[Bilimsel Haber] SEMINAR SERIES- TOSCCA Central Asian Humanities Seminar, University of Oxford

[Gonul Pultar]

SEMINAR SERIES- TOSCCA Central Asian Humanities Seminar, University of 
Oxford

Posted by: Nariman Skakov <nariman.skakov at univ.ox.ac.uk>

The Oxford Society for the Caspian and Central Asia
Central Asian Humanities Seminar Series

Hilary Term Sessions

Friday 25 January, 2008 at 5.30pm (Hilary Term 2008 Week 2)
Hamid Ismailov's Railway: Appropriated Russianness?
By Hamid Ismailov & Robert Chandler, chaired by Dr. Philip Bullock (Wadham)
Location: Swire Seminar Room, 12 Merton Street, University College, Oxford

Friday 22 February, 2008 at 5.30pm (Hilary Term 2008 Week 6)
The Use of the Russian Language in Contemporary Central Asian Cinema
By Eugenie Zvonkine (University Paris VIII)
Location: Swire Seminar Room, 12 Merton Street, University College, Oxford

Friday 7 March, 2008 at 5.30pm (Hilary Term 2008 Week 8)
Soviet Oriental?: Socialist Realism and Formation of Identities in
    Soviet Central Asia
By Aliya de Tiesenhausen (Courtauld Institute of Art), chaired by Dr.
    Michael Nicholson (University)
Location: Swire Seminar Room, 12 Merton Street, University College, Oxford

All inquiries regarding the seminar should be made to Nariman Skakov
<nariman.skakov at univ.ox.ac.uk>


Abstracts

25 January 2008
Hamid Ismailov's Railway: Appropriated Russianness?

The Railway
Set mainly in Central Asia between 1900 and 1980, The Railway
introduces to us the inhabitants which include Uzbeks, Russians,
Persians, Jews, Koreans, Tartars and Gypsies of a small town near
Tashkent. Among those whose stories we hear are Mefody-Jurisprudence,
the towns alcoholic intellectual; Father Ioann, a Russian priest;
Kara-Musayev the Younger, the chief of police; and Umarali-Moneybags,
the old moneylender. At the heart of both the town and the novel
stands the railway station. Highly sophisticated yet imbued with a
naive delight in storytelling, The Railway chronicles the dramatic
changes felt throughout Central Asia in the twentieth century.

One of the main questions Hamid Ismailov will address in this seminar
is why he wrote the novel in Russian, rather than in Uzbek?  The town
of Gilas, he has written, is like a microcosm of the Soviet Union, or
even of the world as a whole that Gilas is a kind of Noahs ark of
humanity.  And since this Noah's ark was glued together with the help
of Russian Russian political concepts, Russian communist jargon it
made sense to write the novel in Russian...   Thinking about all this,
by the way, I've realized how few truly Soviet novels there are. For
the main part, Soviet literature now seems to me to have been made up
of lots of little artificial reservations or theme parks: Uzbek
novels, where all the characters apart from a few Russians are Uzbek;
Russian novels, where all the characters apart from a few token Jews
or Georgians are Russian; Georgian novels; Armenian novels, and so on
Its all a far cry from my own experience of Soviet life.

Hamid Ismailov was born in Kirghizstan in 1954.  He has lived in
Tashkent, Moscow, Paris, Bamberg and London, where he is now Head of
the BBC Central Asian Service.  He has written poetry and novels in
both Uzbek and Russian, in a variety of styles and under many
different pseudonyms. His most recent novel, Comrade Islam, tells the
story of the IMU, the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, from the
perspective of an Uzbek poet who has ended up in their ranks; the
Russian text has been published in Britain but appears to be too
controversial to be published in Russia, let alone in Uzbekistan.

Robert Chandlers translations from Russian include Vasily Grossmans
'Life and Fate', Leskovs 'Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk' and Aleksandr
Pushkins'The Captains Daughter'. Together with his wife, Elizabeth,
and other colleagues he has co-translated numerous works by Andrey
Platonov; these translations have won prizes in both the UK and the
USA.  His translation of Hamid Ismailov's 'The Railway' received a
special commendation from the judges of the 2007 Rossica Translation
Prize.  Robert Chandler teaches part-time at Queen Mary, University
of London.


22 February 2008
The Use of the Russian Language in Contemporary Central Asian Cinema

If we go back to the beginning of Central Asian cinema, one fact
strikes us: in most of the republics of this region, cinema was
introduced by the Soviets and was thus initially centralized rather
than national. The main language of the industry was Russian.  When
cinema ceased to be silent, the imposed language of cinema production
was, of course, also Russian. Every film edited in Soviet Central Asia
would be dubbed in Russian, if not performed in Russian in the first
place; the scripts would be censored in Moscow. In most of republics
the film directors were for a long time more often Russian than local
(until the sixties).

Little by little, the number of real national talents would increase
in the cinema, but the relation to the language would remain
problematic. Even more so in Kazakhstan, where until the nineties,
most of the city dwellers would speak only Russian whereas those who
live in the villages would talk Kazakh and often very little Russian.
Cinema being an urban industry and the cinema studios being situated
in the main city of the country, Almaty, the profession would stay
dominated by the Russian language.

Nonetheless, when Kazakhstan became an independent country, the
importance of the Kazakh language became preponderant. Considered as
the vector of the whole Kazakh culture, it was on the front line in
the process of defining, creating and re-creating the Kazakh cultural
identity.

We will try to observe and analyse what has become of the place of the
Russian language in this new context: how it is used (as a dominating
element or as a dismembered, deformed, deviated linguistic form) and
what it stands for marks of Soviet History or/and, surprisingly, marks
of Kazakh cultural history?

Eugenie Zvonkine is a teaching and research assistant at the
University Paris VIII, in the cinema department. She is also a PhD
student in cinema (supervisor: Professor Claudine Eizykman), writing
about The states of dissonance in Kira Muratovas cinematographic
oeuvre (from 1964 to our days). Since 2004, she selects Central Asian
films for the Asian International Film Festival in Vesoul (France) and
since 2006, for the International Film Festival AsiaticaFilmMediale in
Rome (Italy). She has given lectures on Central Asian films for the
programme High school goes to the cinema and has subtitled several
films in French (such as Erkek by Yusup Razykov, Boz salkyn by Ernest
Abdyzhaparov, Kurak Korpe by Rustem Abdrashev)


7 March 2008
Soviet Oriental?: Socialist Realism and the Formation of Identities in
Soviet Central Asia

The question of identity has become increasingly potent in the period
since Kazakhstan gained its independence in 1991. With history being
rewritten and the increasing influence of internal and external
economic and political pressures the new nation/s is/are going through
a perpetual process of self-appreciation and identity-formation. In
this presentation this intriguing question of construction is being
considered through the development of art history within Soviet Union
in relation to Kazakhstan and Central Asia.

The European traditions of oil painting and sculpture arrived in
Kazakhstan in the 1930s as part of the Soviet civilizing mission in
the guise of officially supported Socialist Realism. This
state-monitored image making provided ways of approaching both history
and the future, and inevitably formed a stereotypical image of the
peoples of the given Central Asian republic.

The duality of both being depicted and yet being taught to depict
oneself in a certain manner lead to the establishment of a tradition
of painting which was neither independent, nor necessarily
imperialist. History has shown that such intervention nevertheless
produced a School of art. Yet, more importantly, it produced valuable
reflections of the use and abuse of stereotypes in the context of
multinational state (USSR).

In the last decade interest in Soviet history and Russian art has led
to the continuous re-evaluation of the Soviet art in general. Within
the political domain, Russia may wish to shy away from the image of a
colonizer, while art may tell a significantly different story. As is
often the case, art production, (possibly playing the role of societys
subconscious), opens up readings and interventions which are often
overlooked within textbooks and official analysis. The presentation of
Socialist Realist art and Soviet history remain a form of expression
with goals not unrelated to the those of Stalin in the mid twentieth
century.  With two related plot-lines the paper suggests on the one
hand the strong Russian domination of Kazakhstans culture throughout
the twentieth century. On the other hand, the exhibition and
re-evaluation of Socialist Realist production remains within the
bounds of the obvious and contradictory structures of power.

Aliya de Tiesenhausen is finishing a doctoral thesis on the
representative strategies of the Socialist Realism movement at the
Courtauld Institute of Art under Dr. Sarah Wilsons supervision. She
has written about and curated exhibitions of contemporary Kazakh art.







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