Reorientalism

With dazzling erudition, Skakov shatters the spatial and temporal coordinates of Soviet modernism through its little-known encounters with Central Asia and Stalinist “national form”—encounters that enabled sustained artistic experimentation even amid the turn to socialist realism. The result is a transformative view of both the avant-garde’s fascination with the other and the early Soviet Union’s decolonizing claims. -- Steven S. Lee, author of The Ethnic Avant-Garde: Minority Cultures and World Revolution
This meticulously researched book is essential reading for anyone interested in understanding the discursive short-circuits and contradictions that plagued the Soviet project of modernity. Skakov proposes that the Soviet Union was a “conceptual muddle” with the Soviet Orient at its heart. The theoretical debates he rehearses are testimony to Russia’s historical dependence on the cultural construction and subjugation of “others,” lending depth to debates around the violence of Russian colonialism today. -- Klara Kemp-Welch, The Courtauld Institute, University of London,
In this capacious and exciting work, Nariman Skakov offers a fascinating new angle of vision for analyzing Soviet culture of the 1930s-early 1940s. Avant-garde artists deprived of their aesthetic coordinates in the Stalin era turned Eastward to “reorient” themselves in relation to their own work, life stories, European modernism, and world socialism—creating a tangle of often contradictory tendencies, including modernist style, utopian anti-imperialist modernization, and orientalist and colonial discourses. -- Associate Professor of Russian and Film Studies, University of Maryland