Blurred Boundaries in Šamšad Abdullaev’s Poetic Prose from Fergana: “Immobility”, World Literature, and the Deconstructing Gesture of Self-Orientalization

In this article, I analyze the poetic prose of Šamšad Abdullaev, one of the leading voices of the so-called Fergana School of Poetry. It is my argument that Abdullaev’s work features self-orientalizing images, including the depiction of the Central Asian space and its inhabitants as motionless, that deconstruct orientalist stereotypes. It does so through a difficult writing that questions the usual representation of both the East and the West, positioning itself as world literature. I also reflect on Abdullaev’s distinctive use of the Russian language, which enriches standard Russian with a number of "Oriental" words that are crucial to describing and representing the Fergana space, thus showing the inability of the former colonizer’s language to speak of Fergana without resorting to the local vocabulary. Drawing on Postcolonial, Decolonial, and World Literature Studies, I propose an interpretation of Abdullaev’s work that foregrounds its emancipatory nature.