I am pleased to have my very own copy of Invisible China, a remarkable travelogue just recently published. The authors, Colin Legerton and Jacob Rawson, both current postgraduate students, have produced a worthwhile and very readable narrative of their journeys through China’s minority ethnic communities. This informative but entertaining and accessible book recounts their journeys in 2006 and 2007 while providing valuable and accurate background information to the lay reader and remaining sensitive to the realities of life for the people they met along the way. The book consists primarily of a series of mini-ethnographies, eleven in all covering fourteen contemporary minority groups, plus two narratives of visits to peculiar sites of ethnic tourism. Legerton and Rawson spent more time than most travel writers among their communities of interest, but they have distilled their visits into short and easily digestible snapshots of minority life accompanied by insightful commentary on wisely-chosen topics. Here, as this is The New Dominion, I will focus on their pieces on China’s Northwest, including their two chapters on Xinjiang.

The book opens with a scene familiar to almost anyone who has lived in China since the 1980s: On a busy street corner under a hazy night sky, as a swirling mass of superficial human sameness throngs in and out of Mr. Li’s and KFC, a lone Xinjiang Uyghur man, doppa and all, tends his kebabs as they sizzle on a smoky and jerry-rigged grill. Here, the authors make an awful fuss about the man’s skin color and that of the Han Chinese around him. At first blush, this seems almost racist, as the authors use the man’s physical differences to emphasize the invisible cultural wall between him and his customers. In fact, this is an honest depiction of a moment shared by many Westerners who venture beyond the Green Zones in Beijing and Shanghai: This is the instant when, in some smoky and anonymous town, you meet someone who looks different, whose Chinese is almost as bad as yours, and who feels isolated and homesick – just like you! The outside Other and the inside Other share a secret wink, and sometimes a career is born. Kudos to the authors for communicating this sense of alienation, achieved elsewhere in the movie “Lost in Translation,” and of the discovery of an imagined new chosen people. This self-consciousness, perhaps the mark of a new generation of writers on Asia, pervades the book and lends it both a measured sensitivity to the voices of the “natives” and a self-reflective honesty about the author’s own perspective. Appropriately for a book about people who inhabit a nationalizing state and who only find a political voice through a system of regional autonomy, Legerton and Rawson set the tone by bringing into focus the truth of the awkward and the disjointed.

Legerton and Rawson’s work, as a travelogue, is a work of journalism. They achieve, however, much that most journalists writing in English do not or cannot when reporting on China by informing their assertions and observations with their educated understanding of the country and of the issues at hand and sensitivity born of experience. Before beginning their journeys, both authors spoke good Chinese, as well as Uyghur and Korean, and both boast backgrounds in China studies. As such, they are far more qualified commentators than most journalists or even diplomatic staff. They have also done their homework, as is apparent from the very accessible potted histories of each region they visit and group they encounter. These gloss over messy details, but do not oversimplify or misrepresent. Each chapter is careful and deliberate and avoids factual error, which shows both respect for the subject and a disciplined approach to research and writing.

This preparation allows them to better protect the identities of their informants and also to tell effective stories. Most journalists, turning a brief visit and a half-dozen conversations into a lengthy piece, depict the story of today’s Xinjiang simply as one of conflict between ethnic monoliths, one backed by the new Evil Empire. It is relatively easy to identify their few informants, who are naturally depicted as angry young separatists or unquestioning tools of the state. In contrast, the characters who appear in Invisible China are rarely caricatures, certainly no more so than some very real people. Legerton and Rawson may too readily project onto the people they met their desire to find the individuals in the machine. They describe one old and loquacious man as someone with “individual” opinions all his own (a social and psychological impossibility) in a country with claims to homogeneity.

Invisible China‘s chapters, although bite-sized, are each based on at least several days of intensive interaction in a given community. The chapters are divided roughly into two parts: The first hooks the reader in, while the second seeks to make a more nuanced polemical point about minority life through a narrative of encounters and conversations. The authors cram nothing down the reader’s throat, but instead try to stay out of the way of their interviewees’ stories, editorializing sparingly and appropriately.

Take, for example, Legerton and Rawson’s lengthy interactions with a pair of Tajik restaurateurs in Chapter 11. Here, the authors build up an honest and sympathetic depiction of their newfound friends, then draw on their own understanding to relate these individuals’ lives to questions of place, culture, and language in a believable and uncaricatured way. When interviewees are quoted in relation to more sensitive political problems, as in Chapter 10 on Uyghurs in Xinjiang, the authors wisely obscure their personal information and focus more on what those people say than how they can be classified or which side they are on. In Invisible China, people may be members of minority groups, but they do not simply represent them. This, and the authors’ clear concern for their interlocutors, as expressed in the afterword, demonstrate that Invisible China is informed by more than a thirst for adventure or profit or a well-intentioned Western concern for the rights of the oppressed Other.

Of course, a travel writer has the freedom to create composite characters or even fashion them out of whole cloth. As such, travelogues have a problem of credibility, and there is really no telling the degree to which Legerton and Rawson’s characters, who are in any case depicted very believably, actually exist. This is not academic work, and so the authors were not fettered in their research by those constraints placed upon scholars. This gave them the freedom to pursue, however superficially, topics otherwise unavailable to research, such as Arabic literacy and the central role of Mosque culture (and even the Old and New Teachings!) among the Dongxiang in Chapter 8. This piece acts as an interesting commentary on Chinese measures of literacy. In my opinion, Legerton and Rawson’s insistence on inserting parenthetical facts at appropriate moments in their narratives gives their work a certain credibility, as well as a scope beyond the strictly nominalist, and I look forward to the results of both authors’ current postgraduate work.

Invisible China is not free from tired tropes of the exotic. As with any old piece of Xinjiang travel writing, for example, exotic smells and colors abound, and cute little kids feature prominently. They compare Tashkurghan and its inhabitants to Europe and the Europeans. Mostly, however, the authors concentrate on lampooning or deflating the depictions of minorities found in Chinese media, as in Chapter 3, which focuses on the Mongols, and Chapter 6, on the Naxi. To their credit, they seem consciously to try to avoid making use of those same representations. Indeed, when a group exhibits some peculiarity, they usually leave it up to the members of that group to explain or comment upon it. Actually, the authors try very hard to avoid adopting anything like “flexible positional superiority,” with regard to anything but the PRC government and its representatives.

Invisible China closes with a thoughtful afterword, composed after the Beijing Olympics in 2008. Legerton and Rawson’s journeys in 2006 and 2007 had shown them China, and especially Xinjiang and Tibet, before the riots of 2008 and before the attacks in Xinjiang. I agree with their final conclusion that, for all of the talk of ethnic unity and the image of far-reaching state control, Beijing has yet to really approach its minority problems in a well-informed and constructive way, and that they might even lack the understanding and wherewithal to begin to do so. Throughout the book, the reader sees China in its odd little pockets, where the foreigner’s feeling of oppressive sameness begins to seem trivial and new old worlds flourish. Legerton and Rawson have chosen to focus on something that could easily be facilely political. They could have written a screed about minority oppression. They could have depicted the billboards and the propaganda as the ubiquitous signs of the omnipotent and malevolent state, but, in the villages on China’s borderlands, they seem like the laughable gestures of a distant power no longer interested in its neediest subjects. Of course, this is not the whole story – one need only look at Eric Mueggler’s The Age of Wild Ghosts, for one example, to see the hand of the state in borderland life – but the authors’ moderate and considered point is well-taken. There is more to minorities than ethnic conflict, and the state is often more blundering than it is malicious.

I would go into greater detail, but, as I found out just today, you will soon be able to read it yourself. Dr. Dautcher’s dissertation will soon appear in print under the title Down a Narrow Road: Identity and Masculinity in a Uyghur Community in Xinjiang China.  The book, published by Harvard University’s Asia Center, will be released on 15 March.  In the meantime, you can pre-order it on Amazon or from Harvard University Press.

You can count on seeing a review on this site sometime late next month.

Update: This book has a website!

Some of you may have noticed about a week ago an article in the New York Times by correspondent Edward Wong titled, “The Dead Tell a Tale China Doesn’t Care to Listen To,” about the famous preserved corpse uncovered in the Tarim Basin and dubbed the “Loulan Beauty.” So the Loulan Beauty looks European and this doesn’t jive well with the continual and enthusiastic insistence on behalf of the Chinese government that Xinjiang has always been a part of Chinese territory. Like almost all the articles written about Xinjiang in mainstream media outlets there was nothing strikingly new about the content and the article itself relied mostly on the “wow” factor one usually can get from telling your average Joe how weird Xinjiang is. Michael over at The Opposite End of China made a great post recently on the eye-rolling factor of the article and we just let the article slip by all together here at The New Dominion.

However, while those of us who have gone a little beyond the surface here in Xinjiang may just roll our eyes and sigh at Wong’s cliche observations, it of course is inevitable that legions of Chinese who lay their eyes on the article would get their feelings hurt and begin the nationalistic backlash. Spearheading the effort is the Global Times, a simmering, sensationalist tabloid that has a reputation for being sentimental and patriotic. Their article titled “American Media Dares to Use Loulan Beauty to Cast Doubt on Chinese Sovereignty” was too much to not write about.

The American newspaper “The New York Times” recently had the gall to publish an article absurdly using the “Loulan Beauty” to speculate that Xinjiang is not a part of the territory of China. That article states that since the “Loulan Beauty’s” appearance is evidence of her not being Chinese and also since her arrival to modern-day Xinjiang vastly predated emissary Zhang Qian’s arrival to the Western Regions, this constitutes proof that Xinjiang is not part of the territory of China.

The article is a short one. It gets right to the point by incredulously stating the NYT article’s goal of proving via the Loulan Beauty that Xinjiang is not a part of the territory of China, then picks a few choice quotes from the original article to display to the disgust of the Chinese readers. Finally, the author brings in two experts, a historian and the head of the Central Asia Research Institute in Xinjiang, to deal the killing blows to Wong’s thesis. The head of the institute, Pan Zhipang, observes that solid control over Xinjiang by a Chinese government was established in Xinjiang as early as 60 B.C. and Zhang Qian was only a part of that effort – a thousands year old mummy is irrelevant to that historical establishment. Historian Zhang Wei invokes international law, remarking that China’s continuous and effective rule over Xinjiang today fits in with the agreed upon definition of sovereignty and renders the origins of a 3800 year old mummy irrelevant. If thousands year old claims rather than effective governance defines sovereignty, the Global Times writer snarkily quips, then Americans should give America back to the Indians. And thus the article ends.

After supping on  this delightful buffet of sarcasm and righteous indignation for a little bit I found myself choking and gagging on one little chicken bone – namely,  nowhere in the article does Edward Wong argue that Xinjiang is not a part of the territory of China.

Sure, Wong’s article undeniably is soaked in a skeptical tone aimed at the current Chinese government, but while Wong makes a number of arguments, Xinjiang not being a part of China is clearly not one of them. For example, the title of the Times article – “a story that China doesn’t want to hear.” China obviously means the Chinese government, but is the story “Xinjiang is not a part of China?” Not quite.

An exhibit on the first floor of the museum here gives the government’s unambiguous take on the history of this border region: “Xinjiang has been an inalienable part of the territory of China,” says one prominent sign.

But walk upstairs to the second floor, and the ancient corpses on display seem to tell a different story.

So as we begin reading Wong’s article, he’s trying to get us to cast doubt on the statement, “Xinjiang has been an inalienable part of the territory of China.” Here’s where things get a little messy – when we’re looking at the predicate “has been” the tense implies a kind of permanence and uninterruptedness, whereas the Global Times author starts of by quoting this quote of a translation of a quote (yeesh), writing in Chinese, 新疆是中国领土不可分割的一部分, in which the subtlety of the tense “has been” gets sucked into Chinese grammar as the verb 是 which will inevitably be interpreted by native language readers as “China is an inalienable part of the territory of China.”

For a moment let’s ignore the stupidity of a sentence that was conceived in Mandarin, turned into a standardized policy statement, translated into English to be placed on a museum sign, was seen by a Chinese-American reporter, was quoted in an American newspaper, and then was seen by a Chinese reporter who took the phrase and translated it back into Chinese. Ha ha.

The difference between calling doubt upon “has been an inalienable part” and calling doubt upon “is an inalienable part” is pretty huge. The first one questions a long, unbroken claim of authority that snakes deep into the past without a clear end. The second one questions a sovereign nation’s right to rule its own territory today. When we acknowledge this difference we actually can find some common ground between Wong and the indignant expert interviewed in the Global Times article.

“As early as 60 B.C., China’s Western Han government had already established a protectorate in Xinjiang, the highest level administrative structure established by the Han dynasty in the Western Regions.” says Pan, “That China had established a local government there is proof that Xinjiang has since ancient times been a part of China’s territory.” Basically Pan is blasting what he is told Wong is claiming about the Loulan beauty by astutely pointing out that indeed there is a beginning boundary to Chinese rule over Xinjiang -the establishment of a protectorate there during the Han dynasty – and what happened before then is irrelevant to Chinese rule today. In this sense, Pan and Wong can both agree – imagining Chinese sovereignty into the 2nd millennium BC would be kind of absurd.

However, it’s not Chinese sovereignty that Wong is questioning, and that makes the Global Times’ impassioned criticism a big, smelly red herring, completely irrelevant. Instead what Wong is questioning is the more subtle idea that a “Chinese identity” could be projected beyond the first Han protectorate, far beyond 1st century BC; that regardless of the presence or absence of Han Chinese control in the region, the individuals were Chinese at heart – not “China” the ethnic Han cultural body, but “China” the multiethnic nation-state. This idea is insidious in its own way, because it depicts a people predating Chinese rule who nonetheless were clamoring in their hearts to be members of the great minzu family, an desire which was fulfilled when the Han dynasty came in the 1st century BC – an Eastern twist to the “heathens need Jesus” rationale that provided the spiritual and social impetus for colonization by European nations.

Does this idea exist in the Chinese leadership? I think it does. We can look back to Pan’s own words. While on one hand he quite correctly, in my opinion, stresses the difference between the concepts of “ethnicity” and “country,” right afterwards he strangely goes on to say, “Westerners often conceive China only to be composed of Han Chinese, but in reality China is an integrated, multiethnic country, and even though the “Loulan Beauty” is not Han, she still may be Chinese” [Emphasis mine]. Furthermore, one of the central writing points of Wong’s article is the befuddling insecurity on behalf of Chinese scientists preventing them from allowing genetic analysis by international scholars of the Loulan Beauty and other Xinjiang mummies. Beyond that, anyone who has visited the Autonomous Regional Museum and Urumqi can tell you much of it is a grand exercise in insecurity, with constant reminders in multiple languages to museum-goers that Xinjiang, no matter from what angle you’re looking at it, is a part of China and don’t even bother to question that axiom in front of all this overwhelming historical evidence.

If there’s no disputing that territorial integrity and sovereignty is all about who is effectively administering a region at a given time, why is there this shroud of paranoia and insecurity around the Loulan Beauty? Why are scientists so protective about her genetic makeup, and why do Chinese social scholars have to qualify their statements about her with “She still may be Chinese?” It’s because the issue runs deeper than sovereignty. As an unelected government, the CCP and even the autonomous regional government are obsessed with rationales, and justifiably so. Without the stamp of popular approval bestowed by elections, the CCP instead has to convince its modern-day subjects that it knows what’s good for them anyways and is providing that – for example, the unending stream of rhetoric about stability and economic prosperity, which, to be fair, in many cases, is not untrue. Ethnic regions that are historically less “Han” but are part of the PRC play a special role in this self-justification. If the titular minorities of these autonomous regions not only desire benevolent Han rule, but also are entitled to it with their long history as “proto-Chinese” peoples, then the non-elected government of, say, Xinjiang, is legitimate, even if real power lies mostly with the party organs consisting primarily of appointed Han Chinese.

As a private individual with a strong interest in Xinjiang, I do not have any objections to the PRC’s territorial integrity and sovereignty over Xinjiang. It’s a fact, just as historian Zhang Wei observes. What I do object to, however, is the sustained educational drive (including things like the Regional Museum in Urumqi) to to depict pre-Han dynasty peoples of Xinjiang as somehow belonging to the multiethnic “Chinese” identity. In addition to displaying the traditional insecurity of the Communist Party and being pretty unnecessary in light of international conventions regarding sovereignty, I consider this stubborn belief contributing to the “you were made for this and you asked for this” narrative that places the “big brother Han” on far higher ground than the other, ostensibly equal minorities of China. Wong is a journalist. His interest in the novelty of Xinjiang, Uyghurs, and the Loulan Beauty is strictly business and he’s writing for a broad audience, and so his article doesn’t delve deeply into the challenges the Loulan Beauty present to the idea of a pan-ethnic primordial Chinese identity. That, however, is still what he’s doing – not suggesting Xinjiang is entitled to become its own nation because a 3800 year old mummy looks European.

What really needs to be acknowledged by all sides is that when something is almost four millenia distant from the present, modern day concepts such as ethnic identity or national identity are completely irrelevant. Professor Pan, as far as the article went, gets close to this understanding – but not close enough. To turn the Global Times reporter’s misguided sarcasm on its head, claiming that the Loulan Beauty could retroactively be considered a member of the multiethnic Chinese nation state is as illogical as claiming the pueblo Indians of the 10th century were dyed in the wool red white and blue members of the United States of America melting pot eight centuries before the USA even existed. The Loulan Beauty beauty isn’t “Chinese” because “Chinese” didn’t exist back then, nor, it must be said, is she Uyghur. She should be nothing more than a representative of prehistoric life in Xinjiang that can be appreciated by the young, the old, Han, Uyghur, and foreigner – without any devaluing political baggage.

***

If you can read Chinese, I also recommend you peruse the comments section to the Global Times article for a nice sampling of typical angry youth (愤青) rage. Lots of amusing yet red herring remarks on giving Alaska back to Russia and America back to the Indians. If there are any intelligent comments that do more than just illustrate angry youth contempt it may merit a future post.

***

Full translation of the Global Times Article below:

Global Times Special Correspondent Shang Bin

The American newspaper “The New York Times” recently had the gall to publish an article absurdly using the “Loulan Beauty” to speculate that Xinjiang is not a part of the territory of China. That article states that since the “Loulan Beauty’s” appearance is evidence of her not being Chinese and also since her arrival to modern-day Xinjiang vastly predated emissary Zhang Qian’s arrival to the Western Regions, this constitutes proof that Xinjiang is not part of the territory of China.
The “Loulan Beauty” the article mentions refers to a preserved body unearthed in the Lop Nur region of Xinjiang, China, discovered by Chinese archaeologist Mu Shunying in 1980. At approximately 3800 years old, it is the oldest body uncovered in Xinjiang to date.

The article, published on November 18 in the New York Times, is titled “The Dead Tell a Tale China Doesn’t Care to Listen To.” The author notes the Chinese government’s assertion that “Xinjiang has been an inalienable part of the territory of China.” “However, the corpses seem to tell a different story.” He writes that from the appearance of the “Loulan Beauty” one can determine that “she does not look like what one thinks of is Chinese,” and that “the very first people to settle the area came from the west — down from the steppes of Central Asia and even farther afield — and not from the fertile plains and river valleys of the Chinese interior.”

The author also mentions that Chinese officials, when offering proof that Xinjiang is a part of Chinese territory, often mention Zhang Qian’s mission to the Western Regions, “but the mummies show, though, that humans entered the region thousands of years earlier, and almost certainly from the west.” The author says that the “Loulan Beauty” is 3800 years old, and that the time of Zhang Qian’s mission to the Wesern Reigions was during the Western Han dynasty, in the second century B.C.

The head of the Central Asia Research Institute at the Xinjiang Academy of Social Sciences, Pan Zhiping accepted an interview with a Global Times correspondent and said regarding this fallacy that the article has made a “conceptual error.” The concepts of “ethnicity” and “country”, he argues, are two completely different concepts. Westerners often conceive China only to be composed of Han Chinese, but in reality China is an integrated, multiethnic country, and even though the “Loulan Beauty” is not Han, she still may be Chinese. Furthermore, as early as 60 B.C., China’s Western Han government had already established a protectorate in Xinjiang, the highest level administrative structure established by the Han dynasty in the Western Regions. That China had established a local government there is proof that Xinjiang has since ancient times been a part of China’s territory; Zhang Qian served only as an emissary to the Western Regions, and his activities there are not considered the conclusive evidence that Xinjiang belongs to Chinese territory.

Historian Zhang Wei told a Global Times correspondent that what is determined by the history of territorial claims and what is determined by the present reality are also completely different concepts. According to international legal conventions, what determines a place’s status as “territory” is a  nation carrying out continuous and effective management of that place. The Western Han central government established a protectorate in the Western Regions in 60 BC, and for over 2000 years since that time the Chinese central government has basically maintained continuous and effective control over the Xinjiang reason. Zhang Wei states that the article’s comparison of the 3800 year old corpse of the Loulan Beauty with the Chinese government’s over 2000 years of continuous effective rule over Xinjiang is completely lacking in logic. Should the argument of the article be implemented, then American should be returned to the Native Americans.

A new book is to be published on the history of and discourse surrounding the muqam, a Turkic musical form with Arabic roots, in Xinjiang. The Uyghur Twelve Muqam were declared a “masterpiece of the oral and intangible heritage of humanity” by UNESCO in 2005. The author of the book, Nathan Light, is a senior researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle/Saale, Germany, and has conducted research on the muqam for over a decade. Sections of his 1998 PhD dissertation on the Twelve Muqam are available for reading here.

The book’s abstract (after the break and also posted here) indicates that Light has taken a broad and multidisciplinary approach to research on the muqam in Xinjiang, incorporating musicological, historical, and ethnographic data to come to some interesting conclusions. I find particularly interesting his assertion that, in the process of further preparing and refining the Uyghur muqam over the past fifty years, the historical and ethnic consciousness of the editors has played a more powerful role than that of the state censors. Subaltern discourses appear in such interesting places. Light also looks at the way the Twelve Muqam, too often regarded as a fixed, formalized collection of “folk classical” music and an unchanging symbol of a transhistorical Uyghur identity, have changed in recent history in response to other social factors.

But perhaps the abstract should speak for itself. I look forward to reading this book as soon as it becomes available.

Abstract:

In 2005 UNESCO declared the Uyghur “Twelve Muqams” a Masterpiece of
the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity. This event was preceded
by more than fifty years of work behind the scenes to record,
transcribe, research, edit and reorganize the Uyghur muqams into a
symbolic form representing the history and culture of the Uyghur
ethnic collectivity.

This study describes the present structure of the Uyghur muqams and
shows how it emerged from the lives and work of performers. It
presents and analyzes the Turkic poetry of the muqams in historical
and cultural contexts, and shows how traditional performers created
their oral versions from mostly written texts. The analysis of muqam
culture and history is combined with ethnographic study of editing the
canonical muqam songs and of the role of the muqams in ongoing
negotiations over identity, culture and history within Uyghur society.

Editing the muqams became a process of Uyghur self-examination and
self-definition. To create positive public representations, the
performers, scholars and politicians who edited the muqams carefully
investigated and interpreted culture and history. The variety of
discourses about the Uyghur past that emerged during editing reflect
the plurality of local ideas and goals. In studying how the muqams
were reworked, Light investigates the social organization of cultural
reflexivity within Xinjiang Uyghur society, and finds that the present
Chinese political context had less influence and importance than
editors’ concerns about Central Asian cultural history and spiritual
practices over the past 1500 years.

Conforming to widespread ideas about representing modern national
cultures on stage through systematic, monumental performances, Uyghur
editors sought to shape the “folk classical” muqams into a source of
ethnic pride. In so doing they confronted many cultural
intimacies–aspects of collective and personal life that undermined
public self-images and disrupt public values and official ideologies
about language, gender, love, and spirituality. Through backstage
discussions in largely Uyghur contexts, the editors and performers
negotiated solutions and rehearsed the framing of public muqam
performances. Light explores the ways past and present cultural
dynamics interact to create contradictions between public and intimate
practices: for example, Central Asian ghazal poetry uses esoteric
images and terms drawn from Sufism to express personal spiritual
quests and critique society, but in the modern Uyghur Twelve Muqams
these same ghazals are sung as love songs in public celebration of the
ethnic collective and its shared culture. Influenced by secular and
national ideologies Uyghur cultural elites have tended to reject the
spiritual, the foreign, and the ecstatic in muqam performance, but
over the past ten years they have begun to integrate these into new
understandings of local heritage.

Contents

1 – Introduction
1.1 – Editing the Muqams
1.2 – International Muqam Scholarship and Local Goals
1.3 – Compromising Culture and Identity
1.4 – History and Geography

2 – Uyghur Performing Arts and the Muqams
2.1 – Muqams and Dance
2.2 – Muqam Discourse, Ideology, and ‘Modernization’
2.3 – The Structure of the Muqams
2.3.1 – First Section: Co? N?gm?
2.3.2 – Second Section: Dastan
2.3.3 – Third Section: M?r?p
2.4 – Muqam Rhythm and Song Meters

3 – The Poetics and Politics of Literary Sufism
3.1 – Sufi Poetry
3.1.1 – Images and Ideas
3.1.2 – Gender in the Poems
3.1.3 – Thematic Unity
3.2 – Ahmad Yasavi
3.2.1 – The Divan-i Hikmat
3.2.2 – Yasavi’s Verses in the Muqams
3.3 – Classical Turkic Poets: Lutfi, Navai, and Fuzuli
3.3.1 – Maulana Lutfi
3.3.2 – Mir ‘Ali-Shir Navai
3.3.2.1 – The Mahbub ul-Qulub
3.3.2.2 – Navai’s Poetry in the Muqams
3.3.3 – Muhammad Fuzuli
3.4 – Muqam Poets after Fuzuli: Mashrab and Huvayda
3.4.1 – Mashrab as Antinomian Hero
3.4.2 – Huvayda’s Didactic Poetry

4 – Give and Take: Genealogies in Music and Art
4.1 – Culture and History as Homelands
4.2 – Creating Autochthonous Uyghur Music History
4.3 – Muqam History on Film
4.4 – Genealogy and Identity
4.5 – Music in Chinese Ideologies and International Relations
4.6 – Foreign Music in China
4.7 – Farabi as Philosopher of Music and Turkic Culture Hero
4.8 – The History of Music in Central Asian Cultural History
4.9 – The Uses of the Narrative of Amannisa Khan

5 – ?m?r Akhun’s Muqams
5.1 – Becoming a Muqamci
5.2 – Learning and Creating Song Lyrics
5.3 – Religion and Love Songs
5.4 – Performance and Audience
5.5 – The Aesthetics of Muqam Sound
5.6 – Other Views on the Muqam Scales and Modes
5.7 – Only Rabbit Meat Remains

6 – Performing, Editing and Publishing the Muqam Songs
6.1 – Rescuing and Publishing the Muqam Texts
6.2 – Editing the Muqam Texts
6.3 – Poetry in Manuscript
6.4 – Come, O Beloved (K?l ?y m?hbub): Language and Ethnicity
6.5 – Mashrab’s Satar Ghazal (Satarim Tariga)
6.6 – Songs in the Repertoires of Turdi Akhun and ?m?r Akhun
6.7 – To the Valley of Madness (Junun vadisiga)
6.8 – From the People of the World (Al?m ?hlidin)
6.9 – In the Garden (Bag icr?): ?m?r Akhun’s Uaq T?z?
6.10 – O Early Spring (?y n?v bahar)
6.11 – O Seven Worlds (?y y?tti m?nz?r)
6.12 – ‘Folk’ Texts in the Co? N?gm?
6.13 – Single Couplets

7 – Dastan and M?r?p Songs in the Muqams
7.1 – Written Dastan Texts
7.2 – The Distribution and Variation of Gherip-S?n?m
7.3 – The Structure of Gherip-S?n?m
7.4 – Formulas in Other Dastans
7.5 – Comparing the Ili and Kashgar Versions of Gherip-S?n?m
7.6 – Gherip Tested by Shaykh Junayd
7.7 – The Resolution of Gherip-S?n?m
7.8 – Turdi Akhun’s M?r?p Songs

8 – Conclusion
8.1 – Cultural Power
8.2 – Offstage
8.3 – Cultural Purity and Working on the Collective Self

Appendix: A Brief Introduction to Uyghur Musical Instruments
Bibliography
Index

I should begin this review of Dr. Äsät Sulayman’s recent work, Özlük wä Kimlik, with a note on the translation of the title. Both özlük and kimlik can be translated, in a sense, as “identity”, which is the focus of the book: the experiences and formation of group and individual identity. Özlük, translatable as “selfhood” or “individuality”, carries a strong sense of self-reflection – it indicates an individual’s concept of his or herself. Kimlik, a term used for one’s public identity, including his or her official identity card, could be translated literally as “who-ness” – it is the identity of a person in reference to his or her surroundings and community. The subtitle, in Uyghur, translates as “looking at the depths of Central Asia from Europe’s shores”.

We can consider the book in these terms. Özlük wä Kimlik is, first of all, a personal memoir of the year Dr. Äsät (Eset) Sulayman, a professor at Xinjiang University and an influential intellectual voice, spent at Stockholm University in Sweden, where he studied, taught, and worked. While living there as an immigrant, away from his family and native land, he spent several months in the Royal Archives of Sweden and the archives of Stockholm University, cataloging the records of Swedish missionaries who operated in Xinjiang from 1892 through the late 1930′s, records previously left nearly untouched by researchers. This forms the other half of the book, detailing the lives of these missionaries and discussing the ways in which their activities, especially in the fields of printing and education, altered the evolution of Uyghur society.

With evidence from these archive materials, Äsät Sulayman essentially argues that the introduction of printing technology to Xinjiang, coupled with the missionaries’ focus on primary education, aided the formation of a Uyghur intellectual class, as well as providing a foreign, Christian foil for an evolving local Turkic Muslim identity. He has since returned to this argument in a more focused academic work (also in Uyghur)¹. Apart from proselytizing largely unreceptive natives, many of whom received a “modern” or “scientific” education in their schools, the missionaries operated the only press in the region until 1938, producing texts beyond their own evangelical purposes, including some of the earliest printed works in Turki. Perhaps more importantly to the formation, codification, and promotion of a modern Uyghur language, the press produced early textbooks (including alphabet books) and grammars of “Altä Shähär Turki”. The story of Swedish or Scandinavian involvement in Xinjiang, dating back to the eighteenth century, forms the nominal backbone of the book, though it hardly makes its presence known in the text. True, Dr. Sulayman presents information about Swedish people in Xinjiang and analyzes the effects of their presence and activities, but, in terms of the book’s composition, the “cultural dialogue between Inner Asia and Scandinavia” is more of a general theme, incidental to the narrative, than it is a force to order that narrative or any argument.

Äsät Sulayman viewed the history he rediscovered through the eyes of an outsider in a strange land. It is his memories of life in Sweden that form the bulk of the book and that bring him to his final conclusions. His descriptions of the deepening Swedish winter and the people he encountered among the “fluttering” snowflakes become somewhat repetitive, but they are effective in framing the commonality he felt with other immigrants, even strangers, as well as with the Swedish, whose “national character” he spends a very long chapter describing and reassessing. He recounts, for example, his repeated need to explain where he is from, an experience common to Uyghurs who go abroad. How does one account for a Uyghur face and a Chinese passport? This constant defense of his own identity, as for many people who have lived abroad, causes him to reevaluate and reflect on it outside of the ever-present Chinese system of ethnic classification.

This, I believe, is Äsät Sulayman’s main point: Uyghur identity and history can be considered outside of the Chinese context. His points of cultural and historical comparison are located in Sweden and Xinjiang, respectively. When he speaks of his “homeland”, he clearly means “Xinjiang”, hardly making mention of China. Indeed, it seems that his natural place in Sweden’s international community is among Uzbeks and other Central Asians. He places Uyghur history and identity on the same level of importance as those of any other ethnic group or nation. His discussion of relative population size favorably compares the Uyghur population to that of most European countries, as does his contrast of the size of different language communities. The Uyghur community, in this narrative, does not simply generate or form within its test tube autonomous region. Rather, it is acted upon by and acts upon non-Chinese outsiders. This is, if not a direct challenge to or rejection of officially-approved accounts of Uyghur history and identity, a major paradigm shift in the more popular literature on ethnicity in China. In this mode, however, it remains very modernist in its outlook, never casting doubt on the naturalness or reality of ethnonational communities, no matter how they may be constructed. This is, I think, part of the book’s appeal to its target audience of at least moderately educated Uyghurs: it changes their ethnic world view in a way still seems logical and natural.

Özlük wä Kimlik, given its wide readership and popularity in the Uyghur intellectual world, has already changed and will continue to affect at least some of its readers’ attitudes towards the question of Uyghur ethnic identity. Äsät Sulayman, himself an historian of literature, recognizes and thinks in terms of intellectual, idealist history. This leads him, it seems, to begin to reassess accepted ethnonational narratives in China, which are overwhelmingly Marxist-materialist. The ideas of identity that he puts forth in this work, as well as its derivative papers, remind me a great deal of the theories of Frederick Barth, while his emphasis on print culture hints of Benedict Anderson, although he does not reference them – nor has he, to my knowledge, read them. This may be the book’s greatest contribution: a diversification of the popular discourse of Uyghur identity, a discourse that is currently primarily concerned, even among independence-minded Uyghurs, with elaborating the concrete trans-historical characteristics of a putative ethnonational group as defined by a state ethnological apparatus. It is, in a sense, a sign of a natural post-modern shift in thought arising from an awareness of and interest in history and literature, which are gaining more acceptance and intellectual freedom, along with anthropology, as fields of inquiry. Furthermore, this is a perspective that comes from (or appears to come from) within a group that regards itself as marginal, though the rejection of this marginal status seems to be a goal of Sulayman’s writing.

This perspective seems to be reinforced by the couching of intellectual inquiry within the structure of a personal narrative. This is reminiscent of a very common strategy for Uyghur writers who want to communicate about history – history is novelized (as in Iz, Oyghanghan Zemin, Ana Yurt, and other books) and, thus, protected from certain kinds of censorship. Äsät Sulayman is doing the same here, I think, with experimental ideas about history and identity that are not otherwise ready for academia.

Özlük wä Kimlik: Yawropa Qirghaqliridin Märkiziy Asiya Chongqurluqlirigha Qarap is an interesting piece of writing by any measure, as well as a possibly very important and influential work in the Uyghur intellectual work. Indeed, its place as a classic is assured, and not just by Dr. Äsät Sulayman’s well-established reputation – the book’s first and second printings, totaling several thousand copies, both sold out quickly, and the book is now a hard-sought favorite in Ürümchi used-book stores.

¹Äsät Sulayman. “‘Qäshqär basma buyumliri’ wä ötkünchi däwrdiki Uyghur tili mädäniyiti – Chaghatay tilidin hazirqi zaman Uyghur tiligha mäzgilidiki ‘ötkünchi däwr Uyghur tili’ wä uning tarixiy, ijtima’iy, mädäniyät arqa körünüshi” in Shinjang Pedagogika Uniwersiteti Aliy Zhurnali (Pälsäpä – Ijtima’iy Pän Qismi), No. 4, 2007, pp. 1-11.

James Millward has done the Xinjiang studies community a great service by authoring the first comprehensive historical survey that takes this region as its primary focus without adopting any explicit political thesis. This contribution is a significant step towards validating Xinjiang studies as a valid field of academic inquiry. In addition to this noble deed, Eurasian Crossroads offers much more to both the general reader and non-specialist, particularly those interested in political history.

As befits any historical survey, the organizing principle of the work is a chronological progression that begins with the prehistorical era with the Tienshanosaurus and concludes in the present day with a discussion of noted individuals like Adil Hoshur. Millward divides his book into eight substantive chapters: Ancient Encounters (earliest times – 8^th century), Central Eurasia Ascendant (9^th – 16^th centuries), Between Islam and China (16^th – 19^th centuries), Between Empire and Nation (late 19^th century – early 20^th century), Between China and the Soviet Union (1910s – 1940s), In the People’s Republic of China (1950s – 1980s), Between China and the World (1990s – 2000s), and Conclusion: Balancing Acts. As these chapter titles suggest, the breadth of coverage is only achieved through substantial reduction in its depth. This trade off comes as the cost of more thoroughly discussing events prior to the late nineteenth century, which only occupy approximately one-third of the book.

This book is best used as a substantial piece of background reading for those who seek some information about the historitcal background of today’s complication political situation or an introductory level history text. Readers approach the work for these purposes stand to benefit the most from its content. However, all readers will likely be grateful to Millward for included an extensive timeline as an appendix, which reports contemporary events in “Northern Xinjiang, Southern Xinjiang and Nearby Regions.” This straightforward chronicle of events is an excellent map through the very complex territory that is the history of Xinjiang.

Unfortunately, Eurasian Crossroads also suffers from some significant defects – although these shortcomings will not seriously compromise the book’s value to all except the most serious of the book’s readers. The most serious lacuna in Millward’s work is readily apparent after perusing the bibliography or reading the text: there are essentially no Turkic or Persian language primary sources and very few Russian or Japanese language secondary sources. Millward goes very far on the basis of previously published sources in English and Chinese, but does not go the extra mile to explore local primary sources or a rich body of secondary literature on his own. The discussion of the 14^th – 19^th centuries, which features a most cursory overview of the Chagataids and Khojas in Kashgaria, could certainly be enriched by considering to a primary material such as the chronicle of Shah Mahmud Churas or the Tarikh-i Kashgar. Moreover, secondary material written by non-Anglophone authors available in French, Russian and Japanese also remains beyond the purview of the book. This limitation to the sources is unfortunate precisely because scholars writing in these languages have produced some of the best available scholarship relating to the 14^th-19^th centuries. The lack of any mention of these sources suggests a related shortcoming of Millward’s book that is relevant to most readers; namely, without integrating (or at least acknowledging) as much relevant primary and secondary material as possible Eurasian Crossroads falls short of being an excellent introduction to the growing body of relevant literature. This book easily could have been an excellent survey of the field as well as a solid survey of historical events, but it is not.

Overall, Eurasian Crossroads is a first attempt at writing a relatively balanced, scholarly historical survey of Xinjiang and is an excellent quick reference for anyone looking to contextualize contemporary political developments in a historical context. The field still appears open, however, for a more comprehensive survey of events prior to the rise of Yaqub Beg and for a lengthy critical review of historical scholarship relating to Xinjiang.