Écriture kurde en français: Territoire, identité et discours

Abstract

This thesis, consisting of four chapters, presents an innovative perspective on the strategies used by French-speaking Kurdish authors to convey their claims and aspirations. The first chapter deals directly with the linguistic question, the general objective being to raise the main political and aesthetic issues involved in writing in a dominant language from a minority perspective. The second chapter focuses on the question of identity and illustrates how the experience of French-speaking Kurdish writers can serve as a basis for establishing a minority perspective on society. The third chapter examines the question of the access to speech and identifies the sociopolitical consequences of the voice of the marginalized on the assertion of identity. The aim of this study is to examine in depth the literary and discursive strategies, such as testimony, that are privileged by writers from a dominated culture to get recognition of the subjectivity of these peoples who are excluded from knowledge. The last chapter is an analysis of two other literary and discursive tactics allowing the subjectivity of the marginalized to build, showing how the unsaid or unspoken and irony are tools of an oppositional writing in the invocation of an alternative discourse that destabilizes the discourse of power. The works of the French-speaking Kurdish writers reveal a minority perspective of identity in a context of oppression and domination, and thus produce a “unique” expression of the experience of otherness and power. Keywords: Kurdish writing in French, territory, identity, discourse, testimony, opposition