September 12 (W), September 14 (F), September 17 (M), September 19 (W), September 21 (F)

Read: Chio, "'Take a Picture with Us' - The Politics of Appearance," chapter 4, A Landscape of Travel: The Work of Tourism in Rural Ethnic China (Moodle article)
Schein, "Gender and Internal Orientalism in China" (Moodle article)
Strassler, "Cosmopolitan Visions: Ethnic Chinese and the Photographic Imagining of Indonesia in the Late Colonial and Early Postcolonial Periods" (Moodle article)
MacLean, "The Rohingya Crisis and the Practices of Erasure" (Moodle article)
Thum, "The Uyghurs in Modern China" (online article)
Thum, "China's Mass Internment Camps Have No Clear End in Sight" (online article)

1. What is the economy of appearances for tourism in Upper Jidao and Ping'an (Chio)? What work is required to maintain it? How is it connected to modernization?

2. Why does one woman Chio interviewed feel that it is important for photographs of terraced rice fields to include people?

3. How are gender and class connected to tourism in China?

4. What does Schein mean by internal Orientalism? How is it different from Said's concept of Orientalism? How does Chio use this idea as well?

5. Why, according to Schein, are representations of the Miao highly gendered?

6. Schein writes, "Miao were not mute objects of representation, but rather active subjects engaged in the molding of their own self-representation" (86). What does she mean? How does her account compare to Chio's?

7. In what ways, according to Strassler, did ethnic Chinese Indonesian photographers help to construct Indonesia as a nation?

8. How does MacLean use the concepts of lawfare and spaciocide to analyze the erasure of Rohingya claims to citizenship and home in Burma/Myanmar? Do you see parallels between Rohingya and Gorkha in terms of claims to land and belonging?

9. What are the main themes in the history of the emergence of the identity category, "Uyghur"? What political, cultural, and social factors have shaped it?

10. Drawing from all of the articles, what processes fuel the production of images of ethnic others within national boundaries, and what role do these images play in the production of national identity? Does it matter whether the othering is directed toward economic or political ends?

 

Topic for RESPONSE PAPER #2 (2-3 pages, double-spaced, due on September 21 by email before class to Professor Leshkowich.) Please remember to submit your paper as a Microsoft Word document named lastname2.docx.

Orientalism and Othering in China, Indonesia, and Burma/Myanmar

Option 1: The articles we're reading for this unit explore ethnic relations as connected to processes of othering that resemble the stereotypical characterizations associated with European Orientalism. For this paper, consider the effects of internal or self-Orientalizing on majority-minority relations for one of the articles you have read. What are the concrete and symbolic political, economic, social, or cultural effects of Orientalism as it relates to assertions of nationalism and national identity? Who is included and excluded, and how did these processes of categorization come to be seen as normal, natural, or desirable in the specific context discussed in the article? Be sure to use your example to consider the strengths, weaknesses, and significance of the author's perspective.

Option 2: Find a newspaper or reliable electronic media account from the past two years that discusses issues of ethnicity in China, Indonesia, or Burma/Myanmar. How are ethnic differences described? What outcomes, both positive and negative, are said to be associated with issues of ethnicity and nationalism? How does the article compare to the account of ethnicity in that country provided by this unit's reading? (Be sure that your discussion allows you to assess the strengths, weaknesses, or significance of the argument presented in the article assigned for class.)