Sent: Wednesday, October 14, 2009 9:32 AM
To: 'H-Net Network on Travel and Tourism History' [H-TRAVEL@H-NET.MSU.EDU]

University of Liverpool
School of Languages, Cultures and Area Studies

in association with the University of Kent
and the Liverpool Travel Seminar

WORKSHOP
Xinjiang and Travel Writing

Date: Friday 23 April 2010, 10am-4pm
Venue: Cypress Building, University of Liverpool, UK
Convenors: Charles Forsdick (Liverpool) and Alex Hughes (Kent)

In recent times, the region of Xinjiang, located in the westernmost reaches of
the People’s Republic of China, and known also as Eastern Turkistan, has been
subject to significant Western socio-political analysis. Exemplary in this
regard are the essays contained in S. Frederick Starr’s 2004 edited volume
Xinjiang: China’s Muslim Borderland. Born of a will to read Xinjiang’s
evolution through an interdisciplinary lens forged within the social sciences,
and generative of a body of work entitled the ‘Xinjiang project’, these essays,
alongside other contemporary socio-political and historical studies, conceive
of Xinjiang as a complex, contested zone, whose past, present, and future lie,
to cite Starr, at the junction of different civilisations and act as an arena
of cultural conjunction as well as stark intercultural tension.

The discursive nexus formed by Western research on Xinjiang, pursued inter alia
within geography, sociology, anthropology, ethnic and religious studies, and
economics, is complemented by a textual network of Western Xinjiang-centred
travel narratives. Produced before and across the twentieth century, and set
against the backdrop of Xinjiang’s shifting political fortunes, that network
speaks too of a pivotal Central Asian region that, since the Qing era, has been
a target of Han Chinese incursion and colonisation (ethnic, educational,
cultural, linguistic). It inscribes a historical and contemporary space of
intercultural connection, ethnic interaction, and interethnic conflict that has
long fascinated those foreign travellers who have crossed its bounds. Within
the myriad travel narratives that make it up, Xinjiang is mapped as a zone of
exile for Han Chinese; as a locus of friction between Han and Uighur peoples;
as a buffer protecting the PRC from penetration by foreigners; as a domain that
works against cultural relationality; and, concomitantly, as a multicultural,
multiethnic space open at least potentially to myriad intercultural
interactions.

Travel writers in the modern West have been seduced by Xinjiang’s status as a
culturally hybrid arena, where the possibility of cross-cultural dialogue and
encounter is both dazzling and endlessly subject to restraint. Primary
narrative models in which Xinjiang’s seductions – and challenges – are charted
are those provided in the 1930s by Peter Fleming and Ella Maillart: however,
the tales of a shared journey in China’s Far West furnished by these authors
are but individual facets of a much broader, highly intertextual body of
Xinjiang-based travel writing. And that body of travellers’discourse is a key
space in which Western socio-political renderings of Xinjiang, on the increase
at the turn of the twentieth century, are afforded a cultural and narrative
context for rearticulation, reiteration, and interrogation.

The proposed workshop is timely, given the intense focus on Xinjiang’s
political, cultural, and ethnic canvas that the inception of the twenty-first
century has witnessed. Methodologically, it will constitute a crucible for a
regionally focussed intervention in the related fields of travel writing
studies and intercultural and postcolonial studies. Participants will explore
the key themes and topics of modern and contemporary Xinjiang-based travel
writings produced in a range of Western contexts, from a range of critical
viewpoints. Reading a selection of such travel writings with and against the
mappings of Xinjiang formulated within contemporary investigations such as
those engendered by the ‘Xinjiang project’ will be a primary facet of the
workshop.

Please send proposals of twenty-minute papers (abstracts max. 500 words) and a
brief CV to Charles Forsdick (craf@liv.ac.uk) by 31 December 2009.

Humanities & Social
Sciences Online

Copyright © 1995-2006 - Contact Us
RSS | Validate: XHTML | CSS