“When We Replace Our World …”

Abstract

The Fergana School of poetry is one of post-Soviet poetry’s most remarkable phenomena. In the early 1990s, members of this school—Shamshad Abdullaev and Khamdam Zakirov, along with Hamid Ismailov, who is close to the school—proposed a project for the recreation of Uzbek literature. This approach involves inventing a new type of subjectivity that, in terms of a number of its features, could be described as a postcolonial subjectivity. This article examines the three components of this approach: rethinking Uzbek literature as part of world literature and the related process of “self-exoticizing”; identifying the particular mode of visuality that distinguishes the work of the Fergana School; and searching for a new linguistic identity, one more cosmopolitan than that offered by Uzbek language and literature. Using materials published in the Tashkent journal Eastern Star [Zvezda Vostoka] (which was edited by Abdullaev in 1991–1996), Korchagin examines these three components.