Postcolonial Identities in Central Asian Ecocritical Culture

• In Event: Images of Transition in Post-Soviet Visual and Narrative Culture

Abstract

Central Asia is rarely included in conversations about the current climate crisis, and the role of colonialism in contributing to it. This paper examines how postcolonial writers, artists and filmmakers from Central Asia have treated the legacies of Soviet policies affecting their local environments, such as the Aral Sea, since the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Works under focus include Kazakhstani filmmaker Zhana Isabaeva’s feature film Bopem (2015), Uzbek author Hamid Ismailov’s novella The Dead Lake (Mertvoe ozero) (2014), and Kyrgyz author and activist Syinat Sultanalieva’s short story ‘Element 174’. I argue that authors tend to employ the character of an adolescent protagonist navigating their grim environmental surroundings in order to comment on the broader existential crisis facing the new generations. While critical of Soviet colonial policies, many of the authors simultaneously eschew depicting characters as victims, moving away from emotional narratives on the struggles of postcolonial societies, and an outright rejection of Communism (thwarted as it was, according to them, by the Soviet regime). Furthermore, I will argue that while Western posthumanist theories (notably by Donna Haraway) hold some force for creative artists like Sultanalieva in their intellectual tackling of environmental legacies of Soviet colonialism, their works suggest that harmonious co-existence of human and animals has been central to the societies inhabiting Central Asia since antiquity. Thus, as a way out of the crisis, they create unique utopias of highly advanced technological societies reviving the positive potential of Communist ideology and rooted in shamanistic tradition whereby living human, non-human and spirit realms interweave seamlessly, thus imagining new, positive postcolonial identities.

Author

• Tamar Koplatadze, U of Oxford (UK)