Qazaqstan, Labyrinths of Post-Colonial Discourse by Alima Bisenova

The author of the book, Alima Bisenova, writes:

Qazaqstan, Labyrinths of Post-Colonial Discourse responds precisely to this internal intellectual demand of Kazakh society for reflection on the problems of postcoloniality, for rethinking the (Soviet) past and understanding its current “place in the world” as a “small” (from the point of view of geopolitical influence) country, torn apart by cultural contradictions. How to talk about the “inconvenient past”, how to find one’s own identity and one’s own voice despite the “pressure of the metropoles”, and how to get rid of post-colonial complexes? The authors of the book, in their research, have intensely worked and reflected on many of these issues, and the time has come to present their thoughts and reflections to the judgment of an interested reader.

The book was designed in the summer of 2022 in Germany by Yevgen Anfalov, assisted by Ukrainian designer Olesia Bachyns’ka. Yevgen took the robust format of 130×195 mm so the volume is easy to carry, despite its thickness and thanks to its lightweight. The book is text- heavy: its layout follows the reader’s pragmatism. There are enough margins and room for footnotes, and all the cross-references are set in margins and linked to respective images. The book is unique of its kind as it is the first collective work on Kazakh post-colonialism.

The main language is Russian, functioning as a lingua franca for all post-Soviet countries. As original texts in Kazakh Cyrillic were set, language support of the body face was of big importance. The main carrier of the book’s identity is the font KTF Labyrinth, made by Yevgen specifically for its occasion. It takes on the metaphor of a labyrinth as derived from the book’s title and is being used on the cover as well as on the chapter titles (pp. 3–4).

Due to the poor resolution of some delivered visual materials, they were digitally reconstructed as on p. 15. A special “book within a book” section features “post-colonial fiction” (pp. 21–22), marked by black margins, as if it were a scan of a smaller book. All in all, the book was made under limitations in paper stock due to sanctions on Russian suppliers (using the only suitable materials that were anticipated “blindly” at the distance) and printed at rather a fast pace, including night shifts – most likely resulting in a slight misplacement of the cover, which is shifted downward to 3 mm. All the print supervision was handed out to Anuar Duisenbinov, the project manager, who did his best to describe the outcome via smartphone videos and using LANGUAGE. The book production reflects its time and social conditions for sure. However, the book is an important lecture on Kazakh culture and has come to the world in a print run of 1,000 exemplars. It’s available from Tselinny.