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REG05


Visions of Self and Community: tradition, modernity, and the negotiation of national and Soviet by Central Asian poets and writers 
Convenor:
Svetlana Jacquesson (Palacky University)
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Chair:
Ali Igmen (California State University, Long Beach)
Discussant:
Nicholas Walmsley (American University of Central Asia)
Formats:
Panel
Theme:
Regional Studies
Location:
GA 1106
Sessions:
Friday 21 October, -
Time zone: America/Indiana/Knox

Abstract:

In this panel we want to continue the conversation on vernacularity and modernity that Paolo Sartori initiated at his workshop “Local Modern: Exploring Vernacular Cultures across Central Eurasia.” The workshop was held at the Austrian Academy of Sciences in May 2022 with support from the American University of Central Asia. Specializing in the study of the history and literatures of modern Central Eurasia, the participants in the Vienna event were invited to “add a new interpretive dimension to the current historiography on vernacularisation and modernity by reflecting on what processes of linguistic and literary realignment might signify for local communities, individuals, and their systems of knowledge.” This panel offers four case studies which demonstrate the variety of ways in which poets and writers fashioned visions of the self and community throughout the Soviet period. In her paper Svetlana Jacquesson shows how a Kyrgyz akyn (bard) played havoc with Soviet scholars and writers. Instead of the “traditional epic” that he was asked to produce for posterity in the mid-1920s, he composed and had written down thousands of verses in which he claimed a modern mission for himself and for the “vernacular” epic tradition that were irreconcilable with the Soviet ideas of socialist national cultures. Moving to Uzbekistan, Cristopher Fort dwells on a mode of Soviet subjectivity pioneered by Uzbek men of letters in the 1930s-1960s and connects the act of passive witnessing which distinguishes this Soviet Uzbek mode of subjectivity from other Soviet subjectivities to pre-Soviet Uzbek writing. In the first case from Kazakhstan, Gabriel McGuire singles out the most famous work of Kazakh children’s literature in which the anxiety of preserving Kazakh culture interferes with the vocation of turning children into Soviet citizens and shows how references to pre-Revolutionary Kazakh akyns and to oral literary forms are mobilized to smooth the possible gaps between Soviet and Kazakh identities. In the last contribution to the panel, Christopher Baker introduces Anuar Alimzhanov, a Kazakh poet and artist who attempted to fashion an ethnographic self from varied encyclopedias and disparate classificatory texts in the steppe. His art was an enterprise in assembling the bits and pieces of heteroglot taxonomies into a “mirror of paper”.

Accepted papers:

Session 1 Friday 21 October, 2022, -