Imagining the Uyghur Literary Tradition

This collection of books and journals forms the core of material for my research into the recent definition of the canon of Uyghur literature. Recent Uyghur scholarship and publications in China have begun to construct a unified literary history for the Uyghur ethnic group out of the long and diverse tradition of Turkic literature. The motivations and methods of this work offer insight into how literary works become identity symbols for social groups.

Since 1980 in China, in the context of political liberalization following the excesses of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, there has been an unprecedented growth in the study and publication of the literature of the Uyghurs of Xinjiang (also known as Eastern or Chinese Turkestan). The ethnic group known as Turki or Eastern Turki before the 1920s and as Uyghur (also Uighur or Uygur) since then, has never before under Chinese rule been given the opportunity to publish and appreciate a literature it could identify as reflecting its national identity. Since 1980, literature that had previously only circulated in manuscript form has been collected, edited and published on a large scale, and strong nationalist sentiments have grown around this material, which has been embraced as a coherent tradition embodying Uyghur culture, values and identity.

The works in my collection represent the results of research by most of the important scholars of Uyghur literature now working in China, as well as several from the Soviet Union. The breadth of the Uyghur literary tradition, its rapid wholesale conversion into print, and the complex ideological concerns governing which works and interpretations have become widely accepted, make it distinctive among world literary traditions. The materials that I have collected reveal a process of creating a tradition from disparate sources, in which writings that have been widely dispersed in time, space, and cultural context, are being brought together and presented as a coherent whole that stands for and helps shape national cultural identity.

In Chapters 2-6 of my dissertation, I discuss many of these works and the ways they have been used by Uyghurs thinking about their cultural identity.

The following list of works contains primary materials in Turkic, and background materials in Chinese, Russian, and English.