Critical Artwork, Critical Actions, and the Inclusion of Difference

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.13169/jinte.6.1.0001
• Published date: 11 November 2022
• Date: 11 November 2022
• Pages: 1-16
• Author: Autumn Cockrell-Abdullah
• Subject Matter: kurdistan,art,intersectionality

Journal of Intersectionality

1DOI: 10.13169/jinte.6.1.0001

Guest Editor’s Introduction

Crical Artwork, Crical Acons, and the Inclusion of Dierence

Autumn Cockrell-Abdullah

Visitin g Assistant Professor of Political S cience, Departme nt of Political Science, Ag nes Scott College, Georg ia, USA

Research Fellow, Gl obal South Research Consortiu m

Welcome friends to this special issue of the Journal of Intersectionality, “Making Spaces: Art,

Culture, and Dierence in Iraqi Kurdistan.” It is both a professional and personal honor for

me to be able to return, for a second time as a guest-editor, to this unique space that has been

dedicated to understanding and applying ‘intersectionality,’ Kimberlé Crenshaw’s groundbreaking

framework for understanding the impacts of overlapping, interconnected and interdependent

social categorizations.1 As a space that has allowed for the expression and exploration of complex

categories of social identities, the Journal of Intersectionality has continued to promote the radical

inclusion of voices, subjects and authors too often excluded. Almost ve years ago, in the space of

this journal, it was my pleasure to introduce the predecessor of this special issue, the fertile ground

from which “Making Spaces” has emerged – “Making Faces: Art & Intersectionality in Iraqi

Kurdistan” (2018). This groundbreaking interdisciplinary issue broadly examined contemporary

Kurdish art forms in Iraqi Kurdistan, within the elds of Visual and Conceptual Arts. It was the

rst, if not the very rst, special issue of an academic journal that directly addressed contemporary

art in Iraqi Kurdistan. It looked at the ways in which Kurdish artists and the art forms produced

in Kurdistan are situated around and negotiate multiple intersections of interconnected and

interdependent social categorizations, such as nation, ethnicity, gender, class, language, sexuality,

education, and culture. Because the Journal of Intersectionality was willing to take a people-centered

approach, they placed a premium on rst-hand accounts from those living contemporary histories.

They also demonstrated that they valued other ways of knowing. This enabled us to present direct

accounts from those artists who are working on the front lines of conict inside Kurdistan2 that

would have been screened out of a more traditionally conceived publication.3 “Making Faces”

engaged with rst-hand accounts, interviews, social criticism, and analysis from Kurdish artists as

well as attendant essays from scholars and practitioners working in Iraqi Kurdistan that addressed

intersectional research and research in the arts.

Craing “Making Faces: Art & Interseconality”

The special issue had its origins in the early relationships that I had built with some of the most

engaged Kurdish artist-activists in the arts capital of Iraqi Kurdistan, the city of Sulaimani, and

1 See: Crenshaw 1991.

2 See: Cleveland 2008.

3 See: Harris ed. 2007.

2Volume Six, Number One

“Guest Editor’s Introduction” — Cockrell-Abdullah

through my own early eld interviews conducted in the Kurdish Region of Iraq.4 Extended eld

research conducted in tandem with my husband, Meriwan Abdullah, over consecutive months

and years spent visiting and living in the region, yielded conversations with local Kurdish artists

that presented a picture of a diverse group of visual artists who were not simply making art for

art’s sake, but who were deeply conicted and struggling with the realization of a Kurdish ethnic

identity as a national identity and its relationship to human rights and social justice.5 Working at

the myriad intersections of art, culture, nation, gender, class, privilege and conict, these artists

engaged themselves with art-making as their own form of activism, in order to create dialogues

and responsive spaces for such dialogues about social and cultural reform and a greater inclusion

of a plurality of voices in Kurdish society.6 The title “Making Faces” was intended to express this

plurality and note that this special issue would be taking a look at a Kurdish national identity, not as

a monolith, nor as a given, but as an intersectional identity with a number of dierent, overlapping

and contravening identities. In Jungian terms, the issue was particularly interested in the many

personas each of us inhabits. Our social self, the one we present to the world, but one that is formed

and shaped through the complicated systems of relationships of the individual to their world.7

It was only later, in the nal stages of copy-editing, and after naming the issue, that a mentor

introduced me to Gloria Anzaldúa’s edited volume, “Making Face, Making Soul Haciendo Caras.”

I immediately recognized the resonance between the two works. Anzaldúa succinctly claried the

broad arrangement of themes that I was seeing presented within the “Making Faces” special issue,

“The masks, las máscaras, we are compelled to wear, drive a wedge between our intersubjective

personhood and the persona we present to the world,” and that, “These masking roles exact a

toll.”8 There it was! There was the conict! Anzaldúa was describing in painful detail the very

conicts these artists were discussing throughout the pages of the special issue. The conicts being

presented were the collective struggles of individual citizens with personhood inside an emergent

Kurdistan. The masks were Kurdayati, tradition and nation that had been saturated with internalized

oppressions. Those spaces and places, as Anzaldúa put it, the “interface” where these “multiple-

surfaced” selves intersected and interconnected9 were the sites for contestation.10

Anzaldúa describes these sites as “interface.” In my own work I talk about them as

“frontlines.” This is a borrow from an artist interviewed in William Cleveland’s book entitled, “Art

& Upheaval: Artists on the World’s Frontlines,” who used the term, “frontlines,” to denote arenas

in which artists were engaging with conict for social change.11 In an arena where conict was

4 Author’s Note: My rst eld visit to Kurdistan was in 2012, though I had begun to study the region a bit earlier.

5 See: McDowall 2021: 661.

6 Cockrell-Abdullah 2018.

7 Jung 1968.

8 Anzaldúa 1990.

9 Ibid.: xv-xvi.

10 “Kurdayati” or “Kurdiness” is that sense of ethnic consciousness and distinctiveness dened by a shared cul-

ture, language, territory, symbols, memory and experience, as well as future political aspirations. (See: Brenneman

2007: 3; Sheyholislami 2011: 47 Kindle Edition.) Increasingly, “Kurdayati” has constituted the stu of Kurdish

nationalism inside Iraqi Kurdistan and across borders in states where there have historically been Kurdish pop-

ulations and diasporas since the mid-1990s. (See: Van Bruinessen 2000.)

11 Cleveland 2008: 2.