Beyond minority : ethnicity, modernity, and the invention of the Qiang identity in China
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- This dissertation examines how ethnic minority groups and minority cultures figure into the Chinese experience of modernity. It expands the scholarly understanding of the ethnic diversity of Chinese literature and culture. The dissertation systematically studies the "invention" of the identity of one of China's longest-standing ethnic entities, the Qiang. Ethnic minorities like the Qiang are not only integral to modern China's national imagination, but they also embody the dilemmas of reform-era China's (1980s-present) cultural anxieties. Using a dialogical approach, the dissertation probes how ethnic minorities are imagined into modern China's national narratives and how minorities in turn experience and critique modernity. The dissertation adopts an interdisciplinary methodology and traces the evolution of the Qiang identity in various historiographical, literary, and visual forms. It investigates how the concept of the "Qiang" as a pre-modern signifier of ethnic and racial otherness has been turned into symbols of cultural endurance and inter-ethnic solidarity in modern China. The dissertation also analyzes how minority intellectuals mobilize national cultural memories to narrate themselves into the core of Chinese cultural history, upsetting the entrenched hierarchy between a cultural "center" and its "peripheries." Furthermore, I examine how national and popular cinema portrays the Qiang native village and unveil how ethnic Qiang and Yi writers from southwest China engage in a unique "ethnographic poetics" to document their cultures, express minority spiritual world-views, and combat the secularizing tendencies of a fast developing China. This dissertation contributes to the growing scholarship on indigenous cultures on an international level by joining the debate on how the global neoliberal economy has both undermined minority groups' traditional lifestyles and provided them with a fertile ground to re-make their past.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic resource; remote; computer; online resource |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Place | California |
| Place | [Stanford, California] |
| Publisher | [Stanford University] |
| Copyright date | 2018; ©2018 |
| Publication date | 2018; 2018 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Zhang, Yanshuo |
|---|---|
| Degree supervisor | Wang, Ban, 1957- |
| Thesis advisor | Wang, Ban, 1957- |
| Thesis advisor | Egan, Ronald, 1948- |
| Thesis advisor | Kohrman, Matthew, 1964- |
| Thesis advisor | Mullaney, Thomas S. (Thomas Shawn) |
| Thesis advisor | Palumbo-Liu, David |
| Degree committee member | Egan, Ronald, 1948- |
| Degree committee member | Kohrman, Matthew, 1964- |
| Degree committee member | Mullaney, Thomas S. (Thomas Shawn) |
| Degree committee member | Palumbo-Liu, David |
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures. |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Yanshuo Zhang. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures. |
| Thesis | Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2018. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2018 by Yanshuo Zhang
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
Also listed in
Loading usage metrics...