Writing Tibet as Han Chinese sojourners: the discourses, practices and politics of place in an era of rapid development (original) (raw)
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As rampant modernization profoundly reshapes the economy, culture and ideologies of post-reform China, Han Chinese have encountered directly the malaises of modernity, and are gradually losing faith in modernity's promises of reason and progress. Numerous small towns and cities, consequently, have become anchors of alternative identities and lifestyles. This article examines the group of 'drifters in Lhasa' , namely Han Chinese who have migrated to and settled in Lhasa, Tibet, in pursuit of slow-paced lifestyles, communal belonging and assumedly more authentic social relations. Drawing literature on the critiques of modernity and modern subject's invocation of othered places and peoples as a means of self-criticism, this article argues that the constructed Tibetanness offers the drifters critical cultural resources to counteract ordering endeavours of Chinese modernity. At the same time, however, the modern subject in search of otherness tends to reproduce the modern modality of cognition which results in the objectivation of the other. The article investigates the effects of objectivation from two perspectives, namely the rendering-silent of the others' voices and interests; and re-inscription of boundaries of difference between the self and the other, against broader contexts of socio-economic transformations in Tibet.
Channeling Xining: Tibetan Place-Making in Western China during the Era of Commodity Housing
Through an analysis of Tibetan place-making in China's Xining City, I argue that a focus on channeling in place-making provides a way to move beyond typical accounts of resistance and domination in urban spaces. In China's frontier cities, an ethno-territorial institutional framework has resulted in the curtailment of how and where Tibetans and other ethnic minority groups may construct places. Furthermore, a nationwide urbanization project centered around the privatization of commodity housing and resulting in the hanification of the urban environment is producing a hegemonic urbanism that appears to be reducing urban difference. Yet Tibetans in Xining are channeling their place-making efforts to not simply fit in with or fight against urbanization but to assert their own meanings and rhythms and satisfy their own place-making desires. In doing so, they are learning how to navigate urban regulations and sensibilities while creating a rhizomatic network of urban places. The result is a piecemeal approach that has allowed a minority ethnic identity to thrive in the city through the creation of a diffuse but connected urbanism. Channeling highlights the careful path that marginal place-makers must tread as they find their way through territorial regulations and commercialism in the city. This research is based on seventeen months of ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with forty-five Xining urbanites.
Literary representations of the Other, regardless of place or time of origin, adopt similar strategies emphasizing the difference between the Other and Self, and are recognized as symbolic expressions of supposed superiority of Self over the Other, thus serving to legitimize any actual attempts to civilize or rule the Other. Such strategies that have often been applied by the West to describe the uneven East-West relations in the colonial literary discourse can be found as well in contemporary Chinese literary representations of “minority nationalities”. Representations of landscape belong to the most important symbols that are used in the process of “othering” of the non-Self, and are especially relevant for Chinese representations of Tibet. The article examines ways of representation of Tibetan landscape in Chinese and Tibetan literatures about Tibet, written in the 1980s by both Han Chinese and Tibetan authors. Han Chinese writers have used Tibetan landscape for a symbolic expression of the imaginary distance between themselves and Tibetans, while Tibetan authors stress those natural aspects that can help to the identification with the environment. The analysis reveals the symbolic function of landscape in relation to the newly (re)constructed Tibetan identity on the background of the multiethnic People’s Republic of China at the end of the twentieth century.
Voiceless Tibet? Past and Present in Tibetan Sinophone Writing by Tsering Norbu
Voiced and Voiceless in Asia, 2023
As a culturally and linguistically hybrid product emerging from specific historical and political conditions, Sinophone Tibetan literature has been often overlooked in Western academic and literary circles. Still, as argued in this article, it is a plausible voice coming from within Tibet, shedding more light on the present lived reality of the region and its inhabitants and forming a multilayered minor discourse of self-representation vis-á-vis the major Han Chinese discourse regarding not only Tibetan history and culture, but, more generally, literary creation. By analyzing the various representations of present-day Tibet in short stories by Tsering Norbu, this paper provides insights into the formation of collective historical memory and transformation of Tibetan society following the economic development of the region after the year 2000. While responding to the official call for a realistic representation of the lives of ordinary people, the author has come up with effective counterhegemonic narrative strategies of resistance to the dominant forces of ideology and brutal commercialization by including elements of religion, suppressed historical memory, and social problems in contemporary Tibetan society.
Moon over the Eastern Hill: Constructing the Han Chinese Imagination of Modern Tibet
The sixth Dalai Lama, Tsangyang Gyatso, has become extremely popular among Han Chinese recently. Behind this enthusiasm is the fantasy of an idyllic and spiritual Tibet, which has replaced the previous " hell " image. This article offers a contextualized account of the process of social construction of these contrasting images. It is argued that the Tibet fantasy has grown out of three sets of structural conditions: the Tsangyang Gyatso story, the authoritarian regime's nation-building mission, and the commercialized mass media. This Han Chinese discourse, both oppressive and liberating, has turned Tibet into a secular fantasy represented by the sixth Dalai Lama.
Interpreting the Tibetan Diaspora: Cultural Preservation and the Pragmatics of Identity
CEU Political Science Journal, 2009
Nearly all accounts of Tibetans in exile acknowledge the remarkable extent to which they have been able to maintain their culture against all odds. They were premised on the idea that exile and identity was only worth studying insofar as it contained traces of "how things were in the past", and proof of how well that past has been preserved. The result of this approach to refugee studies has been the tendency to neglect the variety of strategies displayed by Tibetans with regard to "place-making". Without making any definitive claims about the prevalence of a distinctly "Darjeeling Tibetan exile culture", this ethnographic study of Tibetan refugees in Darjeeling town, India shows how the experience of movement to and from a "place"-Darjeeling town reconstitutes the idea that Tibetan refugees have of their relation to a specific "place" in the diaspora; of how this sense of "place" in the diaspora gives meaning and purpose to refugee lives.
'Tibetans in Dharamshala' or 'Dharamshala in Tibetans': Tibetan place-making and belonging in exile
Asian Ethnicity, 2024
This article explores place-identity relationship by employing the concept of place-making in a prolonged exile context. It undertakes a study of the association of exiled Tibetan community with Dharamshala, the de-facto Tibetan capital-in-exile. I conceptualize this association through Tibetan place-making in two mutually inclusive processes. The first is the creation and recreation of an 'essentially Tibetan space' through visual and demographic landscape of the town. The second process constitutes the daily acts/ practices that facilitate place-making. Consequently, I demonstrate the manner in which Tibetan place-making practices inculcate a sense of belonging with the place of residence thus depicting the association of place and identity among refugees. The article postulates the agency of Tibetan community in enabling visibility of Dharamshala as a marker of Tibetan exilic identity despite their marginal status as de facto refugees in India.
"On the margins of Tibet: cultural survival on the Sino-Tibetan frontier"
Asian ethnology, 2010
Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006. ix + 276 pages, 18 illustrations, glossary, index. Paperback, US$24.95; iSbn 978-0-29598481-0. KolaS and Thowsen have written a useful work that contributes to the debates on contemporary Tibetan culture and development in China. In the often-polarized environment of such debates, this book offers an alternative data set of information, all the more unique because the authors had official research access, under the auspices of the Research Project on Tibetan Culture, to each of the twenty-five Tibetan counties under study (vii, 16). By attempting to draw out the voices of those intellectuals and elites who "are debating Tibetan culture" (10) while simultaneously referring to relevant Chinese government policies that so influence the lives of those concerned, this work ultimately seeks to understand the viability of Tibetan cultural survival.