We found a match
Your institution may have access to this item. Find your institution then sign in to continue.
- Title
Obscured Hybridity: The Kurdishness of Turkish Folk Music.
- Authors
Hough, Christina
- Abstract
Postcolonial scholars have explored how "hybridity" in cultural forms and practices might resist the power of colonial discourses. Homi Bhaba, in particular, has explored ways in which hybridity and mimicry expose the contradictions within power structures based on the construction of difference. Turkey, however, offers a complicating case study for notions of postcoloniality. After the end of the Ottoman Empire and the formation of the Turkish Republic, the country saw a concerted effort on the part of the state to assert its legitimacy on the basis of "sameness," with certain types of difference being dismissed as "foreign." On this basis, the Kurdish language was officially declared to be no more than a bastardized Persian dialect picked up by "Turks" on the border who had forgotten their authentic "Turkishness." Likewise, music from Eastern Turkey/Western Kurdistan became reconstituted as "Turkish" in state archives, and in the repertoires of popular singers who had to obscure their Kurdish origins in order to build their careers. While these examples of "hybridity" may seem to serve an agenda of assimilation more readily than any postcolonial dream of resistance, this paper asks in what ways they can be used to reveal the constructed nature of hegemonic "Turkishness." It considers Kardes Türküler's recording of "Kara Üzüm Habbesi"-which refuses to definitively assign the song either Turkish or Kurdish origins-and asks whether such "hybrid" songs can be used to challenge the reified boundaries between "Turkish" and "Kurdish," or the binary of "foreign" and familiar.
- Subjects
TURKEY; FOLK music; TURKISH music; SCHOLARS; BHABA, Homi; KURDISH folk songs
- Publication
Pacific Review of Ethnomusicology, 2010, Vol 15, p1
- ISSN
1096-1291
- Publication type
Article