Early Tashkent Postcards: Strategies of Picturing

• In Event: Negotiating the Colonial Gaze: Russian and Soviet Visual Culture in Domestic and International Contexts

Abstract

This paper examines some of the earliest known postcards featuring views of Tashkent, the capital of Russian Turkestan, produced during the final years of the Russian Empire. My central focus is on the postcards that refer to the motifs and models of the pan-European tradition of landscape painting. The key question for me is the following: How can we conceptualize this form of Westernization of Central Asian subjects – as a result of the colonizing or globalizing gaze and mindset?

Author

• Maria Chernysheva, Independent Scholar