Paper long abstract:

Between the 1930s and the 1960s, Uyghur intellectuals in China's Xinjiang region worked to codify an official culture for their nation. Under a succession of socialist and quasi-socialist regimes—the decade-long administration of warlord Sheng Shicai; a separatist state backed by the Soviet Union; and finally the People's Republic of China—Uyghur writers and intellectuals were tasked with turning preexisting folk culture into a national culture. While the ideology of socialist cultural production dictated that new national cultures would be drawn from the people, the transition from oral and manuscript culture to the printing press in fact meant that the power to define and distribute cultural products would be concentrated in the hands of a small cultural elite. This paper examines how this elite—drawn largely from the Ili region of northwestern Xinjiang—used its influence in Xinjiang's cultural bureaucracy to transform the local folk culture and folk heroes of Ili into a fundamental part of the Uyghur nation's new official culture. Particular attention will be paid to the way in which Ili writers and intellectuals reinterpreted their home region's poetry and legends along socialist lines, in the process successfully presenting their corner of Xinjiang as the proto-socialist vanguard of the entire province. Key sources will include school textbooks, poetry collections, and short stories, as well as documents and memoir literature illuminating the Ili group's rise to bureaucratic power.