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- Convenors:
-
Claire Roosien
(Yale University)
Michaela Pohl (Vassar College)
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- Theme:
- HIS
- Location:
- Posvar 3800
Accepted papers
Session 1Paper long abstract
The government-led evacuation to the Soviet "East" in 1941 had turned Tashkent into the major cite of children's reception. For many displaced orphans from the Western parts of the Soviet Union who had no family to return to, adaptation after an adoption was not just a temporary stage, but rather a first step towards the full integration. I argue that these Russian, Ukrainian, and Latvian children had no other choice but to adopt local Central Asian religious/social practices, master the indigenous language(s), and in some cases, even change their Russian or Ukrainian names to Turkic or Persian ones. I refer to this process as a downward integration since in the Soviet discourse of the time Central Asia was a "backward" periphery that was expected to "catch up" with the more advanced republics, to adopt progressive "European"/Russian social norms and to modernize. One may say that structurally, European children adopted by Central Asian families serve as an example of the inverted colonial situation, where the relationships of subjugation and domination are turned upside down twice: first, because the agent of integration into the Central Asian society is a minor, de facto inferior to the family hierarchy. Local foster parents were active agents who picked and thus saved the children. And last, but not the least, because the recipient culture is marked as less Soviet and less modern. To account for this complex encounter that contributed to the transition of Soviet nationalities' relations from the "brotherhood" to "friendship", I suggest a dialogical model that approaches the evacuation experience from the standpoint of mutual interactions that reshaped both evacuated children and the host families. Case studies drawn from the Soviet newspapers not only evoke a rigid heteronormative family model where gender roles mattered above all but show how the adoption of evacuated children contributed to the rise of status of Uzbek "Eastern" women. These cases allow us to see the actual hybridity of identities, gender roles, and loyalties, produced by the Soviet experience of evacuation. To examine the unique experiences of the Slavic children adopted by the Central Asian parents, I suggest the "internal displacement" - for unlike "The Lost Children" by Tara Zahra, Soviet orphans, though having endured very similar hardships of displacement, were still on the Soviet territory, although cultural and language disparity in the Soviet "Asian periphery" required them to adapt and integrate in a distinct way.
Paper long abstract
This paper will examine how three Western women travel writers in the 1930's shared a similar conceptual image of the ancient city of Samarkand as the venerable, Orientalized Timurid capital, which was then used to support or condemn the contemporary Soviet Union's modernization campaign in Soviet Uzbekistan. This paper uses critical discourse analysis to deconstruct how these women travel writers used Soviet Samarkand as a platform either of glorifying a timeless Timurid mythos, one that reproached the Soviet Union's attempts to bring modernity to this ahistoric Orient; or as demonstrating the inevitable expansion of modernity, rightly sweeping away whatever ruins and refuse remains from the terrible, tyrannical non-Socialist past. I look specifically at three Western women travel writers: Anna Louise Strong's Red Star in Samarkand (1929), Ethel Mannin's South to Samarkand (1936), and Rosita Forbes' Forbidden Road - Kabul to Samarkand (1937). These women travel writers debate the Soviet state's efforts to preserve or destroy Samarkand's illustrious Timurid past alongside Samarkand's growth as the emerging educational center within a rapidly-changing, dynamic Soviet Uzbekistan. Each of these writers imagine Soviet Samarkand from within the same Western intellectual and cultural framework; Samarkand is the representative conceptual battleground between an imagined, unchangeable Timurid past and intrusive, modernizing Soviet future. This paper provides three unique perspectives on Soviet modernization in Uzbekistan, each relying upon a shared Samarkand envisioned in the crumbling façades of the Registan, and using the contrast between the ancient Registan and modern factories to comment on the validity of Soviet Uzbekistan's social and urban modernization. This research expands discussions on how these travel writers shared an Orientalized image of Samarkand intimately connected to its mythical Timurid past, and how the Soviet Union's destructive modernity was applauded or condemned within a Western debate on Samarkand's proper historicity as the shrine of the quasi-mythic history of Timurid Uzbekistan, amid the rapidly changing union of machine and man.