During my fieldwork in Kyrgyzstan from 2023 to 2024, I made numerous visits to Almaty, Kazakhstan. I traveled to Almaty for the first time for a book launch for an edited volume about the embodied experiences of researchers conducting fieldwork in Central Asia and an evening meeting with Aminata Uėdrаogo, an anchor on a television show called Dobroe Utro, Kazakhstan (Good Morning, Kazakhstan). I have known Uėdrаogo “virtually” since 2020 through direct messages and comments with each other on Instagram. This first trip to Kazakhstan not only marked a shift in location but the contours of my own embodied experience as a Black queer woman doing research in Central Asia, the very topic of my conference presentation in Almaty.
On the panel, I attempted to open a critical conversation about how gendered and raced embodiment shaped researchers’ encounters in the field, specifically Black women. Furthermore, I discussed how my own encounters in fieldwork shifted across different contexts, borders, and interactions within Central Asia. Still, my moment of vulnerability underscored how nostalgia or ideology could easily hide this reality. During the question and answer session, a questioner evoked the anecdote of a faceless and nameless “African student at Lomonosov Moscow State University (MGU),” who was welcomed despite their blackness, to defend Soviet internationalism and society against racism allegations. Their comment was not new. It appealed to an ongoing, larger, and older discourse in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (SEEES) that often imagines the “positive experience” of the “African student,” read male, as “evidence” of Soviet exceptionalism. This response, whether intentional or not, denies the existence of racism and racial hierarchies in the USSR and continues to obscure other racialized and gendered experiences across the (post)socialist space.Footnote 2
To placate the questioner, I shared a brief “positive experience” I had with my taxi driver that morning over Tupac Shakur before the panel. I recounted how Tupac’s legacy served as a “Black resource”: a shared cultural reference to articulate blackness in relation to one’s embodied experience, beyond the conventional bounds of the African Diaspora.Footnote 3 It became a way to speak to common experiences of economic disparity and racialization. While the account seemed to satisfy the audience, I was unsatisfied.
Absent from dominant narratives of blackness in SEEES is an intersectional account of embodied blackness, particularly the experiences of women of African heritage in Central Asia. In this short essay, I am interested in exploring how their blackness is lived in (post)socialist Central Asia. What alternative futures are being enacted through the blackness of Russian and Kazakh women of mixed heritage? Despite its limitations, did Soviet internationalism lay a foundation for imagining blackness beyond western paradigms of Black disposability? How do global discourses of race and gender shape Black life in Central Asia today? In what follows, then, I center Black womanhood by bringing into conversation the experiences of Aminata Uėdrаogo, an Afro-Burkinabé-Kazakh woman born and raised in (post)socialist Almaty, and Yelena Khanga, a self-identified Jewish-Afro-Tanzanian-Russian born in 1962 in Moscow.Footnote 4 These two “dual heritage” women, Khanga and Uėdrаogo, represent the socialist past, present, and future. I use historian Olivette Otele’s term “dual heritage” to acknowledge the complexity of Khanga and Uėdrаogo’s identities, citizenships, and transnational experiences. While Otele briefly addresses eastern Europe and Russia to rethink African and European histories through citizenship, in the context of Central Asia, her work also offers a framework for us to understand these layered identities beyond Europe.
Despite the three decades between them, Khanga and Uėdrаogo’s experiences overlap. Khanga and Uėdrаogo were born in Soviet Russia and Kazakhstan, respectively, geographies with a shared imperial-colonial history: one a metropole, the other a former colony.Footnote 5 Both studied journalism at top universities. Khanga attended Moscow State University (MGU), and Uėdrаogo attended Al-Farabi Kazakh National University (KAZGU). Additionally, both women hosted/host popular regional television shows. Khanga hosted two shows—Vzgliad and Pro Eto in the 1980s and 90s. She continues to host a popular YouTube series, V Gostiakh U Khangi. Uėdrаogo hosts Pervyi Kanal Evraziia (Channel One Eurasia) and is a popular vedushchaia (master of ceremonies). With more than 140,000 Instagram followers between them, both are celebrities and enjoy a degree of social mobility. Yet, due their respective society’s perceptions of blackness, they paradoxically face limitations. Their experiences invite further inquiry into how blackness circulates—both symbolically and materially—across Eurasia during socialism and its afterlife, and how those meanings are internalized, contested, and reimagined within Central Asia.
Khanga’s Soul to Soul is not simply a memoir, but a rigorous work of Black feminist theorizing.Footnote 6 Khanga’s insights allow me to connect together questions of race, ethnicity, nation, gender, and Soviet/post-Soviet identity. I place Uėdrаogo, Khanga, and at times myself in dialogue through an autoethnographic mode of writing. This approach highlights their experiences as women of dual heritage and asserts the authority of Black women’s embodied knowledge. Furthermore, it challenges the dominance of the Eurocentric gaze, voice, and epistemic control, while exposing the affective and representational labor encapsulated by the figure of the “African student.”
Tracing the dynamics between Khanga and Uėdrаogo’s embodied experiences permits us to critically examine (1) continuities between late socialism and (post)socialism; and (2) how blackness operates as both a limit and possibility in relation to categories like Kazakh/Kazakhstani, Russian/Soviet, and African/Black (Although I do not discuss this latter point in depth). In sum, my aim is threefold. First, to highlight the continuities and paradoxical nature of blackness in the socialist and (post)socialist epochs. Second, to encourage scholars to approach African and African diasporic peoples as reservoirs of embodied knowledge and theory. Third, to open an intellectual dialogue between SEEES and Black studies, to explore both its offerings and limits for knowledge production.
Blackness as an Analytical Concept
Blackness and the Black lived experience in (post)socialist Central Asia remains critically understudied.Footnote 7 Existing scholarship on blackness in the SEEES region largely centers on three dominant themes: (1) the African experience in the USSR, (2) the Black (American and Diasporic) experience under socialism, or (3) blackness as abstract or a metaphor.Footnote 8 Typically, the third theme analyzes Central Asians, Caucasians, and other ethnic minorities as black(end) in relation to the category of Slavic. This body of literature engages racialization through modes such as nation, class, labor, religion, and migration, unfolding systemic and everyday inequalities from Central Asians’ perspectives during and after socialism.Footnote 9 More recent inquiries into race and racialization within Central Asia engages mixed identities and past and present views on transnational/interracial marriage or intermarriage.Footnote 10 Notably, Adrianne Edgar’s work on ethnic mixing in Soviet Central Asia offers a foundation to build from.Footnote 11 Using lived experiences and oral histories, Edgar argues that the category of ‘nation’ in Soviet Kazakhstan and Tajikistan became racialized, and public views of intermixed marriages, as defined by nationality, changed in the shifting economic and political landscapes of the late socialist period.Footnote 12 Although Edgar highlights diverse experiences, a discussion of intermarriage with Africans and people of African descent and their children is absent. This absence marks the point at which I intervene.Footnote 13
Drawing on Damani Partridge’s work, I am particularly attentive to how blackness—as both psychic and material—is taken up by those positioned outside normative citizenship.Footnote 14 For Partridge, blackness offers a paradoxical avenue of incorporation for Black African, Turkish, and Arab migrants in Berlin. It at once enables political expression and reinforces social exclusion. I use this framework to trace temporal and spatial continuities between Uėdrаogo’s and Khanga’s experiences. Blackness, in this context, becomes a sliding scale—“ungeographic” and misplaced—through which their bodies accrue symbolic power that simultaneously produces limit and possibility.Footnote 15 Their narratives reveal how blackness is mobilized every day by both the state and “non-Black” actors in USSR/Russia and Kazakhstan to shape access to intimacy, mobility, and recognition.
Me, Aminata, and Yelena
“So how I identify myself? It depends where I am? … In Kazakhstan, I can say I am Kazakh, and people are like really? What? Are you serious? … When I don’t want to talk to someone. I say no I’m from here, I’m Kazakh that’s all and stop talking … But I’m not lying because in my passport and all the documents have the nationality Kazakh. I was born here so I feel like a local girl.”Footnote 16
In spite of the many strands of my heritage, I am also Russian to the core … yet there was always a shade of difference.Footnote 17
Upon returning to Bishkek, a month after our first meeting at a Traveler’s Coffee in Almaty—where Uėdraogo and I talked about our travels, upbringings, and work in Central Asia and the US—we met again over WhatsApp. During our first meeting, I awkwardly shared my interest in writing about her experiences as a woman of dual heritage and as part of the broader African community in Kazakhstan, particularly how she navigates and negotiates challenges and categories of being Kazakh or Kazakhstani. Perhaps Uėdraogo sensed I was also asking for myself: what could I learn from her? I wanted to understand how she handled the constant questioning that sought to undermine her ethnic Kazakh identity, even as she maintained she was a “local girl.” How did she deal with the constant stares, the touching, the photos, and the comments that signaled her Otherness? Uėdraogo laughed: “Alexa, I will teach you, come to Almaty and we will walk together.”Footnote 18 Khanga’s memoir resonated somewhat with Uėdraogo’s reflections. Khanga understood herself as being “Russian to the core,” yet always sensing a shade of difference—an absence of full recognition.
Uėdraogo’s encouragement for me to return to Almaty and walk together was an invitation into her embodied experience. While Khanga would not be with us, I took it as an opportunity where the three of us—Uėdraogo, Khanga (spiritually), and I—might find points of commonality and divergence. Instinctively, I understood the desire for belonging: my own longing to feel American is constantly unsettled. I am Black, but being American is questionable, and always a question. “American” is an unstable category both at home and abroad, shaped by the imagined norm of a white Americanness. More frustrating, however, was the tension in our affiliation through blackness. Meeting Uėdraogo in Almaty sharpened this fragmentation. She identified as Black, but also Kazakh, and Burkinabé. The question lingered: not only how I desired to interpolate her into my own understanding of blackness, but how she herself made sense of being Afro-Kazakh—its limits and possibilities—especially in relation to romantic intimacy.
Navigating Enclosure
My friends are like, probably every man loves you and you’re so popular; you probably have some boyfriend, not one maybe two, all the men love you, [and] they give you everything you want … [but] not really, I do think that people here, especially men sometimes, they are afraid of a girl who does not look like a local girl.Footnote 19
Love is colorblind, my grandmother always told me. I wanted to believe her, but I wasn’t sure I did.Footnote 20
Uėdrаogo and I often joked about our difficulty finding a life partner to take us seriously. Her friends thought her beauty and fame meant she easily dated men. The reality was much grimmer. According to Uėdrаogo, while many Kazakh men found her attractive, they were uninterested in dating her because they considered her “outside” of an ideal Kazakh femininity and “preferred a woman from their nationality.” Uėdrаogo said: “Sometimes there is a nice guy and [you] try to make friends, and try to build a relationship but just because he grew up with the idea that his future wife should be Kazakh or Kyrgyz or Uzbek, he (doesn’t) look at you really seriously.”Footnote 21 Uėdrаogo’s remark could be understood as reflective of a shifting attitude on interracial marriage in Kazakhstan due to demographic changes, the emergence of “Kazakh consciousness,” and political instability.Footnote 22 Yet, years before Uėdrаogo encountered this issue, Yelena Khanga, in Soviet Russia, faced a similar dynamic. While Khanga did not have trouble dating men, she was often marked by her blackness as foreign—not Soviet or Russian–and thus unsuitable for marriage.
In the 1980s, Khanga met a man named Volodya. “Black is beautiful,” he uttered to her.Footnote 23 Volodya thought Khanga’s blackness was beautiful, and it gave her confidence. But, ultimately, Volodya decided that he could not marry “someone like her” because of his job in the Soviet navy.Footnote 24 Although Khanga understood herself as Russian and a Soviet citizen, blackness connected her with another place, the US, the USSR’s geopolitical rival.Footnote 25 Blackness as inscribed on Khanga’s body, not just her familial connection abroad, marked her as foreign to this white Soviet man. In her writing Khanga mentions many suitors, most if not all are “non-Black” due to lack of proximity to the African community in the Soviet Union. I wondered if Uėdrаogo had faced similar obstacles of proximity to Black men in Almaty, despite its growing African and Black community. Were Uėdrаogo’s dating experiences different among African and Black men? And was dating as a dual heritage woman more accessible in those communities?
I asked Uėdrаogo about her dating experiences among the African diaspora in Kazakhstan, initially hoping for a reprieve. Uėdrаogo evaded my question with a story about her friend’s recent Toi (celebration). Her friend, an African man who married a Kazakh woman, had a Tusau Kesu for their child.Footnote 26 The event brought together both the African and Kazakh communities. Uėdrаogo’s retelling of the Tasau Kesu contrasted with her experiences, highlighting the gendered aspects of blackness in (post)socialist Kazakhstan. Whereas, according to Uėdrаogo, Kazakh men are hesitant to marry a “foreign” woman, Edgar’s research notes Kazakh women are open to marrying “foreigners.”Footnote 27 Uėdrаogo’s silence around my question on her dating life within the Black community perhaps indicates that she had none or that the experience was rather painful to articulate. While Edgar’s work and the story of Uėdrаogo’s African friend indicates that views on racial intermixing are changing in Kazakh society, we must ask, but for whom? Focusing on the experiences of Black women brings to the fore insights that can be submerged when focused on the figure of the “African man.” In this case, Uėdrаogo’s experience reveals more about the gendered position of African men and men of African descent within the structure of patriarchy in Kazakh society. Mainly, it reveals how masculinity affords them access to social resources like kinship, albeit with limits, even as their racial difference continues to mark them as outsiders.
To some Soviet Muscovites and Kazakhs, Uėdrаogo’s and Khanga’s “roots” makes their Kazakhness and Soviet/Russian identities illegible despite their upward economic and social mobility. Their imagined blackness is confined to geographies outside of their birthplaces and hometowns. Khanga and Uėdrаogo understand themselves simultaneously as Black, Kazakh, Jewish, Russian, and Soviet women, though their phenotypical, melanistic expression cancels out those identities, which cultural practices construct and maintain.Footnote 28 Both women are placed “outside” of their citizenship, a positioning that underscores how blackness disrupts and unsettles celebratory narratives of “intermixing” in both Soviet and contemporary Kazakhstani discourses.
Blackness as an Opening
Blackness is a symbolic resource that invites possibilities within limits. While Khanga and Uėdrаogo faced unique challenges finding life partners because of their skin color, they also have access to upward social and economic mobility—even celebrity status—perhaps, because of their skin color. While both certainly worked hard for their success, they understood their blackness as a powerful tool of upward social mobility precisely because it was associated with symbols of elsewhere (Africa, US, and Europe), cosmopolitanism, and coolness.Footnote 29 Through their blackness, Khanga and Uėdrаogo build alternative possibilities, despite the global stereotypes of Black womanhood.Footnote 30 Institutions, particularly the state, also realize the symbolic power of blackness to connect to contemporary global discourses or to maintain socialist ideals of tolerance. This perspective creates unique challenges within the openness of blackness.Footnote 31
In her chapter, “The Moscow-New York Shuttle,” Khanga reflects on how her blackness became a vehicle for public discourse about taboo topics on the television show “Vzglyad. Glasnostʹ,” ushering in an atmosphere of political openness that provided conditions for the first Black Russian to appear on state television. Khanga took great pride in being on television, recalling how ethnic minorities and women were underrepresented on larger platforms such as Moscow Television. Upon returning from a trip to the US in the early 1990s with the HIV/AIDS pandemic gaining steam worldwide, Khanga was nudged into talking about how the US approached the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Her live segment would be a follow up on the previous episode about HIV/AIDS in Russia. Khanga recalls bringing a pamphlet titled “Looking for Mr. Condom” back from her trip to America and being asked to display it on the program for educational purposes.Footnote 32 This task of talking about condoms in public created tensions between Khanga’s Russianness and her perceived foreign status. Explicitly speaking about condoms in mixed company was inappropriate in Soviet culture, so uttering the word condom was in direct conflict with her “good girl Russian upbringing.”Footnote 33 Moreover, the expectation of Khanga—as “foreigner”—to bridge global and local discourses of sex for Russian audiences went beyond her connections to the west, but reinforced associations between blackness, Africa, and HIV/AIDS.Footnote 34
Khanga received mixed responses for discussing HIV/AIDS publicly, from descriptions like “heroine of the young” to facing public harassment from a neo-Nazi.Footnote 35 Khanga’s celebrity status gave her a platform to contest the dominant stereotypes about blackness and ethnic minorities. Yet it also reinforced her symbolic ties to the west and Africa, through her interpellation as a sexual-racial subject in broader Soviet and post-Soviet discourses about sex. In this way, Khanga’s blackness opened up visibility and recognition through its associations with global modernity while limiting her legibility within the national frame. In other words, she became readable as “global,” yet remained illegible as Russian.
Aminata Uėdrаogo’s experience three decades later highlights continuity despite the sociopolitical and historical transformations of the Soviet collapse. Months after our meeting, Uėdrаogo posted Proekt Pokhabarim’s podcast, “Zhiznʹ v Kazakhstane s Ekskliuzivnoi Vneshnostʹiu (Life in Kazakhstan with an Exclusive Appearance),” on Instagram, featuring the experiences of Afro-Kazakhs.Footnote 36 The episode’s premise aligned with the podcast’s sponsor, the Assembly of the People of Kazakhstan, founded by Nursultan Nazarbayev in 1995 as a national political entity to strengthen ethnic and religious harmony among Kazakh citizens. The phrasing, Ekskliuzivnoi Vneshnostʹiu (Exclusive Appearance) as the podcast title invites attention. Exclusive is a cognate in Russian with English and Latin roots. It is mostly used to describe commodities. For instance, luxury branding often uses phrases like Ekskliuzivnaia kollektsiia, Ekskliuzivny aksessuary or Ekskliuzivnoe obsluzhivanie to describe products or things—a collection, an accessory, or a service. In this context, blackness is reduced to an “object” and is marked an “exclusive” commodity, set apart from Kazakh identity.
Moreover, the episode uses blackness to reinforce notions of what Kazakhness is not. The podcast interviewer, Rustam Kairyyev, whose own ethnicity remains unknown, highlights the difference between Africans and Kazakhs and blackness and Kazakhness by creating a binary of us and them, contradicting his own aims of promoting racial and ethnic harmony.Footnote 37 Kairyyev fixates on “roots.” He asks Uėdrаogo, “otkuda vy rodom?” (Where are you originally from?) In her answer, Uėdrаogo concedes: “we” have roots from here and Africa and specifies that her mom is Kazakh and dad is from Burkina Faso. A shocked Kairyyev confirms that each podcast guest was born in Kazakhstan. Throughout the episode an us/them binary is continually reinforced by highlighting differences in physical appearance and inherent physical ability. Ironically, Kairyyev references his own body for what Kazakh is not, while never revealing his ethnic identity. He says he can relate to stories of immigration to Central Asia, only that he is not African—“Tolʹko ia ne afrikanets Kak vy po mne zametili” (Only I am not African if you noticed). This interaction reveals an arbitrary claim to Kazakh/Kazakhstani identity that reconstructs boundaries between Kairyeev, Uėdrаogo, and the other participants based on phenotypical attributes, placing him in proximity to Kazakhness.
Despite Kairyeev’s interrogation, Uėdrаogo finds rhetorical tools to open the boundaries between Africanness and Kazakhness and to connect them. She replies to questions about roots by evoking her dad’s journey to Al-Farabi Kazakh National University (KazGU) in the late 1980s, where he met her mom. She then links their personal story to contemporary exchange programs with Europe that are popular with Kazakh students. In addition, Uėdrаogo emphasizes the commonality between African and Kazakh culture in valuing large families and huge gatherings, unlike European culture. When Kairyeev inquires about Kazakh traditions and culture, Uėdrаogo highlights the significance of participating in cultural practices her Kazakh mother upheld, including the practice of eating horse meat, which she says is taboo in Burkina Faso. Here Uėdrаogo pointed to cultural differences while simultaneously reinforcing her Kazakh identity. She critiqued Kairyyev’s homogenizing of Africa and Africans by reminding him that she could only speak to her knowledge of Burkina Faso, a landlocked West African country. More importantly, Uėdrаogo challenges the monolithic figure of the absentee African father by highlighting diverse family histories and experiences with migration to Kazakhstan that distinguish her from the other podcast guests. While one could view their blackness as limiting, Uėdrаogo and Khanga use it to expand Russianness and Kazakhness and to make sense of both categories.
Socialist Pasts, (Post)socialist Futures
Uėdrаogo’s and Khanga’s perspectives reveal the possibilities and limits of blackness, and how SEEES scholars might employ the knowledge and experiences of Black women to rethink our theoretical assumptions and the conventional historiography and literature of the field. This paper has outlined how blackness can be an alternative way of worlding. Uėdrаogo understands herself as Black, African, and Kazakh. For her, Blackness is “a special tool.”Footnote 38 Similarly, Khanga is equally proud to be African, Black, Jewish, and Russian. Their multi heritage experiences in the USSR and contemporary Kazakhstan document simultaneously fixed and shifting ideologies of blackness through socialist and (post)socialist transformations. This is a symbolic blackness that is experienced, internalized, and reinterpreted, rearticulating national and ethnic boundaries. More importantly, their embodied experiences enable critique of structural hierarchies, which uniquely function in a space where European heritage is a minority, but still holds a lot of power, and where the “periphery” is now a “center” that invites into it a multitude of racialized “others.”
Alexa Kurmanov is a doctoral candidate in the Anthropology Department at the University of California, Berkeley. Their research explores race, gender, and sexuality in (post)socialist Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan through Black feminist methods and autoethnographic modes of writing. Their work has appeared in Central Asian Survey and Researching Central Asia: Navigating Positionality in the Field.
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