Resisting cultural Hegemony in Nadia Murad’s The Last Girl

Abstract

This research paper explores the resistance against Islamic cultural hegemony in Nadia Murad’s semi-autobiographical novel The Last Girl (2017). Nadia, as a representative of the Yezidi community, delineates her traumatic experience of ISIS brutality and their cruel behavior toward her community in the name of religious transformation. Antonio Gramsci’s notion of cultural hegemony uncovers the text as the site of resistance for the Yazidi community against ISIS as the dominant group. Gramsci argues that the process of hegemony is led by the mainstream culture to shed light on its own cultural value upon the working class through their brutal acts. For this reason, the mainstream culture of Islam tries to flourish its own cultural branches with violence, killing, raping, and torturing. Moreover, Michael Foucault's notion of Truth, Power, and Knowledge ventures the text from the perspective of criticizing the false ideology made by ISIS as their ideology incorporates a false narrative to hegemonize Yezidis. Reading and analyzing biography, ISIS found to be expanding their religious propaganda to the Yezidi community as following the devil's path; this is how the power creates knowledge as real to disseminate their own cultural values. Similarly, Louis Althusser’s notion of the Ideological States Apparatus excavates the text as a site of rioting for the Yazidi community against state-level policymakers as well as ISIS militants. In conclusion, the research finds that Nadia’s biography is a record of resistance to cultural hegemony, an appeal for justice, existence and the pursuit of freedom for the Yezidi population in the Islamic state, conveying the message that hegemony is always resisted in one or the other way.