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Abstract

Nightlife has always been a vessel for social movement, activism, and community-building across the world, in the case of Almaty we have seen nightlife evolve in similar ways. Almaty DJs in the past years have earned international notoriety on platforms like Boiler Room and Hör. With this notoriety along with DJing abroad, DJs have brought what they have learned from huge nightlife scenes like Berlin and Copenhagen to Almaty. Keeping this in mind, in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the nightlife scene of Almaty has seen a huge shift. Solidarity events for Ukrainians would immediately become common, fundraising for humanitarian aid, but at the same moment Russian relokanti began to fill not only the streets of Almaty, but also the clubs.

Our paper seeks to explore the themes of solidarity, virtue signaling, and decoloniality through the lens of the Almaty nightlife scene. It seeks to address the issues of how the scene only addresses social issues (like the Russian invasion of Ukraine, violence against women, LGBTQIA+ issues, and Israel-Palestine) on a superficial level as a means of seeking notoriety. Additionally addressing the way the arrival of relokanti has impacted social movements within the nightlife scene along with the colonial attitudes they have brought with them towards Kazakhstanis and the contrasting issue of Kazakhstani artists continuing to rely on Russian notoriety.

The authors come from two varying perspectives, Kamila Narysheva is a Kazahkstani DJ and curator based in Almaty, whose main curatorial research is mainly focused on the ideas of decoloniality and self-identity in Kazakhstan and Central Asia. Having lived in Russia for two years Kamila holds a unique perspective on the ways in which coloniality shapes the mentality of Russian relokanti in Kazakhstan and perception of Central Asian migrants in Russia.

Whereas Abigail Scripka is a queer researcher from the United States and Thailand whose work is rooted in decoloniality, they have spent 2 years living in Kazakhstan and Central Asia and they currently live in Berlin, their perspective on these issues comes from an academic, Western, and outsider perspective but also share the perspective of having lived in Russia with Kamila. Together this paper will serve as a dialogue between the two authors from their varying perspectives and backgrounds despite similar theoretical and methodological approaches.

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Abstract

Slowness frames Turkestan and Hungry Steppe as dekhans wait for scarce water to arrive at the dry fields and the nomadic caravan loses the carried “white gold” to the harsh desert storm. Whereas the forging of the railways sets up the rhythm and choreography of soviet modernity’s entrance into Central Asian landscapes. The montage of Victor Turin’s renowned documentary “TurkSib” (1929) builds a recognizable narrative of the industrial conquest of nature and with it “the primitiveness” of the indigenous populations. As Maya Peterson puts it, “the film also seemed to imply that the railway itself could bring water to the cotton fields. Building a railway, however, could not make the deserts bloom.” (“Pipe Dreams”,2019) Yet policy-wise in the early Soviet Anthropocene, the intensity of the grand transformation of nature and people in the region was embedded in their proximity to the railroad and water needed for cotton manufacturing.

Tsarist and early Soviet systems of power envisioned their “mission civilisatrice” in the region in making arid topographies bloom by transferring the flows of rivers and its “unpredictable and uncontrollable inhabitants” to which they attributed the fickle nature of Central Asian water. The Soviets' success in these topographic interventions was both the forced and encouraged campaigns for mobilizing people. Thus, railway tracks mark not only the vectors of agricultural projects, some turned into contemporary ecological disasters, but also trace the routes of mass displacements, the sedentarization of nomadic populations, and labor migration in the making of Central Asian modernities.

This paper unpacks the cultural history and human geography of (Post)Soviet Anthropocene in Central Asia. I propose to consider the grand environmental transits through politics and memories of precarious human mobilities – moving and being moved in the reimagined industrial relationships between groups of people and land.

Drawing on archival sources, visual culture, and memory studies, I unfold the repertoire of moving along the Turkistan-Siberian Railroad, framed as the tangible and symbolic socialist subjugation of nature and people. The complex interplay between infrastructure development, environmental change, and precarious human routes allows us to consider the uncertainty of mobility as a generative condition of being “modern” in Central Asia. Taking the traces of historic “unsettlements” as a theoretic and geographic blueprint, I conduct ethnography across the railroad's contemporary state. I face the ruins of past transits and encounter the (im)mobilities at the new “Silk”/war/water routes, that shape the current notions of movement and displacement.

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Abstract

In the first part of my talk, I will discuss how the British colonial narrative influenced Russian policies in Central Asia and how this inter-imperial dialogue was reflected in art using two examples: the photographic Turkestan Album (1870) and the Turkestan (1873) and Indian (1884) series of paintings by Vassily Vereshchagin.

The former was commissioned by the Governor-General of Turkestan to ‘show the benefits of the Russian rule’ and, according to Heather Sonntag, had ‘precedent outside the Russian empire, beginning with Governor-General John Canning, who commissioned the Peoples of India (1856-1874).’ I will briefly juxtapose these two works to identify common trends of colonial representation.

Vereshchagin’s paintings can be seen as an imperial message at the British audience (as the artist admitted in his foreword to the catalogue of his exhibition in Munich). An active participant in the occupation of Samarkand in 1868, Vereshchagin was sympathetic not only to the Russian, but also to the British colonial rule, which is evident in his Indian series and even in the controversial painting Persecution of Sepoy (1884).

I will examine the Russian colonial representation in Central Asia is through a series of paintings and photos depicting human bodies in different Central Asian contexts. I will discuss how Vasily Vereshagin’s Turkestan Series (1873) and other paintings were exhibited in the Tretyakov Gallery in 2018 and commented on. Nearly all the texts about Vereshchagin produced in Russia in recent years can be sees as part of an apologetical campaign of the Russian colonial policy. Elisaveta Vereina maintains that Vereshchagin’s ‘canvases from the Turkestan series became the realistic evidence reflecting the true events in the conquered native territories… Vereshchagin, instead of Oriental bliss, depicts violence, cruelty, immorality of the real East.’ I will demonstrate how various colonial attitudes can be traced through the depiction of human figures by such artists as Alexander Volkov and Usto Mumin in the 1920s and 1930s and other Central Asian artists of the late Soviet period.

I will discuss how the Russian colonial agenda determined the choice of particular genres, topics and artistic forms in these pieces to express various political, ethnographic, orientalist and gender tropes. In conclusion, I will show how these colonial and modernist representations are being promoted in Russia and Central Asia to justify Russia’s current neo-colonial policies in the region.