Writing the Self, Nation, and Empire

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

This panel examines the ways in which writers of 19th and 20th-century Central Asia made use of established genres, such as the travelogue, the childhood memoir, and the novel, to engage in self, national, and imperial fashioning. Following Stephen Greenblatt and the many scholars who have employed his work, we examine how these writers sought to present their public personas and identities as well as the nations and peoples they felt called upon to represent to a broader public. Alexey’s Shvyrkov’s paper argues that Chingiz Aitmatov, in constructing an indigeneity beyond the Kyrgyz one the Soviet Union tasked him with representing, in fact, engages in Orientalizing processes of construction of the Other that he seeks to criticize. Kristen Fort examines how two Central Asian memoirists of the Brezhnev period depicted female homosociality and their own resulting trans-femininity in fashioning their public personas. Hana Stankova analyzes Bukharan scholar Ahmad Donish’s travelogue of his trip to St. Petersburg to tease out how his encounter with Bukhara’s new imperial Other affected his own understanding of self and his Bukharan home.

Sub Unit

• Literature: 20th Century

Chair

• Anna Carolyn Oldfield, Coastal Carolina U

Papers

• Between Hegemony and Allegory: Chingiz Aitmatov’s 'The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years' - Alexey Shvyrkov, Columbia U

• Ahmad Donish’s Discovery of Petersburg - Hana Connelly Stankova, Yale U

Discussant

• Anna Carolyn Oldfield, Coastal Carolina U