5 - Generation Q and Decolonizing Alash

Summary

This chapter dwells further on the collective solidarity and imagined digital community that the Kazakh Spring was able to bring about. In this chapter, I discuss the use of language, colonial heritage, and the rethinking of its legacy in the context of the nationalizing regime of Nazarbayev. I argue 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. This chapter also discusses how activists read the decolonial theory and use it in their activism. I dwell 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. I also discuss how the Kazakh Spring as a field allows the rethinking the nationalistic stigma that remained a Soviet legacy.