Colin Legerton and Jacob Rawson. Invisible China: A Journey Through Ethnic Borderlands. Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2009. 256 pp.
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 [...]
Just yesterday, I was flipping through an old photocopy of Dr. Jay Dautcher’s Berkeley PhD dissertation in Anthropology, “Folklore and identity in a Uighur community in Xinjiang China”. It’s an excellent read, and it’s based on, I would say, by far the most extensive and perceptive ethnographic fieldwork undertaken in Xinjiang by a [...]
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 [...]
Uyghurs dressed as Mexicans and Brazilians? Kazakhs and Tartars posing as Russians? Skulking Han Chinese teenagers with Japanese rising sun headbands? Central Asians exulting in German patriotism while the real German begrudgingly cheers for America? And artistic masterminds and overlords from Hong Kong pointing fingers and cameras in all directions barking orders in English? What [...]