Abstract:

New scholarship on East Turkestan/Xinjiang has increasingly decentered questions about ethnonational identity in favor of class analysis while also challenging the conception of Xinjiang as a coherent region by demonstrating its heterogeneous connections to other spaces. Our panel furthers that project through a series of multilingual, archive-driven, entangled histories-from-below from the late Qing (1636–1912). Where previous scholarship has demonstrated the premodern origins of ethnonational boundaries in networks of religious practice, the panel illuminates alternative spatialities generated through the movement and mobilization of people, goods, and ideas. Three of the papers emphasize economic change as a primary motivator for the reconfiguration of space and focus on laborers and merchants, both within and beyond the vast space of Xinjiang, while a fourth demonstrates the role of cultural identity in shaping politics over distances. We find that network-oriented analyses lead to interesting new questions about loyalty, identity, and economy.