"The Politics of Loss and the Poetics of Melancholy: A Case Study on Iraqi Turkmen" by Guldem Baykal Buyuksarac

Guldem Baykal Buyuksarac

Deposited 2010

Abstract
In this dissertation, I examine the question of politicized ethnicity in a transnational context where nationalism is put into service as a redemptive ideology to heal personal and collective wounds of historical traumas and marginalization. I try to understand how ethno-nationalism is organized as a process of identification and as a discursive regime dictating certain moral imperatives generative of a collective political subjectivity. The locus of my ethnographic research is largely a middle class Sunni community of Turkmen expatriates in Turkey, who have maintained a resilient politicized attachment to their hometown, Kirkuk, the oil-rich ancient city of northern Iraq.

I conceptualize ethno-nationalism as a melancholic process, marked by the subject‘s refusal to abandon its (lost) object of desire, which is, in this case, home (the city of Kirkuk) as well as ethnic identity (Turkness). I understand the melancholic tendencies of the ethnicized subject in terms of one‘s resistance against normalizing discourses (in the case of Iraq, Arabization and Kurdification). With a retrospective approach, I study the survival strategies that the Turkmen community has developed against the assimilation policies of Iraqi state. I explore the constitutive role of state and inter-communal violence in the formation of Turkmen ethnicity.

I also study the diasporic perspective on contemporary Turkmen politics in Iraq. I argue that the diasporic elite seeks to incorporate ethnic sentiments and (be)longings into a kind of civic nationalism and to justify the Turkmen claims of ethnic particularity based on universal principles of human rights. I maintain that this identity discourse, which foregrounds the civic bonds of the Turkmen to Iraq, has developed mainly in response to a Kurdish ethnocracy emerged in the post-2003 period.