Teaching the canon? Nation‐building and post‐Soviet Kazakhstan's literature textbooks

This paper analyses Kazakhstan's new generation literature textbooks for Kazakh‐medium schools, with a focus on national identity and citizenship constructs that the revised textbooks promote. By comparing the literature textbooks of the Soviet and post‐Soviet periods, the paper discusses Soviet institutional and cultural legacies that continue to exist in Kazakhstan's literature curriculum. Implications of the recurrent patterns of nation‐building discourse in the literature textbooks for democracy and social cohesion in Kazakhstan are also discussed.