Mustafa Shirzad, junior student from Economics department who recently has returned to AUCA from an Exchange semester at Norwegian University of Life Sciences NMBU, Norway, tells his story about exchange semester in Norway

SPEAKER: Christopher Fort, University of Michigan
Abstract: Since the breakup of the Soviet Union, historians of Central Asia and the Soviet Union have frequently asked to what extent the post-colonial theory developed by writers of Africa and Asia can be applied to Soviet Central Asia. In answering this question, most have reexamined the founding moments of the USSR under Lenin and Stalin. In this presentation, I turn our attention to the 1990s and the breakup itself, comparing post-Soviet independence to anti-colonial revolution. 

SPEAKER: Gabriel McGuire, Nazarbayev University
Abstract: The paradox of the horse in Central Asia is that it appear, at first glance, to simultaneously hold the place of ideal companion and ideal food. In Kazakhstan, the meat of horses above all other animals holds the highest value: its acquisition drives households to band together to collect the money necessary for its purchase; its presence at funerals, weddings, and seasonal celebrations mark these events as qualitatively different from everyday life.

SPEAKER: Naomi Caffee, University of Arizona
Abstract: What are the limits of Russian literature? What factors--language proficiency, citizenship, geographic location, family heritage--qualify someone as "Russian" or "not Russian?" Entering into dialogue with research in Francophone and Sinophone Studies, this talk introduces the transnational framework of “Russophonia” in order to analyze literature produced from within a variety of geopolitical, cultural, sociolinguistic, virtual, and subjective spaces shaped by the Russian language.

Thanks to generous funding provided by Matthew Nimetz, CASI has held a follow-on workshop this year to the seminar it conducted in 2014 on the “Intersections of History and Literature in Central Asia.” The workshop was held on the campus of AUCA in Bishkek from 30 November to 2 December 2017.

SPEAKER: Ali İğmen, California State University
Abstract: Nazim Hikmet became an iconic figure in his homeland Turkey only decades after his death in 1965. As a son of an Ottoman civil servant father and a painter mother, Hikmet is reflective of a generation of young Ottoman subjects who learned about and struggled with modernity, nationalism, and communism. 

 
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SPEAKER: Charles Shaw, Central European University
Abstract: What was Nasriddin afandi, the trickster of the Islamicate world, doing at the heart of Soviet culture during its war with Nazi Germany? This talk discusses Nasreddin in Bukhara (1943), the last film of Soviet director Yakov Protazanov, which was filmed in evacuation Uzbekistan and starred an array of Soviet acting elites.

Literature Week is a part of CASI’s Workshop on Literature and History. Supported by a generous contribution from Matthew Nimetz, the aim of the workshop is to create a community of junior scholars and advanced graduate students committed to studying literature and to applying literary tools and methodologies to the study of literary art in the Central Asian past. 

 
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SPEAKER: Diana Kudaibergenova
Short abstract: The understanding of regional locality and, moreover, of regional art and cultural production poses important questions, namely, What is Central Asia and Where is Central Asia? “Central Asia” is a multi-layered jigsaw that appears as a fairly simple and well-defined but in reality as very complex yet very exciting “lively space”. 

Literature Week is a part of CASI’s Workshop on Literature and History. Supported by a generous contribution from Matthew Nimetz, the aim of the workshop is to create a community of junior scholars and advanced graduate students committed to studying literature and to applying literary tools and methodologies to the study of literary art in the Central Asian past.