Urban Histories of Central Eurasia: Memory, Mobility, and Modernization

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

Soviet Central Asia was characterized by relatively low rates of urbanization in comparison to the European republics of the USSR. Moreover, both tropes of rurality and a sedentary-nomadic binary have long dominated popular and scholarly understandings of Central Asian culture and history. The papers in this panel, in contrast, center Central Asian urbanity as a key site to explore the development of national identity, both past and present. With this in mind, we also probe how both 1) legacies of Soviet-era urbanization and 2) the mobilities of people, technologies, and ideologies that Soviet urban initiatives entailed are narrated, reframed, and grappled with in contemporary processes of nation-building in the independent Central Asian states.

By emphasizing the entangled roles of human mobility and urbanization across a range of Central Asian contexts, the papers in this panel also seek to add nuance to the “sedentary-nomadic” classification that has long operated as a key rubric in the categorization and analysis of Central Asian peoples and societies. By emphasizing the role of urbanization and industrialization in the historical trajectories of both Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan (typically understood as historically “nomadic” peoples) and the role of mobile trajectories in the making of Tajikistan (typically classified as “sedentary”), these papers contribute to lively debates in the field of Soviet history, and in the social sciences more broadly, on the nature and legacies of Soviet “modernization” in Central Asia.

Sub Unit

• Anthropology, Cultural Studies

Chair

• Mariana Peixoto Irby, New York U

Papers

• Migrations through Operational Landscapes: Mobile Pastoralism in Kazakhstan’s Urban Society - Mason Smith, UCLA

• Ethnography of a Disappearing City: Memory, Postcoloniality, and De-Sovietization in Dushanbe - Mariana Peixoto Irby, New York U

• Interhelpo: Modernizing Soviet Frunze in the Interwar Years - Kasiet Toktomusheva, Columbia U

• Unsettling Urbanisms: A Reinterpretation of Central Eurasian History Through Three Cities - Rowan Claire Choe Maher

Discussant

• Maria C Taylor, Cornell U