新书：Land of Strangers：The Civilizing Project in Qing Central Asia

作者：Eric Schluessel

出版社：Columbia University Press

出版时间: October 2020

ISBN: 9780231197557

304 pages

LIST PRICE: $35.00£27.00

本书简介

At the close of the nineteenth century, near the end of the Qing empire, Confucian revivalists from central China gained control of the Muslim-majority region of Xinjiang, or East Turkestan. There they undertook a program to transform Turkic-speaking Muslims into Chinese-speaking Confucians, seeking to bind this population and their homeland to the Chinese cultural and political realm. Instead of assimilation, divisions between communities only deepened, resulting in a profound estrangement that continues to this day.

In Land of Strangers, Eric Schluessel explores this encounter between Chinese power and a Muslim society through the struggles of ordinary people in the oasis of Turpan. He follows the stories of families divided by war, women desperate to survive, children unsure where they belong, and many others to reveal the human consequences of a bloody conflict and the more insidious violence of reconstruction. Schluessel traces the emergence of new struggles around essential questions of identity, showing how religious and linguistic differences converged into ethnic labels. Reading across local archives and manuscript accounts in the Chinese and Chaghatay languages, he recasts the attempted transformation of Xinjiang as a distinctly Chinese form of colonialism. At a time when understanding the roots of the modern relationship between Uyghurs and China has taken on new urgency, Land of Strangers illuminates a crucial moment of social and cultural change in this dark period of Xinjiang’s past.

作者简介

許臨君(Eric T. SCHLUESSEL)，康涅狄格大学中文文学学士，伦敦亚非学院文学硕士（语言学）、印第安纳大学欧亚中部研究文学硕士，哈佛大学历史与东亚语言博士，现任乔治·华盛顿大学（George Washington University）历史系副教授，主要研究中国和中亚社会文化史、帝国主义和殖民主义、民族法律史、宗教史与边疆史。近期著有An Introduction to Chaghatay: A Graded Textbook for Reading Central Asian Sources. Ann Arbor: Maize Books, 2018.“Water Management and Local Politics in Turn-of-the-Century Xinjiang,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 62, no. 4 (December 2019), 595–621.“Hiding and Revealing Pious Endowments in Late-Qing Xinjiang,” The Muslim World 108, no. 4 (December 2018): 613–629.(as 許臨君) “从城隍到戍卒：定湘王在新疆 [From God-of-the-Wall to Garrison Soldier: The Dingxiang Wang Cult in Xinjiang],” 历史人类学学刊 Journal of History and Anthropology, special issue 重探「帝国」与「地方社会」 ：华南研究与新清史的对话 [Reexamining “Empire” and “Local Society”: A Dialogue Between Historical Anthropology and the New Qing History] (October 2017), 169–186.

目录

Acknowledgments
A Note on Conventions
Introduction
1. The Chinese Law: The Origins of the Civilizing Project
2. Xinjiang as Exception: The Transformation of the Civilizing Project
3. Frontier Mediation: The Rise of the Interpreters
4. Bad Women and Lost Children: The Sexual Economy of Confucian Colonialism
5. Recollecting Bones: The Muslim Uprisings as Historical Trauma
6. Historical Estrangement and the End of Empire
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index

REVIEWS

An expert collector, reader, and translator of difficult materials, Schluessel provides us with a window into frontier society in the late nineteenth century. Land of Strangers is an exceptionally well-researched work grounded in a stunning assortment of primary sources, replete with memorable close-up encounters with an engaging cast of characters.

Tobie Meyer-Fong, author of What Remains: Coming to Terms with Civil War in Nineteenth-Century China

Eric Schluessel combines prodigious linguistic skills with exhaustive archival research and conceptual sophistication to bring the Turpan oasis to life in all its human complexity. Land of Strangers is a fine-grained account of history from below, unlike anything we have on any part of Central Asia. A stellar achievement.

Adeeb Khalid, author of Making Uzbekistan: Nation, Empire, and Revolution in the Early USSR

Through this theoretically rich exploration of Qing philosophy and practice of colonial rule, we see how violence and forced intimacy shape enduring group identities in Xinjiang. Using his multilingual skills to draw on diaries, memorials, and documents from court cases, Schluessel uncovers the interactions of everyday life among colonizing Chinese, intermediaries, and colonized Uyghurs in late Qing Xinjiang.

Marianne Kamp, author of The New Woman in Uzbekistan: Islam, Modernity, and Unveiling Under Communism

In this fine monograph, Eric Schluessel describes the local articulation and hardening of boundaries between people in late Qing Xinjiang. Using Turkic, Manchu, and Chinese sources on Turpan, he introduces (among others) local elites, Hunanese Confucian statecraft ideologues, mediatory tongchi interpreters, and Chinese-speaking Muslim brokers. His narratives describe culture clashes, identity negotiation, gender ideologies, colonial discipline, and naming practices, persuasively and subtly connected to today’s troubled conditions.

Jonathan N. Lipman, author of Familiar Strangers: A History of Muslims in Northwest China

A valuable contribution to our understanding of the actions of the modern Chinese state to pacify Xinjiang through this same combination of force and cultural transformation first attempted by the Xiang Army one hundred and fifty years ago.

Asian Review of Books

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