Reconfiguring the Kurdish Nation on YouTube : Spatial Imaginations, Revolutionary Lyrics, and Colonial Knowledge

Around the globe, colonized nations and indigenous peoples make use of colonial photography of the nineteenth and early 20th century to provide documentation of oppression, slavery, and extinction, as well as of resistance and survival. In Iraqi Kurdish nationalist discourse, for example, this mode of representation can be observed from the 1960s and the first Kurdish modern guerrilla war. The digital age has multiplied the possibilities of translocating knowledge and has promoted Kurdish national aspirations for a nation state. Yet, this chapter will show that colonial images of the Kurdish bodies and of Kurdistan’s geography still have use value in identity discourses shaped by the aid of social media and mobile media, which bears witness to the simultaneity of modes of representation.