"I Am Asian": Kurdish Diasporas, Interconnected Racial Geographies, and Asian America

Abstract:Kurdish communities are often imagined through Area Studies frameworks and their Western colonial afterlives that refuse a fuller engagement with forms of self-identification. In this poem, I bring together ethnographic data and the voices of my Kurdish interlocutors in Nashville, TN; New York City, NY; Connecticut; Rhode Island; New Jersey; and Massachusetts to imagine and reimagine South West Asia and North Africa as part of Asian American Studies. Through this poem, I foreground the ways that Kurdish diasporas refuse colonial, imperial, and academic racial geographies and offer their own geographies that illuminate their self-identification as Asian and the various intimacies and connections they have with Asia, Asian America and communities of color.