Black & Queer in Central Asia (aka Twerking in Kyrgyzstan)
Welcome back!
Black Diplomats is back from our hiatus with an update from Terrell about plans for the show and an all new interview.
Our guest today is Alexa Kellogg-Kurmanova, a PhD student in anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley.
Terrell met Alexa at the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies conference in New Orleans and they hit it off immediately. Kellogg-Kurmanova is a queer Black woman from Chicago, and her husband is a trans man from Kyrgyzstan. She speaks Russian and has spent a lot of time in East European communities, both in Central Asia and the US.
They go deep on how Kellogg-Kurmanova was introduced to the Russian language and babushka culture, and what it means to be your authentic self when you're thousands of miles from home.
This is part one of a two-part conversation.
Alexa Kurmanova
Alexa Kurmanova, PhD Student, Dept. of Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley, does research focused on intersectionality and the category of “woman” in (post)socialist Central Asia, more specifically in urban and rural Kyrgyzstan. They are interested in categories of queerness, Blackness, colonialism, and Trans and feminist activism in Central Asia and Russia. Their research interests stem from previous experiences in studying the global coalition between Black Nationalism in the United States and the anti-racist campaigns in the Soviet Union in the early part of the 20th century— offering insights on the figure of Blackness/the Black identity in the Soviet and post-Soviet space.