Comparative Nationalisms and Bibliographic Black Holes: The Case of the Turkmen of the North Caucasus

Abstract

The centuries-old Turkmen community of Stavropol’ Krai in southern Russia, while currently numbering only about 15,000 people, is an integral part of the famously diverse ethnolinguistic landscape of the North Caucasus. To the extent that Euro-Atlantic scholars have noted the existence of this community at all, their comments have been rather cursory and dismissive, and it has been claimed that the North Caucasus Turkmen (virtually alone among the dozens of similarly small ethnic groups of the region) have never published anything in their own language. Intensive investigations in the bibliographic record (and in secondary sources in Russian, Turkish, and Turkmen) show that this is not actually the case, and that the North Caucasus Turkmen do have a modest record of Turkmen-language publishing stretching back a century or more. What are the implications of these published works for our understanding of Turkmen identity, the Turkmen diaspora, and the complicated multiethnic and multilingual environment of the North Caucasus? What does it mean when groups like the North Caucasus Turkmen are made all but invisible in Euro-Atlantic scholarship and Euro-Atlantic library collections?