Ethnic ChinaLit

A government-sponsored project to publish translations of pre-1949 Xinjiang-related texts during 2012-2020 has been launched with the February 27^th announcement (首批) that the first sixty volumes will soon be available in print (albeit in small numbers and high-end editions) and in digital format.

Dubbed the “Xinjiang Archives” (新疆文库), it will consist of originals and translations in Chinese, Uyghur, Kazakh, Mongol, Kyrgyz and Xibe. Targeted domains include works of philosophy, sociology, history and geography, literature and technology.

As usual with wordy PR announcements from China’s state-run organs, it’s not clear just how much of this is genuinely “new” or easily accessible to the public.

The Xinjiang Archive web site (www.xjwenku.com) lists data about most of the 88 original documents that will appear in the new collection (出版书目), but most carry rather old publication dates. It may be that this new collection features updated, edited versions of originals that had gone out of print, so making them available in digital format would be much appreciated by scholars worldwide. Read the rest of this entry »

. . . the three great epics—the Tibetan “King Gesar,” the Mongol’s “Life of Jangger,” and “Manas” of the Kyrgyz—have all become the object of global studies in the genre. But there is not even a basic introduction to these three epics in our histories of Chinese literature. 

Li Xiaofeng in his new piece on The Plight of Native Language Literature among Ethnic Minorities in China (“不在场的在场”：中国少数母语文学的处境，李晓峰著)

In 2013, it’s not easy to locate what I’d consider a good overview of Uyghur writing on the Chinese Internet.

Home to perhaps 10 million Uyghurs, the 1.6m sq km Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region accounts for almost one-sixth of China’s territory and borders Russia, Mongolia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India.  The Chinese government is hyper-sensitive about most anything “Uyghur,” particularly their religion (Islam), and the language, which has Turkic roots unrelated to Han Chinese.

Even so, I’ve found two articles in Chinese which are fairly informative, if dated. One by 祖姆拉提 · 克尤木 that focuses strictly on Uyghur literature in Xinjiang during 1949-2005 (新疆维吾尔文学),  and another by 阿扎提·蘇勒坦 that looks at a broader topic, ethnic literature in Xinjiang (新疆民族文学五十年) since the founding of the autonomous region in 1955.

Here are some factoids cited from the latter essay—all based on the 1955-2005 period—that offer a glimpse of literary “output” of the various non-Han peoples in Xinjiang:

See below for my table listing a selection of Uyghur authors and their works. Read the rest of this entry »

Just a few weeks after 40 Uyghur masters of the rhymed epic tales known as dastan gathered in Hami to stage and talk about their threatened art form (Dastan Training Session), some 60-plus performers of traditional Kyrgyz songs have gathered for a similar get-together in Xinjiang’s Akto County (阿克陶县) bordering on Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan.

According to the article (约隆歌) re-published on the China Ethnic Literature Network, there are a large variety of these songs known as 约隆歌 (Yuēlóng gē in Chinese, and ïr in Kyrgyz, I think), including those reserved just for a man or a woman, satirical ones, or to welcome a guest. Similar renditions can also be found among other nomadic peoples of Central Asia such as the Kazakh, Altai, Tuvan and Khakas.

This traditional Kyrgyz musical form was designated an Intangible Cultural Heritage by China in 2008, and more than 800 songs have reportedly been collected in the Pamir region to date.