Recentering Central Asia in Postwar Art Exchange 

This session foregrounds Central Asia as a critical site of postwar cultural convergence. Rather than a distant periphery within Cold War imaginaries, Central Asia was an active meeting ground, where national ambitions, resistance movements, and visions of modernity intersected in complex and often contested ways.

Following the 1955 Bandung Conference, Central Asia emerged as a key stage for cultural diplomacy and political performance, while artists and dancers such as Ural Tansykbayev and Tamara Khanum participated in international events as interlocutors and representatives of national and Soviet modernity. Events such as Gamal Abdel Nasser’s 1958 visit to Uzbekistan, the 1966 India–Pakistan Peace Treaty brokered in Tashkent, and the Afro-Asian Writers Conference in Almaty in 1973 positioned Central Asia not only as a Soviet model for postcolonial development but also as interconnected cultural space with East and West Asia, as well as China and the African continent.

This session invites papers that explore how artists, filmmakers, architects, and intellectuals working in or travelling to Central Asia shaped these dynamics. We seek historically grounded contributions that situate Central Asia as a site of artistic and discursive significance, examining themes such as race, infrastructure, gender, or the environment alongside cultural production.

By reading Central Asia contrapuntally, this session calls for a methodological reorientation. It asks how this diverse region, which continues to defy any firm definition of its borders, was central to social, political and cultural transformation post-Bandung, and how its study might illuminate new models for transnational cooperation in our present.

Submit your Paper via this form. Please download, complete and send it directly to the Session Convenor(s) below by Sunday 2 November 2025:

Christianna Bonin, The American University of Sharjah, cbonin@aus.edu

Maria Mileeva, The Courtauld Institute of Art, maria.mileeva@courtauld.ac.uk