Postcolonial Approaches To Central Asian Authors

By shifting the postcolonial gaze away from traditional considered postcolonial sites, we are gaining not just a more thorough understanding of Central Asia, but also exposing the links between parts of the world hitherto considered to be disparate and unconnected. This is not to deny the specific historical context of the Russian/Soviet empire or the complexities of Central Asia but rather to prevent an orientalization of these republics which could be dismissed and arguably have been dismissed as too distinct and other to figure in much postcolonial scholarship. Why this dismissive step is so commonly made? Chinua Achebe drew the comparison between western and eastern colonized places, highlighting the similarity between English attitudes to violence in Bulgaria or atrocities in the Congo of King Leopold `or wherever. ` To avoid this hegemonic `or wherever` in which vast differences and cultural traditions are reduced to productions of the `third world`, postcolonial theory, the response of the coloniser, becomes fundamental to world identities as a `universal category `, within which hierarchical structures do not exist and plurality of meaning and situation are celebrated . `East` (or the former Eastern Bloc) can be conceptualized along similar lines as `South` (areas traditionally treated as postcolonial, Africa, South-East Asia, the Caribbean) due to the historical parallels, that is the shared experience of foreign domination, between these two areas. Having both been exoticized, the literature of the two areas is often linked by defiance and evasion of prescribed notions of what it means to be Kazakh or Uzbek or Senegalese. ... The railway plays a central role within each novel. As was visible from the image from Turksib, railways are often an extremely potent symbol in colonised countries, representing the colonial paradigm of civilizing the savage (either landscape or people) and at the same time, being constructed at huge cost to the local population and ecology, as was the case with the Turkestan-Siberian railway in 1931 as well as, infamously, in the Belgian Congo between 1890-1898 . Moreover, the very idea of constructing a railway is one that depends on acquisition and subordination. The railway`s principal use was, of course, to transport the materials extracted from a specific colony and a means of `demarcating the exotic. ` Cartographic colonisation, the process by which space is `explored, charted and finally brought under control, ` provides a fundamental building block of the philosophy of empire, in which a power dominates or develops an area by `opening it up` to the metropole. Thus the railway is a symbol for wider colonial processes, in which a legitimising image of the mother country is held up against a backward and exotic local population. In the two works considered, a reconsideration of the railroad`s purpose and role takes place. In itself, this reappraisal is an appropriation or a postcolonial gesture, as the railway, in a multitude of different practises and gazes, becomes part of the fabric of Kazakh and Uzbek daily life. Often the railway`s intended purpose is subverted. The ways in which the local population cope with and make use of this transport svyaz` are unexpected and ambiguous. Whether or not the railway is a positive force, its presence defines the settlements` relationship, in both ? ?????? ???? ?????? ???? and ???????? ??????, with the universe of the coloniser. The Russian word svyaz` has a dual meaning of link or relationship but also communication network. Thus a railway svyaz` is both a purely physical connection between one place and another and an implied relationship between two places. The railway is therefore a useful tool with which to compare the two novels as well as connecting them with other postcolonial literatures as it encapsulates a relationship between coloniser/colonised.