Steppe as Multiverse: Decoloniality, Beyotarlyq, and Borderless-ness in Rethinking the Post-Soviet

• In Event: Thinking with the Steppes as an Environmental, Socio-Political, and Epistemic Space

Abstract

This paper explores artistic, cultural, feminist and ecological imaginaries of the postsoviet decolonial thought that flourished beyond borders, ethnicities, languages and colonial identities. Tracing artists and writers travelling to the bottom of the dead Aral Sea - the area that has now become a steppe and uncovering the new readings of the old pre-colonial myths that critically rethink both the period of colonisation and the enduring postsoviet coloniality, I seek to provide a conceptual reading of prolonged decolonial dialogues in Central Asian steppes. Stemming from anti-colonial discussions of the Soviet times and capturing imagination of distant travellers who came to the steppe in search of meaning, the idea of the steppe is both mesmerising and healing. Decolonial artists, intellectuals and activists from all across the former Soviet space consider the steppe a special place able to regenerate itself and anyone else who steps into dialogue with it, from the colonial frameworks and concepts. Artists like Almagul Menlibayeva and Saule Suleimenova, writers like Satimzhan Sanbayev, and contemporary musicians like Samrattama view steppe as a special actor able to trespass colonial temporality and legacies. Inspired by these decolonial dialogues, this paper builds further on ways and knowledges steppe can help us understand decolonial debates.

Author

• Diana T. Kudaibergen, U College London (UK)