Tuesday 14th May

Dr Selbi Durdiyeva (Philipps University, Marburg/ONGC)

Hauntology, Inheritance, and Women’s Writing: Entangled Pasts in Turkmen Family Archives

Women’s emancipation discourse was instrumentalised by the Soviet regime, particularly for agitation of the so-called ‘Red East.’ This paper draws on these narratives from the position of how they were perceived and remembered by women after the fall of the USSR. The paper links what Sabrin Hasbun (2022) calls a mixture of ‘performative and embodied knowledge, memoir, fiction, and historical investigation,’ of sources that are ‘endangered,’ belonging to the genre of ‘life writing,’ or auto-biography studies. I apply a micro-narrative approach and engage with under-represented ephemeral sources of women’s writing as found and preserved in family archives in Turkmenistan that reflect on the Soviet inheritance and memory. These sources demonstrate an attempt of ‘talking back’ to macro-narratives and resisting through writing and recollecting those experiences in the domain of the private, weaving family memory with political events, leaving a complex picture of entangled pasts.