The Global South as Foreignization: The Case of the Kurdish Diaspora in Europe

This article tilts the North/South axis of the Global South scholarship towards the East/West axis, specifically the Middle East and Kurds. I first re-visit the notion of the Global South by using the conceptual tools of translation studies, especially the notion of “foreignizing translation,” a strategy aimed at pushing the boundaries of the target language (and culture) rather than simply assimilating the translated text into it. Besides arguing that the Global South perspective concerns itself with questioning North-South relations temporally and spatially, I focus on the foreignizations diasporas can bring to the Global North. As both insiders and outsiders to Northern spaces, diasporas are uniquely placed both in terms of the foreignizations they bring to the Global North and the entanglements of the North and South which they expose. In this paper I examine the “Global South in the North” by taking the Kurdish diaspora living in European metropoles as a case study and conceptualizing the Kurdish movement as a transnational indigenous movement. I argue that through the foreignizations diasporas bring, the Global South is making claims not only in the North but also on the North. By focusing on the role of diasporas and the Middle East, areas which have received little attention within Global South scholarship, I seek to complicate and thus enrich our understandings of the Global South.