Feminist Ecofiction from Central Asia: Reading Mothersland by Shahzoda Samarqandi

Session Submission Type: Roundtable

Brief Description

This year, Slavica is releasing an English translation of Mothersland, by Uzbekistani author Shahzoda Samarqandi. Mothersland is a short, dreamy, eco-feminist tale that is perhaps the first of its kind. An anonymous peer review called the manuscript “an excellent and well-written translation of a powerful novel… It will be a much-needed Central Asian feminist novel of very high quality, one that is likely to be adapted for many courses.” The protagonist, a young woman from Uzbekistan’s Tajik-speaking minority, loses her memory in an accident while playing her hero-worker mother in a Russian director’s film about cotton and environmental devastation. Her injury scrambles her own memories with the plot of the film and with her mother’s vivid diary entries from Soviet days, and as she struggles to disentangle these stories, she must finally forge her own new, post-cotton, post-colonial identity. The translator and, if possible, the author will be present for this first scholarly discussion of a new addition to the post-colonial literature curriculum for Central Asia. The roundtable format will facilitate an open discussion of the book's themes and its possible uses in the classroom.

Sub Unit

• Literature: 21st Century

Chair

• Tamar Koplatadze, U of Oxford (UK)

Roundtable Members

• Shelley Fairweather-Vega, FairVega Translations & Library Services

• Kristen Jasmin Fort, American U of Central Asia (Kyrgyzstan)

• Samuel Hodgkin, Yale U

• Shakhzoda Nazarova, Independent Scholar