Welcome to The Experimental Humanities Collaborative Network

American University of Central Asia

Bishkek, Kyrgyz Republic

Founded in 1993, American University of Central Asia develops future leaders for the democratic transformation of Central Asia. AUCA is an international, multi-disciplinary learning community in the American liberal arts tradition. AUCA is the first university in Central Asia to offer US accredited degrees in liberal arts programs through a partnership with Bard College in the United States. In addition to Bard, AUCA maintains partnerships with a number of universities and organizations worldwide.

EHCN Representative:

Christopher Fort

American University of Central Asia

Christopher Fort is Assistant Professor in the Department of General Education at American University of Central Asia (AUCA). He joined the department in 2020. In 2019 at University of Michigan, he defended his dissertation, entitled Inhabiting Socialist Realism: Soviet Literature from the Edge of Empire (1914-1992), in which he explores the relationship between Russian and Uzbek literature in the 20th century. He argues that 20th-century Uzbek literature is demonstrative of how non-Russian litterateurs of the Soviet empire inhabited, a la Bourdieu, Socialist Realism, a hegemonic set of Russian literary conventions and tropes, by adapting it, in various ways over the Soviet century, to local literary traditions and demands. He is currently working on expanding that dissertation into a book.

He is the author of articles on Tolstoy and Pelevin, and the translator of two Uzbek novels: Abdulhamid Sulaymon o’g’li Cho’lpon’s 1934 novel Night and Day and Isajon Sulton’s 2010 novel The Eternal Wanderer.

His current interests and projects include literary translation, postcolonialism, postsocialism, and onomastics. With grants received from the Open Society Network’s Experimental Humanities Collaborative Network (EHCN), he has developed and directed AUCA’s contribution to the EHCN’s To Be Named project. AUCA’s contribution, tentatively titled “My Name, My Story,” includes oral history interviews with students and community members about their names, the history behind them, and how they see their names as contributing (or not contributing) to their sense of self. These interviews will be collated and curated in a digital exhibition to be shared with other EHCN universities and with the Smithsonian in order to engage visitors with questions of postcolonialism and identity through the ordinary practice of naming.

English

A blue building with a zig-zag roof and red accents against a blue, cloudy sky. AUCA in sandy letters in front of the building.

Related Projects

Zamandash

Zamandash, an ethnographic documentary film about postcoloniality in language choice, was made by AUCA students Aiturgan Ainakulova and Alina Baitokova. The short film explores the stigmas around speaking the Kyrgyz language among Bishkek youth, who often speak Russian. The film premiered on September 9, 2022 at AUCA.

Watch Zamandash here.

This text is also available in English

A child’s face collaged into three planes: forehead and mouth photo negative, their eyes sepia.

To Be – Named

Names are a key aspect to our identity(s), both personal and cultural. They are what we have been called in our communities, what we call ourselves, what is sometimes assigned to us and they ultimately determine how we live and move through the world. Whatever their cultural origins, names determine whether we are understood or misunderstood, nurtured or repressed, elevated or eradicated. They are how we are inscribed, documented by others, and are used by disciplines and institutions to define, categorize, attempt to discipline, and sometimes control the world. Our names carry knowledge of our Mother Tongue, or the loss of knowledge through attempted eradication of it. They embody how Native peoples inhabit and name Native homelands/reservations/reserves and non-Natives inhabit and name colonized lands and the processes of decolonization now attempted by both. They move with us and can invoke connections through time and space when (re)called. Names are highly personal, at the same time as being wholly political. How is it that we rarely explore, investigate and face what it means To Be—Named?

This exhibition will be multi-site: traveling and adapting among seven EHCN international partners.

This text is also available in English

A family photo, brother, sister, and mother and father, in front of a bonfire and larger gathering of people.

My Name, My Story

“My Name, My Story” is a student-led American University of Central Asia (AUCA) project affiliated with the network-wide EHCN project To Be – Named. To Be – Named is a series of physical and digital art installations as well as a concomitant collection of essays on the practice of naming and how it reveals the processes of colonialism, nationalism, and decolonization in everyday life. AUCA’s contribution to the project, “My Name, My Story,” will be a physical art exhibition and a digitally curated collection of oral history interviews with AUCA students and members of the community in which interviewees share how they received their name/s, the value they place on them, and how they believe those names speak to the history of themselves, their family, and their communities. The project uses video recording and editing to put together a digital exhibition in order to translate the academic concepts of colonialism and decolonization for audiences through the experiences of community members.