“Post-Soviet Ecopoetics” and “Retroactive Anticolonialism”: Theorising Central Asia’s Decolonial Aesthetics

This article situates Uzbek author Hamid Ismailov’s novella The Dead Lake (Вундеркинд Ержан/Мёртвое Озеро) (2015) in the context of the recent turn in Central Asian literature towards postcolonial revisionism, or what I identify as ‘retroactive anticolonialism’. Works in this category are concerned with exposing the taboo legacies of the Soviet past, including environmental exploitation, while affirming repressed ethnic traditions and practices, such as storytelling through music and orality, nomadism, and spiritualism, when defining Central Asia’s postcolonial identities. Yet, while focused on ethnicity, such texts are far from nationalist, as the example of Ismailov’s text shows. Building on the methodical tools of postcolonial ecocriticism and ecomusicology, I propose the concept of post-Soviet ecopoetics: the postcolonial language of environmental solidarity. I argue that Ismailov’s ecopoetics intertwines the themes of its protagonist Erzhan’s identity, nature and music, and in so doing, proposes a new inter-ethnic language of solidarity that transcends the boundaries of nationality or citizenship, and evokes solidarity with the various human and non-human beings, and landscapes of Central Asia. As such, his novella provides a case-study of how the retroactive anti-colonialism in Central Asian culture moves beyond the binaries of colonising centre vs. colonised periphery, dominant language vs. local languages, human vs. non-human, and proposes a truly inclusive vision of decolonial political and cultural aesthetics in the post-Soviet space.