TY - JOUR
T1 - The monumental and the miniature
T2 - Imagining 'modernity' in Astana
AU - Koch, Natalie
N1 - Funding Information:
An earlier draft of this paper was presented at the Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers in April 2010 in Washington, DC. The fieldwork for this research was funded by an IREX Individual Advanced Research Opportunities grant. Additional support has been provided by a NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. This project would not have been possible without the support of Mateusz Laszczkowski and Almira Zakiyeva in Astana. Many thanks to three anonymous reviewers, my colleagues at CU Boulder, Carla Jones, and Tim Oakes’ theory and writing workshop for helping me to improve earlier versions of this paper.
PY - 2010/12
Y1 - 2010/12
N2 - This article examines the elite nation-building project in post-independence Kazakhstan through an analysis of monumental architecture and miniature models in Astana. It considers the role of the country's new capital as a modernist project, in which elite geopolitical imaginaries are multiply inscribed in the cityscape. Drawing on interdisciplinary literatures on modernity and authoritarian regime legitimation, the article considers modernity as a discursive trope employed in legitimating the Nazarbayev government, and one that has various material manifestations in the urban landscape of Astana. The research is based on fieldwork in Kazakhstan in Summer 2009, and examines architecture, monuments, and the 2009 Astana Day celebrations. Through a focus on the monumental and the miniature, it highlights their similar roles in transforming symbols of Kazakhstani independence and identity into objects of reverie outside the field of political contestation.
AB - This article examines the elite nation-building project in post-independence Kazakhstan through an analysis of monumental architecture and miniature models in Astana. It considers the role of the country's new capital as a modernist project, in which elite geopolitical imaginaries are multiply inscribed in the cityscape. Drawing on interdisciplinary literatures on modernity and authoritarian regime legitimation, the article considers modernity as a discursive trope employed in legitimating the Nazarbayev government, and one that has various material manifestations in the urban landscape of Astana. The research is based on fieldwork in Kazakhstan in Summer 2009, and examines architecture, monuments, and the 2009 Astana Day celebrations. Through a focus on the monumental and the miniature, it highlights their similar roles in transforming symbols of Kazakhstani independence and identity into objects of reverie outside the field of political contestation.
KW - Authoritarianism
KW - Kazakhstan
KW - Miniatures
KW - Modernity
KW - Monumentality
KW - Urban landscape
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U2 - 10.1080/14649365.2010.521854
DO - 10.1080/14649365.2010.521854
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:78649699457
VL - 11
SP - 769
EP - 787
JO - Social and Cultural Geography
JF - Social and Cultural Geography
SN - 1464-9365
IS - 8
ER -