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- Convenors:
-
Diana Kudaibergenova
(University of Cambridge)
Christopher Baker (American University of Central Asia)
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- Theme:
- LIT
- Location:
- Space Institute Room 403
- Sessions:
- Friday 11 October, -
Time zone: America/New_York
Long Abstract:
The papers in this panel will discuss artistic literature and literary debates from broader Central Eurasia during the early twentieth century, with a focus on how artistic literary production reflected, and in some cases helped produce, emerging social and political identities. As older affiliations with the wider Islamic world, regional prestige languages, and Eurasian empires bumped up against new formations such pan-Turkism, nationalisms, and Soviet socialism, the literary output of Central Eurasia registered these changes in generic, formal, and thematic shifts and innovations. At the same time, increasing literacy and newly widespread uses of vernacular languages in literary work allowed Central Eurasian writers to reckon with their "local" place within these broader movements. Because of this confluence of "local" and "global" developments, the artistic literature of early twentieth century Central Eurasia provides an especially rich set of examples and case studies in understanding how individuals, social and political groups, and burgeoning nations from the region understood their place in the world.
This panel will examine several specific works or sets of works, providing examples and analyses of how "local" Central Eurasian identities were formed during this period from a combination of traditional and new forces in the region. Papers will include an discussion of nationalist uses of Persian outside of the typical Iranian context; an analysis of a reformist text which envisions the region in literary and cultural dialogue with both pan-Turkic educational forces and pan-Persian artistic modes; an examination of features of the socialist realist novel that derive not from Russian literature but from Islamic reformist discourses; and an analysis of Uzbek women's poetry, foregrounding the problem of integrating marked categories (women, national minorities) into a universalizing public. Taken together, the papers will shed light on how artistic literature reflected some of the massive political changes the early twentieth century brought to Central Eurasia, as well as how literature could be used to further "modernizing" projects like political and social reform and the assertion of new, or newly important, identity positions.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 11 October, 2019, -Paper long abstract:
Bolshevik rhetoric celebrated difference along gender and national lines, but only insofar as recognizing that difference facilitated integration into a universal public oriented toward mass production. But under the rhetoric of universality lurked a problem - Uzbek women had trouble fitting into a public that presumed the fit, male European as a norm. This problem was compounded by the continued challenge of attracting women to the cotton fields or the silk factory when many of them had yet to unveil or had unveiled only recently.
In a moment when the first two Five-Year Plans demanded mass mobilization for cotton production, culture played a vital role in imagining how the members of marked categories might fit into a public that often seemed to have no place for them. This paper examines Uzbek women's poetry as a lens into the fraught process of integrating women into a Soviet public. It shows that luxury textiles - silk and velvet, but ironically not cotton - became a medium through which women came to imagine themselves as participants in a broader state project. Given as awards for shock work and Stakhanovism, silk and velvet both appealed to women's senses and foregrounded their role in production under the Plan. As a result, textiles, and the textile-texts women wrote about them, served to create a respectable femininity-in-public (and femininity-in-production) for newly unveiled Uzbek women.
Paper long abstract:
This paper will examine some of the dramatic polemics of Abdulrauf Fitrat, with a particular focus on the book Bayanat-i Sayyah-i Hindi [Tales of an Indian Traveler, 1911]. Written originally in Persian and drawing on early twentieth-century debates between qadim (traditionalist) and jadid (reformer) thought in Central Asia, the book provides exhaustive descriptions of life of Fitrat's native Bukhara through the eys of a fictional traveler from India. The paper will explore two major aspects of Fitrat's Tales: the book's publication history, and its generic history.
The book's publication history makes clear that Tales sparked interest among Central Asians as well as Russians in the region during periods of sudden and deep political and social change in the region: Initially published in Istanbul, Tales appeared in a Russian translation in Samarkand during the last years of Russian Imperial control in Central Asia and again at the very end of the Soviet Union, in 1990. The work's generic orientation, too, reveals Fitrat's concern with Central Asia's relationship to the broader Muslim and Asian worlds, as well as a self-reflexive tendency to compare Central Asia's social, economic, religious, and political situations to those in other neighboring regions. Meanwhile, Fitrat's works imitates contemporaneous Persian fictional travelogues, linking his own work both generically and in its self-critical orientation to literary developments in neighboring Muslim regions. Finally, in critiquing his own society while using a traveler from the east, rather than the west (or Russia in the north) to provide a evaluative gaze, Fitrat's Tales of Indian Travelers represents a Central Asia that looked both inward, toward its own social problems and developments, and outward, toward its connections to and affinities with other parts of the world, simultaneously making, this paper will argue, a critique of backwardness alongside a protest against peripherality.
Paper long abstract:
On March 18, 1929, Hamza Hakimzoda Niyoziy, known as Hamza, had the relatively good fortune of being stoned to death by supposedly fanatic Uzbek villagers in the Uzbek exclave of Shohimardon. Dispatched to the village by the Uzbek Central Committee to dismantle a pilgrimage site, the town's main source of income, Hamza came up against the fury of powerbrokers afraid of losing their wealth. Had he not met his end there, Stalin's OGPU and later NKVD likely would have subjected him to a far more gruesome fate. Hamza's early demise proved serendipitous for his legacy. The Soviet Uzbek literary establishment began Hamza's canonization soon after his death. The process culminated in 1939 when Uzbek socialist Komil Yashin (1909-1997) "restored" from extant fragments Hamza's 1918 drama The Rich Man and the Servant, which was subsequently declared the first work of Uzbek Socialist Realism, and Hamza - the first Uzbek Socialist Realist writer. Yashin's version of the text was accepted as Hamza's authentic work and represented as such in scholarly editions of Hamza's works until 1988.
This paper provides a comparison of the extant fragments of Hamza's 1918 play with Yashin's 1939 version. Through that comparison, it demonstrates that what Katerina Clark (2000), based on her readings of Russian Socialist Realist texts, dubs Socialist Realism's ritualized "master plot" was not wholesale imported in the construction of non-Russian Socialist Realism but in fact, adapted to similar, already extant modular plots in non-Russian literatures. This comparison has implications not only for the study of Socialist Realism but also for the nascent field of Soviet subjectivity. Most studies of Soviet subjectivity (Kotkin 1995; Halfin 1999; Hellbeck 2006) employ exclusively Russian sources to argue that Soviet denizens used the language, ideology, and symbols of the Stalinist regime to narrate their individual struggles. However, the fact that Uzbek socialists like Yashin could not create Uzbek Socialist Realism without reference to the literary and historical imaginaries of their Islamic reformer predecessors demonstrates that Soviet subjectivity had different narrative implications for the USSR's non-Russian inhabitants.