Travels in Xinjiang in the 1980s: in search of intercultural encounter?

Abstract

A perusal of writings on China's Far West, contained in Frederick's Starr's Xinjiang: China's Muslim Borderland (2004), enables us to identify key, recurrent conceptions of Xinjiang offered by the scholars Starr brings together. These conceptions frame the region as an intercultural arena that is itself culturally complex, hybrid, or “in-between” and appears ripe for the emergence of cross-cultural dialogue and intersubjective exchange, in spite of, or perhaps because of, the cultural and ethnic conflicts to which it is subjected. Starr's collection encourages us to see Xinjiang as the sort of “interstitial”, contested environment, where subjects and bodies may enter into interactions denied them in the frames and contexts of their own cultures. And that understanding of Xinjiang is certainly reflected in Xinjiang-based travellers' tales. Key intertextual narrative models for twentieth-century Western travel writing on Xinjiang, and for the fascination that discourse bespeaks, are of course those provided by Peter Fleming and Ella Maillart. This article addresses, however, travel writings by Westerners that recount Silk Road or Xinjiang journeys from the 1980s: a decade that saw the opening of China's western border after 40 years and enabled a renewal of the practices of trade, travel and transition to which Xinjiang, a cultural “blotter” for the influences of many civilisations, was historically open. The focus will be the tales these Western travellers tell of the motivations subtending their quests for contact and experience in Xinjiang. The article examines their will (or lack of will) to intercultural connection, and the forms of cross-cultural interaction they claim to have achieved. What I hope to show, by exploring the texts I have selected, is that East/West culture-contact sought out in Xinjiang is more challenging, less actually desired, and less lightly – or competently – realised than the Western narratives charting its pursuit might have us believe. Texts examined include English- and French-language travel narratives by Nick Danziger, Marc Boulet, Stuart Stevens, John Pilkington and Christa Paula. The article probes these authors' experiences of culture-contact, and its limitations, in a zone uniquely tailored to its realisation.