ABSTRACT
The south-east region can be charted too by its various economic indices as well as the increasing importance of the GAP programme with its planned 22 dams on the Euphrates and Tigris and large-scale irrigation and electricity schemes. A more convincing explanation for the 'politicization of Kurdish identity on the basis of ethnicity' than that proffered by the theories of globalization may be inferred from study of the periodization of official Turkish nationalism. The enlightenment orientation of Kemalism, with its laicist and evolutionary understanding of history, inspires the discourse of the Kurdish groups in the same way as it does the ‘bourgeois’ Turkish republic. Contemporary Kurdish identity resides in sum at the point of an intersection, the dangerous place where being constituted and constituting oneself collide. The erasure of biography, however, is never mere abolition. It involves at the same time the bestowing of an alternative life-story and telos, a forced invitation to a replacement biography.
