Wow! eBook
Land of Strangers: The Civilizing Project in Qing Central Asia
Author(s): Eric Schluessel (Author)
- Publisher: Columbia University Press
- Publication Date: October 20, 2020
- Language: English
- Print length: 304 pages
- ISBN-10: 0231197551
- ISBN-13: 9780231197557
Book Description
In
Land of Strangers, Eric Schluessel explores this encounter between Chinese power and a Muslim society through the struggles of ordinary people in the oasis of Turpan. He follows the stories of families divided by war, women desperate to survive, children unsure where they belong, and many others to reveal the human consequences of a bloody conflict and the more insidious violence of reconstruction. Schluessel traces the emergence of new struggles around essential questions of identity, showing how religious and linguistic differences converged into ethnic labels. Reading across local archives and manuscript accounts in the Chinese and Chaghatay languages, he recasts the attempted transformation of Xinjiang as a distinctly Chinese form of colonialism. At a time when understanding the roots of the modern relationship between Uyghurs and China has taken on new urgency, Land of Strangers illuminates a crucial moment of social and cultural change in this dark period of Xinjiang’s past.Editorial Reviews
Review
Eric Schluessel combines prodigious linguistic skills with exhaustive archival research and conceptual sophistication to bring the Turpan oasis to life in all its human complexity.
Land of Strangers is a fine-grained account of history from below, unlike anything we have on any part of Central Asia. A stellar achievement. — Adeeb Khalid, author of Making Uzbekistan: Nation, Empire, and Revolution in the Early USSRThrough this theoretically rich exploration of Qing philosophy and practice of colonial rule, we see how violence and forced intimacy shape enduring group identities in Xinjiang. Using his multilingual skills to draw on diaries, memorials, and documents from court cases, Schluessel uncovers the interactions of everyday life among colonizing Chinese, intermediaries, and colonized Uyghurs in late Qing Xinjiang. — Marianne Kamp, author of
The New Woman in Uzbekistan: Islam, Modernity, and Unveiling Under CommunismIn this fine monograph, Eric Schluessel describes the local articulation and hardening of boundaries between people in late Qing Xinjiang. Using Turkic, Manchu, and Chinese sources on Turpan, he introduces (among others) local elites, Hunanese Confucian statecraft ideologues, mediatory
tongchi interpreters, and Chinese-speaking Muslim brokers. His narratives describe culture clashes, identity negotiation, gender ideologies, colonial discipline, and naming practices, persuasively and subtly connected to today’s troubled conditions. — Jonathan N. Lipman, author of Familiar Strangers: A History of Muslims in Northwest ChinaA valuable contribution to our understanding of the actions of the modern Chinese state to pacify Xinjiang through this same combination of force and cultural transformation first attempted by the Xiang Army one hundred and fifty years ago. ―
Asian Review of BooksHe uncovers many fascinating stories about the people who mediated the relationship between rulers and ruled, concluding with a nuanced discussion of comparative colonialism…Highly recommended. ―
ChoiceWriting a ‘history from below’ of any society in any historical period is no easy task, but
Land of Strangers has offered an outstanding example of such history and has provided illuminating insights into this method of exploring modern China andEurasia. — Yuanchong Wang, University of Delaware ― American Historical Review
