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Nationalism and Kurdish Historical Writing

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 July 2015

Abbas Vali
Abbas Vali*
Affiliation:
Department of Politics, University of Wales Swansea.
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Extract

No ideology needs history so much as nationalism. History is indispensable to its romantic narrative, essentialist conceptual structure and apocalyptic claim to truth. Nationalist discourse is historicist; it relies on genealogy for the legitimation of the nationalist cause, on the historicization of the national origin for the affirmation of the self and the denial of the other. But history is also the Achilles heel of nationalism. Nationalist historical discourse is repeatedly denounced by historians for distorting the truth, misrepresenting the historical reality of the formation of nations and nation-states. Nationalist historians are criticized for being subjective, partisan and ideological by “objective” and seemingly non-ideological historians who likewise construct historical narratives by selecting and at times inventing historical subjects and historicizing their thoughts and actions. Many of the charges levelled against nationalist historiography concern the epistemology of empiricist historiography in general, and all historiography which is concerned with extracting the truth from given facts on the assumption that they are identical with the real signified by them is by definition empiricist. This is as true as the errors of nationalist historiography.

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Articles
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New Perspectives on Turkey , Volume 14 , Spring 1996 , pp. 23 - 51
Copyright
Copyright © New Perspectives on Turkey 1996

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