Postcolonial readings of Oralkhan Bȯkei’s works

Abstract

This study explores the relationship between literature and the social, historical, political and cultural themes in the literary works of the Kazakh writer Oralkhan Bȯkei. It discusses the postcolonial aspects of Bȯkei’s literary texts and analyzes the themes of colonialism, hybridity, ethnic nationalism, modernization and industrialization, and postcolonial environmentalism in his works. This study argues that postcolonial readings of Oralkhan Bȯkei’s literary oeuvre can reveal anti-colonial as well as postcolonial discourses existing in post-Stalin Kazakh Soviet literature. Through applying some of the concepts of postcolonial studies such as hybridity, subalterneity, representation, mainly developed in Western scholarship, to the experience of the Kazakh society under the Soviet Union, this work attempts to explore the author’s perception of the Soviet Union as an empire and its threat in destroying the national culture of Kazakh society and Kazakh national identity.