Long Abstract:

Proposed author-critic forum is comprised of specialists in literature, cultural studies, sociology and anthropology. The aim of the author-critic forum is to analyse the recent book Rewriting the Nation in Modern Kazakh Literature which is a book about cultural transformations and trajectories of national imagination in modern Kazakhstan. The book is a much-needed critical introduction and a comprehensive survey of the Kazakh literary production and cultural discourses on the nation in the twentieth and twenty first centuries. In the absence of viable and open forums for discussion and in the turbulent moments of postcolonial and cultural transformation under the Soviets, the Kazakh writers and intellectuals widely engaged with the national identity, heritage and genealogy construction in literature. This active process of national canon construction and its constant re-writing throughout the twentieth century will inform the readers of the complex processes of cultural transformations in forms, genres and texts as well as demonstrating the genealogical development of the national narrative. The main focus of this book is on the cultural production of the nation. The focus is on the narratives of historical continuities produced in the literature and cultural discontinuities and inter-elite competition which inform such production.

Eva-Marie Dubuisson, Bogazici University, Chair

Christopher Baker, Indiana University-Bloomington and American University of Central Asia

Christopher Fort, University of Michigan

Boram Shin, Hanyang University

Diana T. Kudaibergenova (author), Lund University