Description
Book Synopsis*Shortlisted for the 2018 Book Award in Social Sciences of the Central Eurasian Studies Society*Rewriting the Nation in Modern Kazakh Literature is a book about cultural transformations and trajectories of national imagination in modern Kazakhstan. The book is a much-needed critical introduction and a comprehensive survey of the Kazakh literary production and cultural discourses on the nation in the twentieth and twenty first centuries. In the absence of viable and open forums for discussion and in the turbulent moments of postcolonial and cultural transformation under the Soviets, the Kazakh writers and intellectuals widely engaged with the national identity, heritage and genealogy construction in literature. This active process of national canon construction and its constant re-writing throughout the twentieth century will inform the readers of the complex processes of cultural transformations in forms, genres and texts as well as demonstrating the genealogical development of the nat
Trade ReviewKudaibergenova’s project is highly ambitious and covers an impressive breadth of literary history . . . This book accomplishes its primary aim, which is to provide a welcome and needed view into the lives and worlds of twentieth-century writers in Kazakhstan, and will be helpful for scholars of (post-)Soviet literature and nationalisms alike. * Central Asian Survey *
Rewriting the Nation in Modern Kazakh Literature offers a rare glimpse into the world of the ‘writers of the nation’ who, in pursuit of their elitist projects, shaped ‘total readership’ in Soviet Kazakhstan and inscribed the ideals of indigenous history and nationhood. While focused on research and mythology involved in these Soviet projects, it speaks volumes to broader issues and provides important insights to academic debates on totalitarianism, post-colonialism, and national imagination. -- Saulesh Yessenova, University of Calgary
Diana T. Kudaibergenova has written an important book that introduces modern Kazakh literature and issues of Kazakh identity to English-language audiences. She accomplishes this through a careful analysis of selected major works of Kazakh belles lettres. Her study provides a cogent analysis of the relation of works of successive generations of writers to one another and to the political context in which they worked. Readers of this book will be rewarded with an understanding of how Kazakh literati have conceived of and portrayed the history of the Kazakh people and its relevance to the eras in which they wrote. Dr. Kudaibergenova leads the reader up to the present and illustrates the complexity of Kazakhs’ and Kazakhstan’s identity in the post-Soviet era. -- William Fierman, Indiana University Bloomington
Impressively applying methods of cultural semiotics and the sociology of culture, Diana T. Kudaibergenova approaches the ideologies that have been accompanying the complex transformations of Kazakh national identity in a non-ideological manner, combining intimate familiarity with her subject with an objective perspective throughout. This renders her monograph a groundbreaking contribution to the study of modern Kazakh society, particularly regarding the ways in which literary texts shaped national discourses during the Soviet and post-Soviet periods. -- Peter Rollberg, George Washington University
Table of ContentsChapter 1: National Survival, Alash, and Modern Kazakh Literary Debates Chapter 2: Self-Orientalization and Re-writing the Narrative Chapter 3: The Formation of Soviet-Kazakh Literature Canons Chapter 4: Mukhtar Auezov’s Abai Zholy and the Encyclopedia of the Kazakh Nation Chapter 5: Nomads/Koshpendiler and the Re-Discovery of the Past: Canonizing Nomadism Chapter 6: Mukhtar Magauin’s Cultural Archaeology in Soviet and post-Soviet Kazakhstan’s National History and Literature Chapter 7: Internationalism, Postcolonialism and Kazakh Soviet Literature in the 1960s and 1980s: Anuar Alimzhanov, Satimzhan Sanbayev, and Murat Auezov Chapter 8: Olzhas Suleimenov and the Un-Bounded Imagination of the Past Chapter 9: December 1986 and the National Imagination in the Post-Independent Era Chapter 10: Timeless and Post-National: Gerold Belger’s narration on Kazakhstan
