Langston Hughes in Chirchiq: A Model Soviet Town in Socialist Uzbekistan

• In Event: Infrastructures of Occupation II: Apparatuses of *russian (Re)coloniality

Abstract

The objective of this paper is to narrate the untold history of the construction of Chirchiq, a model ‘sotsgorod (socialist town)’ in Soviet Uzbekistan, and to bring that history, as well as those of similar model towns built throughout Central Asia, into conversation with the personal archives of Langston Hughes and other African American intellectuals who visited these towns in the hope of finding a raceless utopia. These model towns were often built with the explicit purpose of facilitating the extraction of the region’s abundant natural resources and, as I seek to argue, reveal that the Soviet state regarded Central Asian ethnicities as an extension of ‘first nature,’ as an object of conquest, subjugation and exploitation.

Author

• Da Hyung Jeong, Princeton U