Post-Russian Eurasia and the proto-Eurasian usage of the Runet in Kazakhstan: A plea for a cyberlinguistic turn in area studies

Abstract

Drawing on the theoretical discussion of common features of cultures in the post-Soviet space, this paper proposes to refocus on the linguistic dimension and to investigate post-Russian Eurasia. Is not the role of the Russian language coming under serious challenge in the post-Soviet context, where independent states are downgrading the status of Russian in administration and education and where ethnic Russians are ‘remigrating’ from former Soviet republics to the Russian Federation? There is, however, one medium in which Russian is gaining new significance as a language of inter-regional communication: the Internet. Albeit to a lesser degree than English and Chinese, Russian serves as a means of communication between Russian-speaking communities all over the world. What is more, the Russian Internet (Runet) offers access to elaborated resources of contemporary culture (video and music downloads etc.). The paper discusses the role the Russian-based Runet plays for Eurasian webcommunities outside the Russian Federation, mostly relying on Kazakh material, and asks whether post-colonial anxieties about Russian cultural imperialism through the Runet are justified or not and what the Kazakh, possibly post-colonial strategies of coping with this situation are. Essential to this essay is the notion of cyberimperialism, which combines aspects of media studies with post-colonial studies. The interdisciplinary approach to Internet studies is completed by a linguistic focus on the performativity of language usage online for creating situational language identities. The essay rounds off by offering an analysis of Nursultan Nazarbaev’s ambiguous inclusive-exclusive logic of argumentation and confronting it with Russian Eurasianism.