Dislocating China: Reflections on Muslims, Minorities, and Other Subaltern Subjects

by Gladney, Dru C.

• ISBN13: 9780226297750
• ISBN10: 0226297756
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2004-04-01
• Publisher: Univ of Chicago Pr

Summary

Until quite recently, Western scholars have tended to accept the Chinese representation of non-Han groups as marginalized minorities. Dru C. Gladney challenges this simplistic view, arguing instead that the very oppositions of majority and minority, primitive and modern, are historically constructed and are belied by examination of such disenfranchised groups as Muslims, minorities, or gendered others. Gladney locates China and Chinese culture not in some unchanging, essential "Chinese-ness," but in the context of historical and contemporary multicultural complexity. He investigates how this complexity plays out among a variety of places and groups, examining representations of minorities and majorities in art, movies, and theme parks; the invention of folklore and creation myths; the role of pilgrimages in constructing local identities; and the impact of globalization and economic reforms on non-Han groups such as the Muslim Hui. In the end, Gladney argues that just as peoples in the West have defined themselves against ethnic others, so too have the Chinese defined themselves against marginalized groups in their own society.

Author Biography

Dru C. Gladney is a professor of Asian studies and anthropology at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. He is the author of Muslim Chinese: Ethnic Nationalism in the People's Republic, second edition, and Ethnic Identity in China: The Making of a Muslim Minority Nationality and the editor of Making Majorities: Constituting the Nation in Japan, Korea, China, Malaysia, Fiji, Turkey, and the United States.

Table of Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments	xi
1. Introduction: Locating and Dislocating Culture in Contemporary China	1	(5)
Part I. RECOGNITIONS
2. Cultural Nationalisms in Contemporary China	6	(22)
Ethnic identity in China	6	(3)
The politics of ethnic identification	9	(4)
The politics of Han nationalism	13	(4)
The politics of ethnic separatism	17	(3)
Population politics: 'coming out' in the 1990's	20	(3)
The politics of 'unofficial' ethnicity	23	(3)
The disuniting of China?	26	(2)
3. Mapping the Chinese Nation	28	(23)
Mapping nations, mapping peoples	28	(1)
Path dependence: derivative discourses of nationalism	29	(2)
The Polynesian Cultural Center: a proto-path?	31	(3)
Mixed media, blurred genres, and derivative discourses	34	(5)
Mapping the Chinese Ethnic Culture Park	39	(7)
Path dependence and the seductiveness of theme parks	46	(1)
Scrambling and unscrambling paths	47	(2)
Breaking path dependence	49	(2)
Part II. REPRESENTATIONS
4. Making, Marking, and Marketing Identity	51	(34)
Representing identity	51	(3)
The display and commodification of the minority other in China	54	(5)
Essentializing the Han	59	(1)
Han modernity and the construction of primitivity	60	(4)
Exoticizing and eroticizing minorities in China	64	(5)
Painting minorities: the invention of the Yunnan School	69	(5)
Marginalizing the center of Chinese film	74	(4)
Contesting and coopting otherness: eroticizing (even) the Muslims	78	(3)
Women as minority and other in China	81	(4)
5. Film and Forecasting the Nation	85	(14)
The Fifth Generation	85	(3)
Horse Thief and its critics	88	(1)
Minority representation in China	89	(3)
The background to minorities film	92	(1)
Borderless crossing: exoticization in Chinese film	92	(3)
Representing Horse Thief's minorities	95	(1)
Majority agendas, minority subjects	96	(3)
Part III. FOLKLORIZATIONS
6. Enmeshed Civilizations	99	(21)
Huntington's 'clash of civilizations' in China	99	(4)
Creating hybridity: human and Hui origins	103	(4)
Legitimating hybridity: imperial imprimatur	107	(4)
Maintaining hybridity: marriage and miscegenation	111	(5)
Betwixt and between	116	(4)
7. Localization and Transnational Pilgrimages	120	(30)
Defining the Hui	120	(1)
Historic tombs and international prominence	121	(4)
Sufi tombs and transnational networks	125	(14)
Local tombs and communal interests	139	(4)
Local gongbei and ethnic folklore	143	(4)
Tombs and Hui ancestral tradition	147	(3)
Part IV. ETHNICIZATIONS
8. Dialogic Identities	150	(26)
Ethnic dialogues	150	(2)
The enigmatic Hui: in search of an ethnic group	152	(1)
A northwestern Sufi community	153	(1)
A Hui community in Oxen Street, Beijing	154	(1)
A Hui community on the southeast coast	155	(1)
Hui communities in China's minority areas	156	(1)
Hui identity and state recognition	156	(2)
Ethnicity and the nation-state	158	(1)
The dialogical nature of ethnic identity	159	(1)
Ethnogenesis of a Muslim minority: from Huijiao to Huimin	160	(5)
The social life of labels	165	(2)
The local expression of Hui identity	167	(2)
The rise of pan-Hui ethnic identity	169	(1)
State definition, minority identity, and Han nationalism	170	(3)
The dialogue and contestation of ethnicity in China	173	(3)
9. Relational Alterities	176	(29)
The re-emergence of the 'tribe'	176	(5)
Three families, three 'nations'	181	(6)
The Muslim Chinese: making hybridity	187	(2)
Relational alterity and oppositional identities	189	(4)
The Uyghur: indigeneities of place, space, and state recognition	193	(2)
The Kazakh: nomadic nostalgia and the power of genealogy	195	(5)
Unscrambling overstructured identities	200	(2)
Relational alterities	202	(3)
Part V. INDIGENIZATIONS
10. Ethnogenesis or Ethnogenocide?	205	(24)
The Uyghur: old and new	205	(3)
Ethnogenesis and the nation-state	208	(2)
The ethnogenesis of the Uyghur	210	(6)
Twentieth-century Chinese expansion and Uyghur identity	216	(3)
The incorporation of Xinjiang and modern Uyghur identity	219	(6)
Uyghur identity and the Chinese nation-state	225	(4)
11. Cyber-Separatism	229	(31)
Reconstructing Uyghur identity	229	(2)
The transnationalization of the Uyghur: Salman Rushdie and trans-Eurasian railways	231	(4)
Islamization and Chinese geopolitics	235	(3)
Cyber-separatism: virtual voices in the Uyghur opposition	238	(19)
Contesting otherness	257	(3)
Part VI. SOCIALIZATIONS
12. Educating China's Others	260	(22)
Making Muslims	260	(1)
Education and China's civilizing mission	261	(3)
Representation of Muslims as minority nationalities	264	(1)
Muslim self-representation	265	(1)
Chinese education of Muslims	266	(3)
Post-1949 Chinese education of Muslims	269	(6)
The gender gap: male/female education discrepancies among Muslim nationalities	275	(2)
The rise of Islamic education and its influence on Chinese education	277	(3)
Public and private discourse on Islamic knowledge in China	280	(2)
13. Subaltern Perspectives on Prosperity	282	(30)
Cell phones and beepers: capitalism comes to the Hui	282	(3)
Muslim nationality, Chinese state	285	(3)
Ethnoreligious revitalization in a northwestern Sufi community	288	(6)
Hui economic prosperity and ethnic reinvention in Fujian	294	(4)
Reflections on Hui prosperity, north and south	298	(1)
Han capitalism in socialist China	299	(10)
Han and Hui market perspectives: contrasting moralities	309	(3)
Part VII. POLITICIZATIONS
14. Gulf Wars and Displaced Persons	312	(24)
China and the Middle East	312	(3)
Transnational Islam and Muslim national identity in China	315	(4)
Islamic movements and revivalism in China	319	(3)
The first Gulf War and China's Muslims: dividing lines	322	(2)
Mutual withdrawal and a 'peaceful resolution'	324	(4)
Colonialism under different masters	328	(1)
But what about the cost of lamb?	329	(2)
The war on Iraq: a war on Islam?	331	(3)
Open doors, guarded expressions	334	(2)
15. Bodily Positions, Social Dispositions	336	(24)
Images of Tiananmen	336	(3)
Tiananmen requiem	339	(5)
Bodily efficacy and River Elegy	344	(4)
Bodily dispositions and Tiananmen	348	(9)
Bodily occupation of the public sphere	357	(3)
16. Conclusions	360	(8)
China after 9/11	360	(2)
Subaltern perspectives on the Chinese geo-body	362	(1)
Chinese nationalism and its subaltern implications	363	(1)
Subaltern separatism and Chinese response	364	(2)
China's expanding internal colonialism	366	(2)
Bibliography	368	(34)
Index	402