Self-Orientalization and Subjectivity in Postcolonial Uzbek Literature

• In Event: Interrogating the Notion of Russia's Asian "Other" in Soviet and Post-Soviet Literary and Visual Narratives: Orientalism and Indigeneity

Abstract

Shamshad Abdullaev and his contemporaries participating in the Uzbek art circles since the 1980-s were one of the first Russophone authors to go fully online. While this early digitalization illustrates how the writers introduced post-Soviet Central Asia as an independent literary space, it simultaneously presents an example of a conscious overcoming of the “peripheral” value that non-Russian Russophone writers present to the Russian literary institute and the Russian reader. A similar reaction to this peripheral position is a phenomenon of “self-orientalization,” which is often associated with the works of the Uzbek authors. In my paper, I analyze the post-Soviet Russophone canon in Uzbekistan to critique the application of “self-orientalism” to Central Asian postcolonial writing. To do so, I locate the fundamental differences between the old (Russian-Soviet) orientalist depictions of Central Asia and the new postcolonial subjectivity constructed by the authors.

Author

• Azhar Dyussekenova, U of Michigan