China and Inner Asia

Organized Panel Session

(3) - Reading between the Lines and across the Border: A History of Maoist Xinjiang through Transnational Kazakh Literature

Traditional sources such as party ethnological documents and local gazetteers can silence or manipulate people’s voices; but literature, particularly historical fiction, is invaluable in unraveling the visceral experience and emic perspective of historical events as lived. This paper examines a number of works published by émigré Xinjiang Kazakh authors in Almaty, Kazakhstan, where the authors were not subject to Chinese censorship. They were therefore able to tackle the Chinese state’s “technologies of forgetting” and serve as an alternative source for examining Kazakhs' lived experience and subjectivities in the Mao era. The works were created instead within their own political context—Sino-Soviet relations and the subsequent nationalizing project of independent Kazakhstan.

Based on life stories and verifiable events in Xinjiang, historical novels such as Kabdesh Zhumadilov’s The Last Migration (Songghy kosh, 1981) and Qazhyghumar Shabdanuly's Crime (Qilmis, 2009) and Shelter (Pana, 2004) function both as an invaluable set of historical sources and as a key media for the intergenerational remembering of Maoist trauma for transnational Kazakhs. The authors’ experiences of persecution also add to the validity of their works as authentic depictions of the anti-rightist campaign, the Yi-Ta incident, and the Cultural Revolution. Triangulating between historical novels, oral history interviews, and ethnographic fieldwork in northern Xinjiang, this paper presents the interweaving of biography and fiction as a history-making practice among Kazakhs. Moreover, it examines how narratives of indigeneity regarding landscape and ancestor worldview reveal ethnic sentiments and desires that are usually made invisible in official documents.

Speaker(s)

• GS

  Guldana Salimjan

  University of British Columbia, Canada