Uyghur Identity Research Articles

The agency of object: the doppa as a narrator for a dynamic Uyghur identity

ABSTRACT This article explores the Uyghur doppa from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to understand Uyghur cultural life and identity. It links the doppa to Uyghur history and the evolving sense of ‘Uyghurness’, reflecting its cultural significance today, both in Xinjiang and through the diaspora. The limited scholarly work on the doppa, spanning 150 years, suggests a gender bias in documenting female-associated crafts. Ironically, at a time when the doppa holds increasing importance, especially with the creation of Doppa Day (5 May), this lack of resources opens up space for creative discourse on Uyghur identity. The study also reveals a tendency to adapt through cultural experiences while maintaining a deep connection to the homeland. Ultimately, this research demonstrates how a small cultural object can provide profound insights into community sensibilities and material culture.

The violation of human security and identity of Uyghur Muslim community through social construction process

The security of the Uyghur ethnic community in Xinjiang became an international concern after media reports about the existence of re‐education camps. History has recorded that the Uyghur often experienced violation of their human security rights. This violation worsened when the Chinese Community Party (CCP) succeeded in controlling the entire mainland. The three pillars of human security that should be ensured by the state, freedom from fear, freedom from want and freedom to live in dignity were violated by the CCP. Using the theory of social construction process, the finding of the research was that the violations aimed to insert socialist and communist values into Uyghur's identity and to control their province, which rich in natural resources.

The Effectiveness of Freedom of Religion or Belief as a Framework in International Relations: The Case of Uyghur Muslims and Other Religious Minorities in Xinjiang, China

This article assesses the effectiveness of religious freedom as a framework in international relations for its ability to define the issue in Xinjiang and propose solutions. In defining the problem, religious minorities other than Muslims, such as Christians, are ignored. This prevents social awareness and policy from addressing the issue, and fosters the Muslim majority to appropriate the Uyghur identity, marginalizing the non-Muslim religious minorities. Moreover, other identities (e.g. national, ethnic or linguistic) and causes of the conflict (e.g. socio-economic inequalities or historical resentment) are often overlooked. In solving the problem, no solutions are proposed to the underlying issue (separatist movements). On the other hand, China’s alternative framework defines the problem (terrorism, separatism, and extremism) and provides the basis from which to propose (savage) solutions: sinicization.

Multilingualism and identity construction: A case study of a Uyghur female youth

AbstractDrawing on a poststructuralist perspective on identity and elite multilingualism, I traced one Uyghur female's multilingual learning experiences in this case study. Using semistructured interviews as the primary data source, I illustrate that by drawing upon multiple affordances, my Uyghur participant was able to expand her repertoire of linguistic resources and hence effect more powerful social memberships, negotiate her “elite” Uyghur identity, and achieve upward social mobility for herself. This study contributes to our understanding of ethnic minorities’ identity construction and language learning in and through intranational migration.

Uyghurs in the Diaspora: Opening Address

Professor Irwin Cotler gave the opening address at the virtual symposium “The Uyghurs in the Diaspora” on May 31st, 2021. The objectives and aims of the conference were to present research findings from various groups regarding the situation of the Uyghur diaspora living in Canada. Given that the Uyghur identity has been heavily sanctioned by the Chinese government, leading several western governments – including Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom – to declare the situation in Xinjiang, China to be a genocide, the overarching questions guiding the symposium were related to how diaspora communities have been re-claiming their Uyghur identity: How has the ongoing genocide affected the Uyghur community? How has emigration and living in the diaspora allowed the community to “reconnect” with their cultural and religious identity?

Identity of Kazakhstan’s Uyghurs: Migration, Homeland, and Language

Abstract This article examines the ethno-national identity of Uyghurs in Kazakhstan, which, during the period of independence, has been undergoing a complex process of transformation from ‘Sovietness’ to ‘Kazakhstanness.’ This transformation is shaped by the ethnic policy of Kazakhstan, aiming for the consolidation of society and formation of a united Kazakhstani nation. Post-Soviet development not only produces threats to the Uyghur ethnic identity, but also creates new perspectives for it. The article focuses on some dimensions of the Uyghur identity determined by cross-border migration from the Xinjiang-Uyghur autonomous region of the neighboring People’s Republic of China and Soviet national policy, such as language, cultural institutions, and existence of the Uyghur district in the Almaty province. Analysis of the discourse of vätän (motherland) shows a shift to a perception of Kazakhstan as a homeland.

“Green-Colored Uyghur Poet”: Religion, Nostalgia, and Identity in Contemporary Uyghur Poetry

There is wide consensus that Islam is an important rallying point for the Uyghurs and an essential component of their national identity. Yet despite its centrality in Uyghur culture, there is only marginal reference to religion in modern Uyghur poetry. In this article, I argue that poets such as Adil Tuniyaz, Tahir Hamut Izgil, and others, most of whom are secular and urban, choose to relate to religion through mysticism and nostalgia in reaction to the Chinese state’s characterization of Islam as identified with violent fundamentalism and terrorism. By avoiding the use of separatist symbols, these poets contribute to a broad national ethos that strengthens contemporary Uyghur identity.

Ethnic Rights, Prosperity and Development in Xinjiang

This article intends to sketch an overview of state policies of China in Xinjiang Uyghur autonomous region. It argues that the situation of China has changed after 1949 with the change in politics. Chinese civilization has deep rooted in the ideas of Confucius which has liberal democratic tendency. The concept of Chinese modern development is pro-people development that aims to meet the basic needs of the common people. Development is for a better and safe life and it appeals to the best of many people. The CPC policy had broader implications for all minority groups, and many of the state policies are a continuation of earlier policies. China’s Muslims are clearly in the threshold in terms of self-preservation and Islamic identity. Uyghur nationalism in Xinjiang was influenced by Muslims of Central Asia, especially Iranian Muslim political ideology. In contemporary China, the growing consciousness of a distinct Uyghur identity should not be linked with political extremist movement –it distorts the political stability and development of the XUAR. China, now, is following its own path of sustainable development while learning from its own classical civilization.

Negotiating Inseparability in China: The Xinjiang Class and the Dynamics of Uyghur Identity, by Timothy Grose. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2019. vii+146 pp. US$45.00/HK$320.00 (cloth).

<i>Negotiating Inseparability in China: The Xinjiang Class and the Dynamics of Uyghur Identity</i>, by Timothy Grose. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2019. vii+146 pp. US$45.00/HK$320.00 (cloth).

Economy and Identity: Felt Making and Marketing in Kashgar Region and Konya

Kashgar in China and Konya in Turkey are centers of felt making. The making and marketing of felt in these places, however, developed in two fairly different directions. In Konya felt is a sought-after tourism item while in Kashgar felt is reserved for personal use in a rural context. This paper is analyzing why felt-making in Kashgar barely survived, while the felt industry in Konya flourished. The paper compares the processes of felt-making, as well as the living or working conditions of felt makers in the two regions and argues. That in Kashgar, felt is not only used for domestic purposes, but it is also a marker of Uyghur identity. Moreover, Kashgar is a historical center of Uyghur handicrafts and felt-making that had, due to the severe travel restrictions during the past centuries, little cultural exchange with other regions and, the felt making techniques and production patterns thus barely changed. The limited flow of people, skills, ideas and techniques reflect in a low marketability of felt in Kashgar and - Uyghur felt makers hardly reach their level of subsistence by focusing on felt making. In contrast, Konya is an tourist’s city and contemporary center of felt industry producing for tourists hunting local felt and felt products. As such, the Turkish felt makers incorporated modern patterns, eased and accelerated the production process and in doing so repurposed the use felt, making it attractive for a young clientele. In this way they were able to cure prosperity for their felt industry.

Conflicting perceptions of education in Canada: the perspectives of well-educated Muslim Uyghur immigrants

ABSTRACT This paper discusses how some well-educated Muslim Uyghur immigrants position themselves in relation to the education systems in Canada. The findings reveal that, on the one hand, these immigrants view education in Canada as very empowering, reflecting the long existing discourse of Orientalism. Their special background as a deeply oppressed Muslim group in China seems to have only added to this position. On the other hand, they have started to see some disempowering aspects of Canadian education that have the potential to sabotage Uyghur identity and culture, while realizing the values and importance of their own community cultural wealth for maintaining and strengthening their collective identity. Put differently, their admiration is also accompanied by their resistance to the same knowledge systems, foregrounding their own religious and cultural wealth. Many of them defy the Euro-centric nationalism and secular liberalism, some manifesting their agency at a more political level.

Uyghur customs: the genesis, popularity, productivity and demise of a modern Uyghur topos

ABSTRACT This article traces the development of the modern concept of ‘Uyghur customs’ in Xinjiang, its rise to popularity in the 1980s-2010s and its demise after 2016. It argues that a certain modern notion of customs took shape in Xinjiang within the frame of modernization policies and the strengthening of formal bureaucracy. This notion, built on ideas introduced in the early twentieth century, defined customs as being distinct from politics, religion and economy. It provided Uyghur intellectuals with a politically safe space to write about local practices and construct Uyghur identity. These intellectuals were bridge builders between modern Chinese society and Uyghur communities. They used discourses around customs formulated in articles, books, TV-shows and teaching to envision a specifically Uyghur modernity. This cultural production ended abruptly with the detention of many of its protagonists and a general security clampdown on minority people and culture in Xinjiang from 2017.

Negotiating Inseparability in China: The Xinjiang Class and the Dynamics of Uyghur Identity. By Timothy Grose. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2019. 160 pp. ISBN: 9789888528097 (cloth).

Negotiating Inseparability in China: The Xinjiang Class and the Dynamics of Uyghur Identity. By Timothy Grose. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2019. 160 pp. ISBN: 9789888528097 (cloth).

If you don’t know how, just learn: Chinese housing and the transformation of Uyghur domestic space

ABSTRACT The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is eliminating and replacing (Wolfe, Patrick. 2006. “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native.” Journal of Genocide Research 8 (4): 387-409) indigenous expressions of Uyghurness. The Party-state has narrowed the official spaces in which Uyghur language can be used and tightened restrictions on religious practice while it has broadened the criminal category of “extremist.” These policies attempt to hollow-out a Uyghur identity that is animated by Islamic and Central Asian norms and fill it with practices common to Han people. The CCP has thrust these tactics into private homes. Drawing on research in the region between 2010 and 2017, government documents, and colonial theory, this article introduces and interrogates the “Three News” housing campaign. It argues that by imposing what I call “authoritarian reflectiveness,” the CCP intends to uproot Uyghur configurations of order and replace them with Han domestic sensibilities.

Ethnic and cultural issues of Uyghurs identity in Xinjiang region

The Uyghurs are a Turkic-Muslim minority in the People`s Republic of China (PRC), their native language belongs to a Turkic language family and is written on the basis of Arabic graphics, and regard themselves as culturally and ethnically close to Central Asian nations. This article deals with the issue of the Uyghur identity role in the case of the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region (XUAR) in China and its manifestations in relation to Chinese policy in the region. In order to study this issue the article analyzes the Uyghurs` attitude towards the Han Chinese migrants and their reaction towards Mandarin tuition as well as the salience of Islam faith as a crucial identity marker.

Belonging between Inclusion and Exclusion: Dimensions of Ethno-Cultural Identity for Uyghur Women in Xinjiang, China

ABSTRACT Research on Uyghur communities in China often focuses on the power and oppression of the Chinese state, neglecting the power situated in the domestic sphere and women’s bodies. My research addresses how younger Uyghur women (aged 18–35 years old) feel suffocated by the expectations of their ethnocultural identity, and how those women both conform to and reject social norms. The themes of marriage and clothing illustrate how representations and discourses of the female body reinforce the boundaries of the Uyghur community. The pleasure and pain of Uyghur identity manifests in women’s bodies during territorial insecurity of fading nationalist space. Multiple scales of identity in the body and household disrupt the imaginary cohesiveness and boundedness of territory. While the Chinese state polices Uyghur bodies, so too does Uyghur society police the bodies of other Uyghurs – especially women – as a security strategy of bordering the nation.

Claiming the mystical self in new modernist Uyghur poetry

By recuperating the Sufi poetics of the Uyghur past, “avant-garde” Uyghur poets such as Tahir Hamut and Perhat Tursun are claiming a right to speak as heirs to both a religious and a literary tradition. For these modernist poets, finding one’s own way forward through the past is a way of reclaiming the discourse surrounding Uyghur identity, and the cultural symbols built into it, as an extension of the self. By channeling affect in such a way that it appears to derive from conventional Uyghur imagery, these poets demonstrate a measure of self-mastery that restores a feeling of existential security in the midst of political and religious change. This article argues that the purpose of their poems is to force the reader to accept new interpretations of images of Sufi embodiment and spirituality as valid and powerful. It further claims that the new indexing of Sufi imagery in this emerging corpus disrupts the unity of Uyghur poetry in the genres of Chinese Socialist Realism and ethno-nationalist Uyghur tradition, not in a negative process, but in order to create new forms of thought and subjectivity. It forces the reader to interpret the world not by trying to return to mythical Uyghur origins or reaching for a Socialist or an Islamic utopia but instead as a means of self-determination and affirming contemporary life itself.

Gender and Urban Aspirations: The Case of Highly Educated Uyghur Women in Shanghai

AbstractIn spite of the growing attention given to minority Uyghurs in China, there has been little focus on gender issues in relation to the Uyghur migration to inland cities since the 1980s. Based on fifteen months of ethnographic research from 2012 to 2013, this article focuses on the lifeworlds of highly educated Uyghur women and their aspirations in the megacity of Shanghai. A combination of local gender norms, patriarchal Islamic ideologies, and state policies that aim to promote the emancipation of women have influenced the current status, conditions, and gendered identities of Uyghur women. Added to these are the shifting demands of an environment marked by rapid socioeconomic change in urban China that sees Uyghur women on the move. Tracing the migration story of Uyghur women through a case study of Xumar, a woman who pursued university education and then worked in Shanghai, I demonstrate the dilemma of staying or returning with which they constantly wrestle as they attempt to balance the normative Uyghur cultural values and their experiences of urbanism and cosmopolitanism in Shanghai. These factors all inform their understandings of what it means to be a Uyghur woman. Looking at the shifting ideas of gender among highly educated Uyghur women, this research contributes to understanding changes of Uyghur identity in relation to migration on the one hand, and reflects the ambivalence and complexity of Uyghur migration experiences on the other. Personal narratives of migrant Uyghur women shed light on the subtleties of the gender roles, arguments for and against returning home, and their later resignation to (arranged) marriages. The migration experiences gained by the women offer them a better understanding of themselves and of the demands and expectations of their cultural heritage. The urban aspirations of highly educated Uyghur women, this article argues, are produced by structural, cultural, and social factors that rely on dominant discourses of migration, minority, gender, age, class, and place.

Language, education and Uyghur identity in urban Xinjiang

Language, education and Uyghur identity in urban Xinjiang

Uyghur transnational identity on Facebook: on the development of a young diaspora

How are online and social media being used in transnational spaces? This article presents empirical findings from a study of the Facebook usage among the Uyghur diaspora. We demonstrate how online identities are negotiated and developed through social media use, and in turn how the expression of identity online is contributing to Uyghur diasporic identity. Drawing upon a content analysis of Facebook sites, we attend to the construction of Uyghur ethnic identity within Facebook group sites and the ways Uyghur political identity is currently being developed online, providing insight into how Facebook is serving as a space for global, daily online interactions. The examination of discussions on Facebook sites indicates that online Uyghur identity has a youthful, emergent character, actively being explored and produced through social media use.