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"'Take Me Home': Kurdish Popular Music and the Politics of Belonging"
Abstract
According to sociologist Nira Yuval-Davis, belonging is the result of emotional attachment that causes an individual or group to feel “safe” or “at home” in a particular context; the politics of belonging, on the other hand, comes into focus when this feeling of safeness or at-homeness is threatened, resulting in a collective response that constructs not only belonging but also the collective itself (2011). For many diasporic Kurdish communities, the politics of belonging is a result of having been displaced from their nations of origin, targeted in acts of state aggression or even genocide, and relocated to places in which their fellow Kurds might not even speak the same language. Given the importance of radio and other broadcasting technology in the formation of a transnational Kurdish “listening public” (Blum and Hassanpour, 1996), how has Kurdish popular music reflected the unique challenges of a Kurdish politics of belonging? In this paper, I attend to this question by analyzing the 2013 pop song “Take Me Home,” featuring Kurdish artists Li Dinê and Dashni Morad. On their group’s website, the three members of Li Dinê, who have ties to Turkish Kurdistan, describe their music as the result of blending “eastern” and “western,” as well as old (Kurdish folk) and new (R&B/hip-hop), traditions. Including Dashni Morad (originally from Iraqi Kurdistan) in “Take Me Home” allows the group to craft a musical politics of belonging that represents the vast majority of the Kurdish homelands. Analyzing the visual and sonic features of the song and the accompanying music video, I show how its politics of belonging reflects the struggles of a Western-oriented, transnational Kurdish listening public. In particular, I highlight the song’s use of themes such as nostalgia, rurality, and lovesickness to emphasize a shared, pan-Kurdish past, even as others of the song’s sonic and visual markers suggest an affiliation with urban centers of capital and feminist critiques of contemporary Kurdish society. I argue that the resulting image of “home” created by the song represents not so much a geographic home for Kurds as a reimagining of the diasporic Kurdish community itself.
Discipline
Art/Art History
Geographic Area
Other
Sub Area
Kurdish Studies