On revolutionary desire and decolonial struggle

Set in the counterterrorism courts and maximum-security prisons of Northern Kurdistan, Serra M. Hakyemez’s ethnography Deadly Refusals: Kurdish Decolonization in Times of Counterterrorism examines how prosecuted and imprisoned Kurds from different socioeconomic backgrounds organize in refusal of the criminalization and colonization of their political demands and desires. Based on more than seventeen years of ethnographic research, this book uncovers the mechanisms through which counterterrorism law reproduces the colonial state. Here, Hakyemez is joined in conversation with Nadia Abu El-Haj and William Mazzarella.

Serra Hakyemez is an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology and the Institute for Global Studies at the University of Minnesota. Hakyemez is author of Deadly Refusals: Kurdish Decolonization in TImes of Counterterrorism.

Nadia Abu El-Haj is Ann Whitney Olin Professor in the Departments of Anthropology at Barnard College and Columbia University, Co-Director of the Center for Palestine Studies, and Chair of the Governing Board of the Society of Fellows/Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia University. 

William T. S. Mazzarella is Neukom Family Professor of Anthropology and of Social Sciences in the College; Faculty Fellow, Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory; and Associate Faculty in the University of Chicago Divinity School.

REFERENCES:

Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment / David Scott

Frantz Fanon

Audra Simpson

Abdullah Öcalan

Jacques Lacan

Nazım Hikmet

Joan Copjec

Hannah Arendt

Walter Benjamin

Eric Santner

PRAISE FOR THE BOOK:

"A dazzling book . . . repeatedly opens new paths for understanding what Raymond Williams called the emergent and the oppositional."
—Rosalind C. Morris

"An invaluable archive of the movement."
—Banu Bargu

Deadly Refusals: Kurdish Decolonization in Times of Counterterrorism by Serra M. Hakyemez is available from University of Minnesota Press. Thank you for listening.