The East Asian Studies Program Presents Book Talk: Land of Strangers: The Civilizing Project in Qing Central Asia

Description

Eric Schluessel, assistant professor of history and international affairs at the George Washington University, will give a book talk on Land of Strangers: The Civilizing Project in Qing Central Asia for the East Asian Studies Program. Schluessel is also the author of the textbook An Introduction to Chaghatay and several articles on the social history of Xinjiang and China. He received a Ph.D. in history and East Asian languages from Harvard University.

Talk Description:

At the close of the 19th century, near the end of the Qing empire, Confucian revivalists from central China gained control of the Muslim-majority region of Xinjiang, or East Turkestan. There they undertook a program to transform Turkic-speaking Muslims into Chinese-speaking Confucians, seeking to bind this population and their homeland to the Chinese cultural and political realm. Instead of assimilation, divisions between communities only deepened, resulting in a profound estrangement that continues to this day. This talk explores that process of estrangement through the politics of translation across Chinese and Islamic idioms, the realignment of a sexual economy along lines of ethnic difference, and its impact on representations of self and other in internal Turkic Muslim discourse. It illuminates the complex dialogue between local archives and manuscript accounts in the Chinese and Chaghatay languages.

This event is co-sponsored by the Department of History.