Accompanying the exhibition As Though We Hid the Sun in a Sea of Stories, this reader weaves together essays, conversations, and poetry that trace the multiplicity of worldviews, histories, and archives that have existed within an area of Central and Eastern Europe, Central and North Asia, and further beyond. The texts search for, and propose, reappraisals and novel frameworks to make sense of cosmological, cultural, and political histories in the geographical area that the exhibition engages with. Via rigorous historical research, the reader includes themes ranging from the geographies of Jadidism, definitions and understandings of Indigeneity in different contexts in the world, and a reappraisal of Muslim subjectivities that defied control and uniformization by the Russian Empire, among many other perspectives.

Contributors: Yevgenia Belorusets, Alfrid Bustanov, Seba Calfuqueo, Cosmin Costinaș, Alina Desyatnichenko, Rossen Djagalov, Anna Gomboeva, Langston Hughes, Saodat Ismailova, Nikolay Karabinovych, Adeeb Khalid, Sarah Lubala, Yäniyä Mikhalina, Marian Pastor Roces, Olga Shirokostup, Kimberly St. Julian-Varnon, Nikolay Tsyrempilov, Iaroslav Volovod, Timur Zolotoev