology, and comparative literature, this project demonstrates how sonic media transgress not just national borders, but also conceptions of sovereignty and scales of belonging in the “shatter-zone” of Kurdistan. Because these scales of media practice cut across the obscurantist boundaries of region formations—themselves products of cold war epistemics—this project offers a novel perspective on Kurdistan and the contemporary making of the Middle East. In so doing, it shows how practices of sounding and listening not only animate shifting concepts of history, tradition, futurity, and belonging, but also confront ongoing conditions of cold war in Kurdistan.

In telling the history of Kurdish sonic media and scenes of sonic encounter, Audible Futures makes three main arguments. First, the Soviet use of Kurdish-language radio during the cold war distributed, through its broadcast footprint, a coherent imaginary of Kurdistan in ways that other media had not yet been able to. This had as much to do with the prohibitions on the Kurdish language across much of Kurdistan that constricted the possibility of imagined community as it did with the technical form particular to radio itself. As such, any understanding of twentieth-century Kurdish politics that does not account for the role of radio and the Soviet Union as imperial and diplomatic power is incomplete. Second, the transnational circulation of music depends on many forms of friction that link disparate localities into media circuits. Captured in archival materials as well as ethnographic encounters, these frictions illuminate the operations of and contradictions in global and transnational forces such as the cold war, structural adjustment, political economy, and the Internet. Third, and relatedly, “old” media like radio and cassettes are not constrained by the time or space of their popularity, but have been subject to constant material and digital remediation. Listening to and remediating older media is a means for younger generations to configure how they interact with one another in new media landscapes. These remediations demonstrate how the durabilities of the socialist past, of Soviet empire, continue to resound across space and time, producing not merely “ruination” or “debris” but new practices of being in community and modes of imagining and relating to both past and future.

Recommended Citation

Glastonbury, Nicholas S., "Audible Futures: Scenes of Sonic Encounter in Cold War Kurdistan, 1923–2023" (2023). CUNY Academic Works.
https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/5559