Title: RADIO KURDISTAN: IRAQI KURDISH MUSIC, COLONIAL POWER, AND THE TRANSMISSION OF TRADITION
Author: JON EDWARD BULLOCK
Place of publication: CHICAGO, ILLINOIS.USA
Publisher: THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO
Release date: JUNE 2022

For centuries, Kurds have lived at the edges of empire. This liminal status has often resulted in the suppression or outright decimation of Kurdish language, culture, and bodies. When Western colonial intervention in the early twentieth century led to the creation of the modern Middle East, Kurds found themselves once again divided by political boundaries created to serve the needs of colonial powers. This dissertation examines the ways in which this division has impacted musical practice among Iraqi Kurds. Rather than arguing (as do some postcolonial scholars) that colonial ruptures have rendered musical tradition impossible, I contend that the realm of musical practice represents a key site for the contestation and critique not only of colonial power, but also of the temporal and spatial logics underpinning that power and ensuring its continuing legacy into the present. Central to this response have been technologies of sound, a category within which I include more obvious examples such as recording and broadcasting technologies, but also the human voice. Even while acknowledging the ways in which colonial power made certain of these technologies possible in the first place, I argue that Iraqi Kurdish musicians have used these technologies to define themselves in ways that defy the designations of their colonizers. In Chapter 1, I examine historical representations of Kurdish musical practice in a wide range of documents including nineteenth-century travelogues and twentieth-century liner notes, drawing out the ways in which many of these works reflect certain colonial logics of place and time. In Chapter 2, I examine the impact of colonial power on various sound technologies, interrogating the ways in which these same technologies ultimately became sites of resistance. In Chapter 3, I offer a historical overview of Kurdish radio broadcasts, which have contributed to the formation of a transnational Kurdish listening public and have shaped contemporary Kurdish musical practice in profound ways. Finally, in Chapter 4, I build on ethnographic research to examine the ways in which contemporary Iraqi Kurdish musicians and music educators are now involved in relating broader histories of Kurdish musical tradition and are invested in transmitting this tradition to future generations. [1]