Today in Writing History May 9, 1946: Ayşe Nur Zarakolu, Turkish author and activist was born on this day. Along with her husband, she cofounded Belge publishing house. She published books on the Armenian Genocide and the human rights of Turkey’s Kurdish population. As a result, the government imprisoned her repeatedly. Amnesty International designated her a prison of conscience.
Today in Labor History January 14, 1921: Anarchist environmentalist writer and philosopher Murray Bookchin was born in New York to Russian Jewish immigrants. Before the age of 10, he had joined the Young Pioneers, a communist league for children. As a young adult, he served as a union shop steward for the United Electrical Workers and later, as an autoworker, was active in the 1945-1946 GM strike. In the 1950s he started writing about the environment and, some say, was the first to introduce “environmentalism” and “ecology” to radical politics. He had a vision of an ecological society based on participatory, grassroots politics, in which municipal communities democratically plan and manage their affairs through popular assembly, which he called Communalism, or Libertarian Municipalism. This tendency has been a major influence on PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan, as well as the Kurdish People's Protection Units and the Rojava Autonomous Region in Syria. Bookchin’s 1995 book “Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism” critiqued the tendency of many anarchists toward primitivism, anti-technologism, & individual self-expression at the expense of forming a social movement.
I'm complaining because I think that many authors intentionally avoid establishing dialogue with my work because I focus on #Kurdish political actors. Maybe I'm overthinking and it has nothing to do with invisibilizing Kurdish voices, but I think overlooking Kurdish studies research is a general trend in #Turkish studies. @academicchatter