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This book offers queer readings of Chinese Qing Dynasty zhiguai,
‘strange tales’, a genre featuring supernatural characters and
events. In a unique approach interweaving Chinese philosophies
alongside critical theories, this book explores tales which speak
to contemporary debates around identity and power. Depictions of
porous boundaries between humans and animals, transformations
between genders, diverse sexualities, and contextually unusual
masculinities and femininities, lend such tales to queer readings.
Unlike previous scholarship on characters as allegorical figures or
stories as morality tales, this book draws on queer theory, animal
studies, feminism, and Deleuzian philosophy, to explore the
‘strange’ and its potential for social critique. Examining such
tales enriches the scope of historic queer world literatures,
offering culturally situated stories of relationships, desires, and
ways of being, that both speak to and challenge contemporary
debates.
In one of the only works drawing on interviews with both Uyghurs
and Han in Xinjiang, China, and postcolonial perspectives on
ethnicity, nation, and race, this book explores how forms of banal
racism underpin ideas of self and other, assimilation and
modernisation, in this restive region. Significant international
attention has condemned the CCP's use of forced internment in
're-education' camps, as well as its campaign of cultural
assimilation. In this wider context, this book focuses upon the
ways in which ethnic difference is writ through the banalities of
everyday life: who one trusts, what one eats, where one shops, even
what time one's clocks are set to (Xinjiang being perhaps one of
the only places where different ethnic groups live by different
time-zones). Alongside chapters focusing upon the coercive
're-education' campaign, and the devastating UErumchi Riots in
2009, this book also unpacks how discourses of Chinese nationalism
romanticise empire and promote racialised ways of thinking about
Chineseness, how cultural assimilation ('Sinicisation') is being
justified through the rhetoric of 'modernisation', how Islamic
sites and Uyghur culture are being secularised and commodified for
tourist consumption. We also explore Uyghur and Han perspectives,
including of each other, giving insight into the diversity of
opinions within both groups. Based on many years of living and
working in China, and fieldwork and interviews specifically in
Xinjiang, this book will be valuable to a variety of readers
interested in the region and Uyghur and Han identity,
ethnic/national identities in contemporary China, and racisms in
non-western contexts.
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