ABSTRACT
The authors provide an introduction to the special issue and the Central Asia Research Cluster project. This transnational project brought together an interdisciplinary group of scholars to examine the roots of knowledge production and preservation in Soviet and Post-Soviet Central Asia, recontextualizing cultural heritage, histories, and memory that illuminate and complicate the many layers of center-periphery relations at local, national, and regional levels.
This special issue of Slavic and East European Information Resources (SEEIR) features articles from the Central Asia Research Cluster, an initiative that originated at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2021. Over thirty years since the collapse of the Soviet Union, our understanding of and interaction with the countries of the former USSR continues to evolve, taking on new theoretical and practical dimensions. The inaugural research cluster sought to examine these new directions with the theme “Decentering the Periphery: Knowledge Production in Soviet and Post-Soviet Central Asia.” Central Asia is often examined through the lens of a “peripheral” space. Within area studies libraries, Central Asia is often classified either as a part of Slavic and Soviet studies or among Middle Eastern studies, leaving our understanding at times fragmented and incomplete. Despite these categorizations that may marginalize the study of Central Asia, interest in Central Asia seems to be on the rise as institutions increasingly depend on countries in the region for language study and research needs. The theme of decentering the periphery, then, challenged authors to pursue the new understandings and frameworks made possible by centering the peoples, cultures, and histories of Central Asia in our scholarship and practice.
The cluster was experimental in nature, with three overarching goals. First, provide support for Central Asian authors, who are largely underrepresented in English-language published research on the region. This goal was made possible through generous support of sponsors and editorial board members who enabled multiple rounds of feedback, reviews, and professional copy-editing. Our second goal was to support increased dialogue between scholars and information professionals and encourage interdisciplinary examination of the theme. Third, provide a collaborative working environment with a full pathway from writing to publishing. We achieved these three goals by working with multiple publishing outlets for the author’s final products. We are immensely grateful to everyone who provided their time and expertise to this project.
The articles included in this special issue investigate how cultural heritage has been produced, preserved, and disseminated in the Central Asian republics during the Soviet and independent periods. Akram Habibulla’s book review provides further context on knowledge production in Central Asia during the Russian Imperial period while highlighting scholarship by a Central Asian author.Marat Rakhmatullaev and Anne E. Hedrich’s article investigates the current state and future potential of academic libraries in Uzbekistan. Dilafza Haydaraliyeva considers the role of conservation practices in Uzbekistan in cultural preservation and identity formation in the independent state. Gul’shat Abikova and Ashirbek Muminov provide an informative overview of manuscript collections in Kazakhstan. This introduction provides an overview of the history of publishing in Central Asia, with special focus on the role of national libraries; and demonstrates that Central Asian intellectual and publishing history was marked by rapid change, as well as a myriad of diverse actors who influenced knowledge production in unique and significant ways.
Late Imperial and Soviet Periods
By the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, groups throughout Central Asia were questioning what it meant to be educated and how knowledge was to be produced and disseminated. A confluence of internal and external forces shaped these views, with the Jadid movement playing a crucial role in dictating these cultural reforms before the October Revolution. These Islamic reformers developed and implemented new methods of popular education, introduced new subjects of inquiry such as geography, and generally sought to “modernize” the indigenous cultures of the region.Footnote1 The nineteenth century presents a challenge to researchers due to lack of scholarly intervention and a limited source base.Footnote2 Within the library sphere, the Turkestanskii Sbornik is likely the most comprehensive documentation of publication on Central Asia before 1917, consisting of 594 volumes of materials originally published in Russian, English, German, and other languages.Footnote3 Although a truly impressive effort that continues to aid researchers, Turkestanskii Sbornik demonstrates the high level of exogenous mediation that many sources on Central Asia embody.
The social change and educational reform of this period occurred alongside the development of lithographic printing. Jadid reformers utilized this technology to begin circulating some of the first periodical publications, new method school primers, and poetry and religious literature in Kazakh, Uzbek, Tajik, and other vernacular languages written in Arabic script. Although we may imagine Central Asia as a unified region, distinct publishing relationships emerged including Kazakh-Tatar, Uzbek-Tajik, and Turkmen-Azeri relations.Footnote4 The largest North American collection of these early materials is held at the New York Public Library.Footnote5
The delimitation of ethno-national Soviet republics in Central Asia in 1924 once again altered the publishing landscape as distinct national identities emerged.Footnote6 During the 1930s, literacy campaigns demanded new materials that could not only teach citizens to read in their native languages but to understand the political ideology of the Soviet Union. Among traditionally nomadic Kyrgyz and Kazakh populations, another aim of cultural education was to promote a sedentarization of people. Additionally, cultural education sought to create demarcated literary traditions among the Central Asian Republics, drawing identity distinctions where they had not previously existed, such as those between the Tajiks and Uzbeks who often existed in bilingual communities.Footnote7 The demand to conform to new ideological and aesthetic guidelines under Soviet rule altered the content of art and science, setting a precedent for the nationally distinct publishing traditions we understand today.
During these early years of Soviet rule, book chambers and national libraries were established throughout the Republics of Central Asia as a part of the standardized Soviet system. As Whitby and Lorkovic establish in their Introduction to Soviet National Bibliographies, the Soviet system of national bibliographies was developed from the Russian Tsarist bibliographic tradition.Footnote8 Among the republics, the Uzbek SSR was the first to begin releasing a national bibliographic publication in 1928. The Turkmen SSR followed soon behind in 1930, registering current publications as well as publications from the 1920s. In 1937 and 1941, respectively, the Kazakh SSR and Tajik SSR began to publish their own national bibliographic serials. National bibliographic output largely began to stabilize in the decade following World War II. The Kyrgyz SSR began to release national bibliographic publications during this time beginning in 1951. In these years, the book chambers began to publish annals regularly, often quarterly, covering a typical array of works such as books, journal articles, and music in vernacular languages and Russian.
Beginning in the 1950s and until the collapse of the Soviet Union, the book chambers and academic institutions of Central Asia engaged in increased bibliographic activity. Many book chambers and national libraries published retrospective bibliographies covering 1917 to the beginning of national bibliographic activity, including World War II.Footnote9 Academies of Science in the national republics engaged in another sort of retrospective bibliography by classifying and cataloging Central Asian and Islamic manuscripts. Unlike other forms of bibliography that were predicated on national distinctions, these works often highlight the fluid geography of Central Asian literary works before the national delimitation. Catalogs like L.M. Epifanova’s Rukopisnye istochniki Instituta vostokovedeniia Akademii nauk UzSSR po Istorii Srednei Azii perioda prisoedineniia k Rossi highlight the longstanding presence of Russia in the region through content as well as creation, as many of these bibliographic materials were assembled in collaboration with Russian bibliographers and institutions.Footnote10 To this day, collections of uncatalogued manuscripts likely exist throughout the region.Footnote11
Knowledge Production in the Independent Republics
When the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, the newly independent republics of Central Asia inherited the institutions and academic traditions established during the twentieth century. National libraries, and in some instances book chambers, retain many of the functions held during the Soviet period. Russia remains a relevant influence on libraries in the region: the national libraries of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan all belong to the Library Assembly of Eurasia.Footnote12 Independence has also created the opportunity for libraries in the Central Asian republics to connect with peers outside of the former Soviet Union; Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, for example, are members of Electronic Information for Libraries (EIFL), an organization that aspires to expand access to digital resources throughout the world.Footnote13
The digital shift of the past few decades has irrevocably changed libraries, and Central Asia is no exception. All five national libraries of the Central Asian Republics maintain websites with a variety of resources and information. Both the National Library and the National Academic Library of Kazakhstan’s websites feature electronic catalogs for books, periodicals, and rare books.Footnote14 The National Library of Uzbekistan’s union catalog went online in 2014 and can be searched without registering or logging into the site.Footnote15 Other resources, such as the digitized card catalog, may be user restricted. The National Library of Tajikistan has a digital catalog available to on-site users in addition to the existing card catalog. This electronic catalog was advertised on the old website but not on the new website. Nevertheless, the catalog requires users to login with their library card, something that can only be obtained in-person and with proper visa and registration.Footnote16 The Kyrgyz Library Information Consortium previously developed a union catalog of seventy-five academic, public, school, and other libraries in the country. This resource has unfortunately been offline for over two years.Footnote17
Digital libraries and collections continue to expand the accessibility of Central Asian sources, especially vernacular language sources. Perhaps the most notable example of an integrated online library is the Kazakhstan National Electronic Library (Kazneb), with over 69,364 electronic copies of books, dictionaries, rare materials, articles, and periodicals. Researchers seeking to work with manuscripts will find full-text access through the Uzbek National Library’s Nodir database, as well as a comprehensive collection of digitized finding aids for manuscript collections held at the Al-Biruni Institute of Oriental Studies in Tashkent.Footnote18 The National Academy of Sciences in Kyrgyzstan has also created a digital library of full-text manuscripts available on the open-web.Footnote19 The National Electronic Library of Kyrgyzstan database contains 1,742 documents from all regions of the country including children’s books, literature, articles, and more.Footnote20 The National Library of Tajikistan offers an e-library to card-holding users.Footnote21
Digital collections of Central Asian materials are also appearing as the result of increased collaboration between North American and Central Asian institutions and scholarship. The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has been involved in three of these projects, which are housed through the UIUC Library’s servers. These projects include the previously mentioned digitization of the Turkestankii Sbornik, as well as a fully searchable collection of Uzbek national bibliographic publications.Footnote22 The Memoirs of the Central Asian Soviet Era digital collection has made available the memoirs of Tajik politicians, intellectuals, and other personalities; in 2021, the Slavic Reference Service (SRS) also began to mirror the contents of this collection to Internet Archive with the intention to expand the collection.Footnote23 International collaboration has become increasingly possible with the Central Asian republics. In the past thirty years, independence has paved the way for librarians and researchers to engage with Central Asian cultural heritage on its own terms, a promising development that demands a new type of engagement and expertise from information professionals outside of the region.
Despite promising developments in the library field, libraries throughout the region face a number of challenges that cannot be overlooked. Although the academic sphere in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan is increasingly interactive with the English-speaking world, previous articles in Slavic and East European Information Resources (SEEIR) have illustrated the difficulty (and sometimes the impossibility) of establishing and maintaining remote contact with libraries in Central Asia, as has been the case with Tajikistan and Turkmenistan.Footnote24 Additionally, as scholars of the former Soviet Union advocate for diverse library collections that reflect the output of these republics, low publishing output limits the available amount of items to acquire.Footnote25 Finally, academic freedom remains a pressing concern in many of the Central Asian republics, with the realities of authoritarian states leading to censorship and self-censorship of researchers.Footnote26
Collaboration with Central Asian institutions is possible and increasingly important as our field continues to adjust to political realignments in the Slavic, East European, and Eurasian world. This special issue is hopefully just the beginning of a conversation that reexamines the role of Central Asia in Slavic and East Europe librarianship in light of our evolving understanding of the region.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. Adeeb Khalid, Making Uzbekistan: Nation, Empire, and Revolution in the Early USSR (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015), 28.
2. Adeeb Khalid, The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform: Jadidism in Central Asia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 19.
3. Turkestanskii Sbornik is housed at the Alisher Navoi State Library in Tashkent, Uzbekistan. At least two institutions have digitized the resource: the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Manas University in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. Both versions are freely available through the open web. Individual national libraries have also created guides to the Turkestanskii Sbornik. These include Maria Sharapova, Russkaia periodicheskaia pechat’ v Turkestane, 1870– 1917 (Tashkent: Alisher Navoi State Library, 1960), and Eleonora Ivanovna, Kazakhstan na stranitsakh “Turkestanskogo sbornika:” annotirovannyi bibliograficheskii ukazatel’ literatury (Almaty: Central Scientific Library, 2002).
4. Edward Allworth, Central Asian Publishing and the Rise of Nationalism: An Essay and a List of Publications in the New York Public Library (New York: The New York Public Library, 1965), 14–16.
5. These materials are accessible due to the work of Edward and Janet Allworth. See Robert H. Davis Jr., “The Allworths and Central Asian Library Resources at Columbia and Beyond: A Note,” Slavic & East European Information Resources 23, no. 1–2 (2022): 228–39. https://doi.org/10.1080/15228886.2021.1985715.
6. See Steven Sabol, “The Creation of Soviet Central Asia: The 1924 National Delimitation,” Central Asian Survey 14, no. 2 (1995): 243–64. https://doi.org/10.1080/02634939508400901.
7. Ali F. Igmen, Speaking Soviet with an Accent: Culture and Power in Kyrgyzstan (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012): 32–36.
8. Thomas Whitby, Tanja Lorković, and Lia Gracheva, Introduction to Soviet National Bibliography (Littleton, Colorado: Libraries Unlimited, 1979), 15.
9. Whitby, Lorković, and Gracheva, Introduction to Soviet National Bibliography, 149–53; 167–70; 173–75.
10. L. M. Epifanova, Rukopisnye istochniki Instituta vostokovedeniia Akademii nauk UzSSR po Istorii Srednei Azii perioda prisoedineniia k Rossi (Tashkent: Nauka, 1965).
11. Akram Khabibullaev, “Arabic Script Rare Books at the National Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Kyrgyzstan: An Annotated Bibliography,” Slavic & East European Information Resources, 22, no. 3–4 (2022): 331–343. https://doi.org/10.1080/15228886.2021.2018249.
12. The official website of the Library assembly of Eurasia is available at: https://bae.rsl.ru/.
13. The Electronic Information for Libraries (EIFL) website is available at: https://www.eifl.net/.
14. Electronic catalog for the National Scientific Library is available in English, Russian, Cyrillic-script Kazakh, and Latin-script Kazakh. https://nabrk.kz/ru/e-catalog. The National Library of Kazakhstan’s search interface is not quite as user-friendly but is available through the main website at: http://82.200.245.21:7980/.
15. Information about creation and use of the catalog. https://www.natlib.uz/bbs/content/94_535832.
16. Information about accessing the online catalog is available on the old version of the National Library site at: http://old.kmt.tj/content/%D1%84%D0%B5%D2%B3%D1%80%D0%B8%D1%81%D1%82%D0%B8-%D1%8D%D0%BB%D0%B5%D0%BA%D1%82%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%BD%D3%A3.
17. A list of members is available at: https://bik.net.kg/en/members/.
18. The webpage that links to digitized catalogs of the Al-Beruni Institute is available at: https://beruni.uz/en-ca/component/k2/item/302-elektron-katalog-bazasi.html. Users can access the Nodir database at: https://nodir.natlib.uz/. Users do need a library login to access the Nodir database system.
19. Manuscripts are openly available on: https://manuscript.bizdin.kg/.
20. National Electronic Library of Kyrgyzstan database: http://neb.kg/index.php/en-us/home-2.
21. The National Library of Tajikistan E-Library is available at http://nlt.tj/. Users may openly search materials and read descriptions, but an account is required for full-text access. Users may make an account online, but a valid Library Card is required.
22. The Uzbek National Bibliography is available at https://uzbekbibliography.library.illinois.edu/. Turkestanskii Sbornik is accessible through the following LibGuide: https://www.library.illinois.edu/ias/spx/turkestanskii_sbornik/.
23. The Memoirs of the Central Asian Soviet Era was created by Artemy Kalinovsky, Isaac Scarborough, and Vadim Staklo as part of the Russian Perspectives on Islam website: https://islamperspectives.org/rpi/collections/show/18. The collection continues to be expanded by the Slavic Reference Service and hosted on Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/taj-mem. See also: Artemy Kalinovsky and Isaac Scarborough, “The Oil Lamp and the Electric Light: Progress, Time, and Nation in Central Asian Memoirs of the Soviet Era,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 22, no. 1 (2021): 107–36.
24. Erika Hope Spencer, “Book Chambers in Central Asia,” Slavic & East European Information Resources 11, no. 1 (March 25, 2010): 35–40. https://doi.org/10.1080/15228881003635239.
25. Karen Rondestvedt, “Iltimos, Bizga Kitoblar Yuboring! U.S. Libraries’ Collecting Strategies for Central Asian Publications,” Slavic & East European Information Resources 8, no. 2–3 (December 13, 2007): 31–47, https://doi.org/10.1300/J167v08n02_04; and Alexander Dzhigo and Alexandra Teplitskaya, “National Bibliographies of the Post-Soviet Central Asian States,” Slavic & East European Information Resources 8, no. 4 (December 31, 2007): 3–17, https://doi.org/10.1300/J167v08n04_02.
26. See, for example: Oleg Antonov, Edward Lemon, and Parviz Mullojonov, “Academic Freedom in Tajikistan: How the Suppression, Acquiescence and Incorporation of Intellectuals Strengthens the State and Affects Knowledge Production,” Central Asian Survey 40, no. 4 (October 2, 2021): 592–610, https://doi.org/10.1080/02634937.2021.1925631.