Vanishing Art, Genre-Making: The Uyghur Storytelling Tradition and its Heritagisation

Abstract

This chapter examines the storytelling traditions of dastan, qisse and hikmet as holistic expressive Uyghur practices that are vanishing under contemporary Chinese communist settler colonialism. Drawing on observations of performances and interviews with Uyghur storytellers between 2008 and 2016, it introduces these traditions as fluid, living verbal and musical art forms embedded in everyday Uyghur life, and traces the epistemic violence caused by efforts to integrate them into the multinational Chinese nation and world heritage regime. Uyghur folklorists, working under the constraints of Chinese Communist Party ideology and policy, have made great efforts to preserve Uyghur traditional arts through their documentation, categorisation and heritagization. However, as this chapter shows, these processes have divorced Uyghur storytelling traditions from the Islamic culture and practices integral to both their literary content and their meaning and practice in everyday life.