SESSION: Recentring 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.
Session Convenor:
Christianna Bonin, The American University of Sharjah
Maria Mileeva, The Courtauld Institute of Art
Session Speakers:
Alexey Ulko, Uzbekistan Amateur Filmmakers’ Association
Sharaf Rashidov’s The Song of Kashmir and the politics of cultural translation
This paper examines Sharaf Rashidov’s 1956 novella The Song of Kashmir and its adaptations in ballet, animation and film as layered examples of Soviet cultural diplomacy shaped by Central Asia’s role in Cold War internationalism. Written before Rashidov became leader of Soviet Uzbekistan, the novella reimagines Dinanath Nadim’s Kashmiri opera Bombur taa Yamberzal, itself influenced by Chinese revolutionary theatre, as a poetic narrative infused with Uzbek folk imagery and Nowruz symbolism.
I explore how Rashidov’s retelling of a contemporary Kashmiri poem as “a legend” functions as myth, veiled allegory and a gesture of solidarity with a specific episode in Kashmir’s political struggle, framed by Soviet authorities as anti-colonial. The novella’s symbolic structure, including its Sufi-inflected prologue and ambiguous ending, invites multiple readings. Characters such as Harud and the Blizzard, once legible as political caricatures to Kashmiri audiences, were later reframed in Uzbekistan as abstract metaphors for colonial oppression.
The paper traces the novella’s circulation and reinterpretation across media, from its transformation into ballet and cartoon to its echoes in Indo-Soviet cinema and later in Salman Rushdie’s literary references. I consider how Rashidov’s work was gradually detached from its original political context, repackaged as folklore and absorbed into broader narratives of “Eastern cultural unity”. This trajectory reveals the shifting ideological uses of cultural production in Central Asia and the fragility of politically embedded art under changing regimes.
By situating The Song of Kashmir within Soviet (Uzbek)–South Asian exchange, I propose a rethinking of Central Asia’s cultural agency across literature, performance and diplomacy.
Da Hyung Jeong, ETH Zuerich
Postmodern Architecture and the Paradox of Non-Alignment in Soviet Central Asia
This paper examines the late Soviet critique and revision of universal modernism, which functioned as a vehicle for the imperial erasure of cultural difference among administrative regions, and the concurrent consolidation of architectural postmodernism as a potentially subversive practice of spatial production in Central Asia. It argues that at the centre of this process, which carried a hidden decolonial significance, was the participation of Central Asian intellectuals and cultural producers in the discourse of non-alignment, a discourse that operated across multiple media and forms of cultural exchange. The fact that Chinghiz Aitmatov, a Soviet Kyrgyz author best known for his critical engagement with Sovietization as a form of Russification, contributed to Lotus a reflection on the monotony and evacuation of difference in the Soviet-built environment illustrates the deep implications of spatial thought within the cultural imagination of non-alignment. This imagination was sustained in paradoxical fashion by the Soviet Union itself, even as it pursued an imperial agenda that became unmistakable with the invasion of Afghanistan in 1979.
Having established this context, the paper turns to the Soviet reception of two architects from the postcolonial world whose work was informed by non-aligned discourse: the Egyptian architect Hassan Fathy and the Indian architect Charles Correa. Fathy’s work received particularly sustained attention in Soviet Uzbekistan, where Arkhitektura i stroitel’stvo Uzbekistana, the republic’s principal architectural magazine, explored the postmodern aspects of his practice. As for Correa’s search for an architectural expression of Indianness, it was presented to Soviet audiences through the exhibition Vistara: The Architecture of India, which was held as part of the Festival of India that took place across all fifteen Soviet republics in 1987 and 1988.
Sharofat Arabova, Filmmaker’s Union of Tajikistan
Peripheral Centers: Tajik Documentaries and the Making of Soviet Global Narratives
The paper examines the dynamics of the development of political documentary filmmaking produced by Tajik filmmakers outside the Tajik SSR and its role within the structure of Soviet
cultural diplomacy. The central focus is on the films by Evgeny Kuzin, a Tajik documentary director and laureate of major USSR State Prizes, whose works were regularly featured in Sovetsky Ekran magazine, as well as on the works of Davlat Khudonazarov. Kuzin was one of the most trusted filmmakers of the USSR State Cinema Committee (Goskino) and produced feature-length documentaries about foreign countries — India, Iraq, Laos, Afghanistan, Cuba, and Kampuchea. His films presented Soviet modernity to international audiences while simultaneously transmitting the USSR’s ideological positions across the “Third World.”
The study highlights the dual nature of Tajikfilm: the studio produced internal chronicles of republican life while also functioning as a diplomatic instrument — from dubbing films into Farsiand Arabic to creating political documentaries intended for international circulation. Through the Tashkent Festival of Asian and African Cinema, new creative ties were established, leading to international co-productions such as Sunrise over the Ganges, the Scheherazade cycle, and The Secret of Nine Prophets.
The paper also analyzes the diplomatic dimensions of the relationship between the Tajik SSR and Iran. For Iran, Tajikistan represented an emblem of Soviet modernity, whereas Iran itself embodied a form of Muslim identity whose strengthening within the republic was considered undesirable. Thus, despite linguistic kinship, Tajik filmmakers were almost never sent to Iran; instead, their work was focused on Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria. These assignments were strategically planned with cultural and geographic proximity in mind.
Xin Wang, New York University
Borderland/Bianjiang Re-Centred
This paper explores shifting artistic strategies for imagining and engaging with Central Asia in modern and contemporary China, placing special emphasis on case studies that speak to as well as trouble the art-historical and geopolitical contexts that informed their making. The evolution in the genres of narrative dance ensembles and revolutionary ballet, as mediated by concurrent development in the government’s ethnic taxonomical work (or “nationality work) from the 1950s to 1980s, both built upon Soviet models to address nation-building imperatives in the newly founded communist regime. Key players who shaped this landscape included diasporic figures with peripatetic lives and careers, like Qemberxanim (c. 1914-1994), a celebrity dancer and highly respected educator who directed the PRC’s first state-sponsored professional conservatory for ethnic minority performers; she was born to a Muslim Uyghur family in Kashgar and received formal training in Tashkent, working as a professional dancer in the Uzbek Song and Dance Theater before being recruited to train in Moscow in the late 1930s. Tajik Bride, a 1983 painting by Jin Shangyi (who was among the 21 students trained in the coveted Maksimov program from 1955-1957), was widely considered and celebrated for marking a departure from the academic Soviet style, but its subject matter reflects a continuity of that pedagogy in myriad ways. Contemporary artists like Liu Chuang, Han Mengyun, and Liu Yujia, on the other hand, adopted film and video installation as their primary medium, constellating and speculating on complex histories, geographies, and lived experiences.
Maja Fowkes, University of East Anglia
Reuben Fowkes, University of East Anglia
Interdependence and Worldmaking in the Central Asian Socialist Anthropocene
This paper homes in on three moments in the post-war trajectory of Soviet Central Asia that illuminate the operations of socialist worldmaking through the prism of a changing relationship to nature and within the evolving landscape of internationalism. It considers paintings of the transformation of the Central Asian steppe that were dispatched in 1948 to capitals of the Eastern Bloc, not just to exemplify the modus operandi of socialist realism, but also to articulate the productivist attitudes to the natural world embedded in five-year plans. By the early 1960s, the campaign to transform the so-called Virgin Lands of northern Kazakhstan into wheatfields had become the centrepiece of the Soviet model of development, held up as an example to the newly decolonizing nations of Africa of the potent combination of technology, state control and collective work as a vehicle of modernity, and also a favoured subject of official art that glorified the post-national identities of newcomer communities. In the 1980s, it was not just the mounting environmental impacts of chemicalized agriculture and the siphoning of rivers for irrigation, but also nuclear testing, that made Central Asia a lightning rod of ecological concern, with the Nevada-Semipalatinsk movement at the forefront of global campaigns for the decommissioning of atomic infrastructures. Considered here is the centrality of Central Asia to the transformative visions of socialist planners, the role of art in expressing and propagating this blueprint in the region and beyond, and the emergence of ecocritical understandings of interdependence in the Socialist Anthropocene.