We are sitting in a large university auditorium. People are slowly filling the seats. In a few minutes, a Best Book award ceremony will start, celebrating the contributions of various scholars focusing on the vast lands of Eurasia. Around me, I see familiar faces of doctoral and master students from my own country and its neighbours: some I have met at conferences, others I have known from before. We are quite excited about the ceremony, as it is our first Eurasian studies conference abroad.
Suddenly the chatter dies down. The speakers on the podium take the microphone and the ceremony starts. After some pleasantries, the book awards are announced: one after the other, the winners rise to the podium to give a short speech, thanking the many people who helped their research. And one after the other, the names we hear are all non-Eurasian names. Instead, they are the “Robert K. Smiths” and “Wendy B. Moores” of Central Eurasian studies: Slavists or Asianists, mostly graduates of North American universities with years of teaching under their belts.
At this point, some readers may think that I am being ungrateful for the opportunities I have been given. After all, the conference organisers had allocated a travel grant that allowed me to participate. What gives me the moral right to criticise the proceedings? In this article, however, I aim to unsettle precisely this mindset, as well as the normalisation of coloniality in knowledge production, where we, the Central Asians, are the source material, the “field”, the very fuel that feeds the production of knowledge about us, but not for us.
