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- Convenors:
-
Assel Kadyrkhanova
(University of Leeds)
Erin Hutchinson (Harvard University)
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- Theme:
- CUL
- Location:
- Alcoa Room
- Start time:
- 27 October, 2018 at
Time zone: America/New_York
- Session slots:
- 1
Long Abstract:
The twentieth century saw large-scale programs of state-led cultural codification in Central Eurasia, as socialist states sought to categorize and define modern nations. Inevitably, the form and content of official national cultures was hotly contested, and the process of codification created both winners and losers. This panel examines some of the reinvention, negotiation, creativity, and destruction involved in this process, and considers how the twentieth-century codification of official cultures in Central Eurasia is alternatively reaffirmed or reexamined in the region today. Informed by the disciplines of literary studies, sociology, and cultural history, panelists will analyze cases from mass media as well as works of literature and the visual and performing arts in contexts ranging from China's Xinjiang Province to Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and the virtual spaces of the Internet. As such, this multidisciplinary panel proposes to shed light on the complex relationship between institutions and individuals that drives cultural production in Central Asia.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Paper long abstract:
This paper focuses on the use of social media as a channel for informal conceptualisation of identity and culture online. With the fast-growing rates of mobile internet use across the world and increasingly so in Central Asia, the discussions about culture, heritage and nation rapidly moved to the internet. But how does this digitalization change the perception about the "formal" framework of the national culture propagated by the state? For example, how do young people analyse and perceive grand texts of national literature (mainly produced during Soviet Union period) if these are shared and discussed in short snapshots on social media? Even if there are virtual clubs, chat rooms and special groups for these discussions, these processes limit and changes the effects on the ways the state or formal culture framework is perceived on the ground. In this paper, I follow literary discussions on canonical national works (seminal novels, films) and contemporary literary production discussions (theatre, music and rap in local languages) to question how is nation perceived, analysed, shared and commented on digitally and how it changes the nationalistic and also formal canons of what authoritarian states in Central Asia position as "national culture".
Paper long abstract:
Between the 1930s and the 1960s, Uyghur intellectuals in China's Xinjiang region worked to codify an official culture for their nation. Under a succession of socialist and quasi-socialist regimes—the decade-long administration of warlord Sheng Shicai; a separatist state backed by the Soviet Union; and finally the People's Republic of China—Uyghur writers and intellectuals were tasked with turning preexisting folk culture into a national culture. While the ideology of socialist cultural production dictated that new national cultures would be drawn from the people, the transition from oral and manuscript culture to the printing press in fact meant that the power to define and distribute cultural products would be concentrated in the hands of a small cultural elite. This paper examines how this elite—drawn largely from the Ili region of northwestern Xinjiang—used its influence in Xinjiang's cultural bureaucracy to transform the local folk culture and folk heroes of Ili into a fundamental part of the Uyghur nation's new official culture. Particular attention will be paid to the way in which Ili writers and intellectuals reinterpreted their home region's poetry and legends along socialist lines, in the process successfully presenting their corner of Xinjiang as the proto-socialist vanguard of the entire province. Key sources will include school textbooks, poetry collections, and short stories, as well as documents and memoir literature illuminating the Ili group's rise to bureaucratic power.
Paper long abstract:
In June 2014, not long after the Russian Federation’s annexation of Crimea, Vladimir Putin asserted a moral imperative to defend not only ethnic Russians living in Ukraine, but also non-Russians “who maintain a cultural and linguistic connection with Russia, who feel themselves to be a part of the “wider Russian world [shirokogo russkogo mira].” What exactly are the boundaries of this world, and who is included in it? The Russian president’s words point to the imagined portability, durability, and universality of the Russian language and culture, as well as the perceived ability of Russian speakers, regardless of ethnicity or nationality, to constitute a global body politic. In light of this contemporary ideological positioning of the Russian language, in my paper I consider the effects of Russian state power and transnational Russophone institutions on Central Asian literary production and reception.
I situate contemporary Russophone Central Asian writers and culture workers—who employ the Russian language with varying degrees of dissociation from an ethnic or national Russian-ness--at the nexus of varying and often contradictory processes of identity formation on local, national, and global levels. Through an analysis of prose and poetry works by writers from Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, I highlight the complex, multidiscursive elements involved in constructing--and critiquing--Russian-ness and “Russian worlds."