For centuries, European operas have portrayed dramatic, exotic Others on stage. However, as opera is increasingly adopted around the world, including by those “Eastern” Others it orientalized, its Othering tendencies serve new, more critical purposes. Post-colonial studies of knowledge and cultural production have shown how relations between centers and peripheries, knowledge and power are integral to forms of orientalism. In Tajikistan, the accounts of opera told today by the daughter of a successful Soviet Tajik composer bring to light the ambiguity of power relations and positionalities in Soviet opera’s production. Her accounts, beyond highlighting opera’s readily apparent orientalist tendencies, reveal surprising cosmopolitan aspirations in Soviet Central Asian opera. Cosmopolitan histories and values also feature heavily in post-colonial politics of knowledge production, but the concept appears worlds apart from, even in opposition to that of orientalism: the latter feeds off center-periphery, knowledge-power relations, while the former aspires to evade them. Through this present-day account of opera’s development in Soviet Tajikistan, this article challenges this opposition, theorizing a conceptual ambiguity and interdependence between orientalism and cosmopolitanism, which has important consequences for knowledge-producing fields like opera, as well as anthropology. Multiple forms of orientalism and cosmopolitanism overlapped and interacted in the development of Soviet Central Asian opera as numerous, intersecting meanings and socio-political agendas went into its production. Ultimately, a conceptual space emerges between the orientalism(s) and cosmopolitanism(s) at play. This ambiguous space in-between offers a lens for critically evaluating the complex, uneven practice of portraying and engaging with Others.

几个世纪以来，欧洲歌剧在舞台上描绘了戏剧性的、充满异国情调的他者。然而，随着歌剧在世界范围内越来越多地被采用，包括被它所东方化的“东方”他者所采用，它的他者化倾向服务于新的、更重要的目的。对知识和文化生产的后殖民研究表明，中心与外围、知识与权力之间的关系如何成为东方主义形式的组成部分。在塔吉克斯坦，一位成功的苏联塔吉克作曲家的女儿今天讲述的歌剧故事揭示了苏联歌剧制作中权力关系和立场的模糊性。她的叙述除了强调歌剧明显的东方主义倾向之外，还揭示了苏联中亚歌剧令人惊讶的国际化愿望。世界主义的历史和价值观在知识生产的后殖民政治中也占有重要地位，但这个概念似乎与东方主义的概念截然不同，甚至相反：后者依赖于中心与外围的知识与权力关系，而前者则渴望躲避他们。通过对当今苏联塔吉克斯坦歌剧发展的描述，本文挑战了这种对立，对东方主义和世界主义之间概念上的模糊性和相互依存性进行了理论分析，这对歌剧和人类学等知识生产领域产生了重要影响。在苏联中亚歌剧的发展过程中，多种形式的东方主义和世界主义相互重叠和相互作用，产生了众多相互交叉的意义和社会政治议程。最终，东方主义和世界主义之间的作用。这种介于两者之间的模糊空间为批判性地评估描绘和与他人互动的复杂、不平衡的实践提供了一个镜头。