In The Kazakh Spring.

By Diana T. Kudaibergen

This chapter dwells further on the collective solidarity and imagined digital community that the Kazakh Spring was able to bring about. In this chapter, Kudaiberger discusses the use of language, colonial heritage, and the rethinking of its legacy in the context of the nationalizing regime of Nazarbayev. She argues that the constructed divide between the Kazakh- and Russian-speaking political audiences no longer works as a divide for the Kazakh Spring activists, who are actively embracing bilingualism not as an unattainable aspiration but as a living reality of post-independence. Kazakh Spring activists can also be dubbed the ‘Generation Q’ as they strive to return to the Latinization of the Kazakh/Qazaq language. Furthermore, this chapter discusses how activists read the decolonial theory and use it in their activism. The author dwells on why the main slogans, names, and titles of their projects come from the oeuvre of the Kazakh pre-Soviet movement of Alash and its writers and how these well-known discourses are changed and adapted to the contemporary Qazaq realities. She finally explores how the Kazakh Spring as a field allows the rethinking of the nationalistic stigma that remained a Soviet legacy.

Access this chapter here.