Reclaiming National Literary Heritage: The Rehabilitation of Abdurauf Fitrat and Abdulhamid Sulaymon Cholpan in Uzbekistan

Abstract

HISTORICALLY SPEAKING, colonialism has had great influence in reshaping geographical, social and cultural identities around the world. As Franz Fanon argues, it has not only aimed at holding captive and emptying the colonised of all form and content, but has also attempted to distort and disfigure the past of oppressed people. Similarly, as an apparatus of power, colonialist discourses have historically focused upon the devaluation and fetishisation of the pre-colonial culture and history of the colonised.' They have also construed 'the colonised as a population of degenerate types on the basis of racial origin, in order to justify conquest and to establish systems of administration and instruction'.2 In responding to their marginalisation, subjugation, exploitation and exclusion, anti-colonialist writers have generated discourses that seek to challenge and rewrite colonial discourses as a way of explicating and defining their own culture, history, literary heritage and being. In so doing, as counter-ideological discourses, anti-colonial literary texts have not only sought to offer a critique of colonial policies, they have also provided cultural and ideological expressions of resistance, liberation and social revolution in colonised regions. In this respect, Edward Said argues that