My identity as a woman from Central Asia is always between two cultures, Russian and Kazakh. It is difficult for me to decide which is closer or dearer to me: I speak Russian, I understand Kazakh, but I don’t speak it. My hybrid identity as an activist, a lesbian, a woman writing a doctoral thesis, is constantly in question. I am never fully realised in any of these identities: I am somewhere but only to a certain level, to a certain extent. When I express myself, I do not know how strongly I am coming through.
In my article, I problematise the existing relationship of subordination between Central Asia and Russia - which to this day retains its imperialistic self-image with regards to its borderlands - through my own personal experience between Russia and Kazakhstan. This subordination becomes obvious when considering contemporary academia and activism, as well as the historiography of the region conducted by Russian imperial ethnographers in the 19th century. These men travelled across Russia’s Central Asian colonies (then called “Turkestan”) to understand the colonisation process, with its expansion of Russian language and culture to civilise the inorodtsy - a legal term with negative connotations that describes the non-Russian population.
Historian Marina Mogil’ner argues that studying purported racial superiority and inferiority was a part of a flourishing anthropological tradition in Russia, in the same way that Western science examined similar issues in their colonies. I cannot find any research by Kazakhstani scholars about Russian folklore, society and gender in the 18th and 19th centuries. The work of Kazakh poet, scholar and activist Olzhas Suleimenov is a perfect illustration of this. When he analysed the influence of Turkic nomads on the medieval Russian epic poem “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign” in his 1975 Az i Ya study, he was accused of nationalism.
