Before social death: cultural rule and ethnic expression in 1980s Xinjiang

Abstract

ABSTRACT Current scholarship on the Uyghurs eclipses the fact that before the present moment of profound crisis, a robust polite society of the indigenous ethnonational communities existed in Xinjiang in the 1980s. This paper, by uncovering the little-known history of the Urumqi-based Tianshan Film Studio and its cinematic production of the non-Han population as the cultural majority of the region in the 1980s, adds to the academic literature that has firmly pushed against the state tropes of Xinjiang as a restive Muslim backwater with little skill in negotiating modernity. By intersecting institutional history, close reading of concrete filmic texts, and the larger historical context of what I argue as a decade of cultural rule in China’s governance of its ethnic frontiers, this paper presents a fresh look at Uyghurs and their ethnic allies in the polite bargaining with the Chinese state for their cultural majority status in the region.