Modernity and Environment in the Literature and Cinema of Uzbekistan

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

This panel addresses how the literature and cinema of Soviet Uzbekistan confront Soviet modernity and coloniality. In the Stalin era, socialist realism projects humanity's encounter with nature as a “war,” but later literary and cinematic production from within Uzbekistani culture might complicate the simple narrative of Soviet modernity. In the late Soviet period, questions of how "modernization" has impacted local environments and practices begin to emerge more forcefully, even within narratives that ostensibly aspire to brace the socialist realist edifice. The papers on this panel consider the possibilities of autochthonous alternatives from within a state-sponsored culture industry.

Sub Unit

• Cinema, Television, Electronic Media

Chair

• Viktoria Paranyuk, Pace U

Papers

• Man’s War with Water: The Hydroaesthetics of Socialist Realism in Central Asia - Claire Nadine Roosien, Yale U

• Of (Dead) Fish and Birds: Uzbek Eco-Cinema of the 1970s - Lida Oukaderova, Rice U

• Narrating Soviet Foundation Myths in the Soviet Western - Elizabeth A. Papazian, U of Maryland, College Park

Discussant

• Zukhra Kasimova, Bucknell U