Discussion
In 1927 Soviet authorities in Uzbekistan launched the
hujum (meaning ‘assault’), an attempt to galvanise modernisation by making women discard face coverings, often at public events. This controversial campaign has been much discussed in Anglophone scholarship, not least because it serves as an informative case-study in debates around race, gender, and coloniality in relation to the wider Soviet project. The role of culture, however, in promoting and debating initiatives in women’s emancipation in Central Asia has been comparatively overlooked, especially when it comes to one the most important arenas for the articulation of new identities at the time – the emergent genre of western-style theatre. As a partial response to this lacuna, this paper will present the initial findings of an ongoing project investigating theatrical stagings of narratives of female emancipation and the symbolic function of dress within them.
Drawing on archival research and an analysis of plays by a number of Uzbek playwrights, including Oydin, Hamza Hakimzoda Nizoziy, Adbulhamid Cho‘lpon and Komil Yashen, the paper will trace the main themes in these authors’ handling of veiling and unveiling and its development over the period 1924 to 1941. As well as highlighting similarities and differences, the analysis will mark overall changes in emphasis, distinguishing the initial period before and after national delimitation when Bolshevik and Jadid projects for modernisation and nation-building coalesced (to an extent) from the later Stalinist period and its preoccupation with cotton harvests and hidden enemies.
These plays will also be read against both Russian-language dramas written in Uzbekistan in this era (by the likes of Lola-khan Saifullina and Vasilii Ian) and the work of Azerbaijani playwright Jafar Jabbarly, as well as contemporary cinematic depictions of the ‘Eastern Woman’ and, crucially, the theatrical nature of the hujum itself, with its emphasis on the public performance of personal transformation. Ultimately, analysis of these plays will grant a new vantage point on the whole project of Soviet ‘modernisation’ in Central Asia and its intersection with the aforementioned debates about race, gender, and coloniality in the USSR.
