Renegotiating Identities and Cultural Legacies Chapter Twelve Be(com)ing Uzbek

Uzbekistan’s Political and Cultural Nationalism
Marlene Laruelle
The theoretical debate on the creation of nations has long been divided between two main schools: the primordialist, which sees nations as enduring entities with essentialist features; and the constructive, which sees the nation as a product of modernity. A third school, ethnosymbolism, tries to move away from this dichotomy and takes into consideration both approaches. I join this school in arguing that nations are a modern construct, yet built upon some preexisting cultural and ethnic roots that are reinterpreted in new contexts.¹ Uzbekistan offers a case study of this multilayered construction, in which both contemporary political conditions and ancient cultural references are merged to advance a consensual and successful nationhood narrative.
Since independence, Uzbekistan’s strategy has been to promote two forms of nationalism. First, a political nationalism, expressed mostly through citizenship policy, that reflects the authoritarian nature of the Karimov regime; it sees the political order as natural and uncontroversial and the state as the ultimate representation of the nation. The second form is a cultural nationalism that gives preference to the titular ethnic group in everything symbolic. The Uzbek state ideology’s ideational premise, inspired by German romanticism, rests on the idea that each people has a “spirit” that endures across time and expresses its “core” essence under different cultural labels. The ideology of national independence as a political project is therefore closely interrelated with the sublimation of the Uzbek nation in its supposed essence, manifested through a linear historical trajectory with the independent nation-state as its evident achievement.
Under President Islam Karimov, the Uzbek regime successfully crafted a national historical metanarrative, as well as a large array of national symbols whose meaning is largely shared by the population, nicely described by Laura Adams as the “spectacular state.”² The new Uzbek statehood has been displayed through a political architecture style that could be named “dubaio-timurid.” What Michael Billig defines as banal nationalism³ also constitutes an integral part of the Uzbek nationhood process. This is the case, for instance, for Uzbek pop music, which combines a Russian-Soviet legacy with Oriental flavors—pseudo-Arabic or Persian in style, with some borrowings from Bollywood—and offers a pantheon of modern idols and their “people” stories.⁴ This is also the case for Uzbekistan’s vibrant film industry—Uzbekkino is the only cinema production agency in Central Asia able to produce commercially viable films that attract a large domestic audience.⁵ Uzbek cuisine also became a brand that works domestically—easily celebrated with a rich symbolic background (family, community, hospitality)⁶—and internationally—with chains of Uzbek restaurants all over Russia.
The literature of Uzbek post-Soviet nationhood is rich: masterful studies by Laura Adams and Peter Finke join older works on late Soviet Uzbekistan by William Fierman. In addition, articles by Andrew F. March, Nick Megoran, Timur Dadabaev, Shahram Akbarzadeh, Charles Kurzman, Reuel Hanks, Johan Rasanayagam, Sarah Kendzior, Nancy Rosenberger, and others examine various aspects of this nationhood process. In this chapter I focus on the intersection of the political and cultural aspects of the official Uzbek ideology of nationhood, especially how its authors have rewritten the nation’s historical trajectory.