Anglophone Kurdish Narratives Unveiled: Readers as Witnesses, Witnesses as Resistance

This book explores the intricate and dynamic role of readers as witnesses, with a specific focus on Kurdish literature in English as a case study. It aims to show how readers actively engage with witness literature, serving both as witnesses to the narratives presented and as active participants in acts of resistance. Kurdish Anglophone writings offer distinctive case studies that unveil the intricate interplay between narratives and readers’ positionality and response-ability. These positions span the Western world, with a particular focus on Euro-America and Australia, as well as the Middle Eastern nations where Kurds have been historically divided and marginalized. Additionally, there are readers from marginalized communities around the world, described here as ’global solidarity readers’. This book considers how each of these reader positions offers a unique vantage point for engaging with these narratives. Drawing on a rich and varied methodology, the book advances research on testimonial narratives at a time when the literary landscape is witnessing an increasing outpouring of witness literature in response to ongoing issues of colonization, warfare, and violence.

Zhila Gholami earned her Ph.D. in literature from Griffith University and is Adjunct Member of the Griffith Centre for Cultural and Social Research. Her research interests include postcolonial and diaspora literature, witness literature, memory and post-memory studies, refugee narratives, and art activism. Gholami’s work has appeared in Continuum, British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, and Art + Australia. She was 2024 Fryer Fellow at the University of Queensland (UQ), where she studied a unique archive of letters written by refugees detained on Nauru between 2001 and 2005. She is currently Casual Academic in UQ’s School of Communication and Arts, teaching contemporary literature. She is also Recipient of the John Oxley Fellowship 2025 at the State Library of Queensland, where she is documenting and preserving stories of refugee experiences and highlighting their cultural and social contributions to Queensland society.