Empires of Paper: Knowledge Production, Paper Technology, and Power in Imperial and Soviet Central Asia

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

This panel examines knowledge production in imperial and Soviet Central Asia, focusing on textual instruments that were used to exercise authority or that emerged from practices of bureaucratic control. It is concerned with paper technologies and with distinct registers of imperial and indigenous power. James Pickett discusses the ways in which local scribes navigated the maze of paper in the protectorate of Bukhara, a setting in which bureaucratic technologies and imperial categories of knowledge posed formidable barriers to comprehension. His research positions this bureaucracy of translation as a locus for the superposition of imperial taxonomies on indirectly ruled territories in Central Asia. The presentation of Christopher Baker shifts attention to Shoqan Valikhanov and his efforts to make sense of the erudition that papered the steppe and Siberia with classifications in the nineteenth century, an inheritance that Valikhanov, an indigenous officer in imperial service, simultaneously applied, altered, interrogated, and repurposed. Ulfatbek Abdurasulov examines the rich repository of diplomatic records in Russia from the 17th to the 19th century, focusing on the disconnect between archival knowledge and its application in history writing and policy formulation, particularly concerning Central Asian affairs. Katya Hokanson deals with the Paris Exposition universelle in 1900 and the indigenous subjects from Central Asia and Siberia who attended, detailing the ways in which they navigated the complexities of representing themselves as part of the “Palais de l’Asie russe.”

Sub Unit

• History: 1800-1900

Chair

• Gabriel Vertin McGuire, Nazarbayev U (Kazakhstan)

Papers

• Colonial Persian: The Transformative Impact of Russian Imperialism on the Language and Materiality of Central Asian Paperwork - James Robert Pickett, U of Pittsburgh

• An Inheritance of Paper: Paper, Taxonomy, and Power in the Writing of Shoqan Valikhanov - Christopher Baker, American U of Central Asia (Kyrgyzstan)

• The Scrolls’ Tale: Unveiling the Posol’skii Prikaz's Archival Legacy - Ulfat Abdurasulov, Austrian Academy of Sciences (Austria)

• Imperial Subjects at the Exposition Universelle - Katya Elizabeth Hokanson, U of Oregon

Discussant

• Gabriel Vertin McGuire, Nazarbayev U (Kazakhstan)