Writing from home: Decolonial agenda and sensitivity in writing on and with Central Asia Diana T Kudaibergenova, University of Cambridge

Event details

Steppe Sisters Annual Lecture

You write three sentences and delete two. Or you write in pencil ready to erase each line or you doodle to hide your words in the diary, on the piece of paper. Memories, ethnographies, pieces and bits of information with relationships, laughs around kurutob or lagman, secrets told in trusting relations, experiences shared in the most unexpected and trusted conditions. Our academic texts are constructed with straightforward and edited verses and lines we thought about for hours if not months and years. What stays outside it is often no less important - feelings, memories, experiences, endless pots of green tea, the heat of Bukharan sun catching every bit of your body no matter how much you hide, the road trips shared with people who speak a dialect you miraculously understand and can speak.

In this talk, Dr Kudaibergenova will address two issues. One is the issue of what stays outside our neatly combined texts; what are the stories that make our research possible but that stay at best the background or anecdotes we tell about this research? Do these stories hold equally important seeds of theorisation? Can the dust from the archives tell stories? Another question that Dr Kudaibergenova will address is the idea of "home" in the writing of decolonial thinkers and writers from Central Asia. And a burning question - how do we write about and with our friends? How do we write from places that we call home and how much of that home-ness can be translated to text? Beyond just the usual "methodological" and theoretical conundrums, she will address the messy, sticky, sometimes aromatic processes of in-between-ness and background-ness that remains a big part of what we write, theorise and talk about. 

About the speaker