Uyghur Identity and Culture: A Global Diaspora in a Time of Crisis

About the Event

Join the Sigur Center for Asian Studies for a talk with the editors of the new volume Uyghur Identity and Culture.Uyghur Identity and Culture brings together the work of scholars, activists, and native Uyghurs to explore the history and growing challenges that the Uyghur diaspora face across the globe in response to shifting government policies forbidding many forms of cultural expression in their homeland.

The collection examines how and why the Uyghur diaspora, dispersed from their homeland to communities across Australia, Central Asia, Europe, Japan, Türkiye, and North America, now has the responsibility to preserve their language and cultural traditions so that these can be shared with future generations. The book critically investigates the government censorship of Uyghur literatures and Western media coverage of the Uyghurs, while centralizing real reflections of those who grew up in the Uyghur homeland. It considers the geographical and psychological pressures that the Uyghur diaspora endure and highlights the resilience and creativity of their relentless battle against cultural erosion.

Uyghur Identity and Culture is a key contribution to diaspora literature and calls to attention the urgent need for global action on the ongoing human rights violations against the Uyghur people. It is essential reading for those interested in the history and struggles of the Uyghur diaspora as well as anyone studying sociology, race, migration, culture, and human rights studies.

About the Speakers

Rebecca Clothey

Rebecca Clothey is Professor and Head of Drexel University’s Department of Global Studies and Modern Languages. Her current research on maintenance and transmission of Uyghur culture spans several countries, including China, the United States, and Türkiye. She was a visiting scholar at Boğaziçi University in Istanbul in 2018-2019 and at Xinjiang Normal University in 2014. Dr. Clothey has been awarded two Fulbright Fellowships for her research, one to China and one to Uzbekistan, a Spencer Fellowship to study community-based schools in Argentina, and an NEH-ARIT Fellowship to study cultural transmission among the Uyghur diaspora in Türkiye.

Dilmurat Mahmut

Dilmurat Mahmut obtained a Ph.D. in Educational Studies from McGill University. He is a FRQSC postdoctoral fellow at Concordia University and a course lecturer at McGill University, Canada. His research interests include Muslim identity, education, violent extremism, and immigrant/refugee integration in the West. His publications include “Conflicting Perceptions of Education in Canada: The Perspectives of Well-educated Muslim Uyghur Immigrants” in Diaspora, Indigenous and Minority Education, 2021; “Lost in Translation: Exploring Uyghur Identity in Canada,” in Taboo: The Journal of Culture and Education, 2021 (with Waite); Revisiting Muslim Identity and Islamophobia, 2018 (book chapter).

About the Moderator

Eric Scheluessel

is a social historian of China and Central Asia, and his work focuses on Xinjiang (East Turkestan) in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He is the Director of the Sigur Center for Asian Studies, Co-Director of the East Asia National Resource Center, and an Associate Professor of History and International Affairs. , his first monograph, uses local archival and manuscript sources in Chinese and Chaghatay Turkic to explore the ramifications of a project undertaken in the last decades of the Qing empire to transform Xinjiang’s Turkic-speaking Muslims into Chinese-speaking Confucians. Schluessel previously taught at the University of Montana in Missoula and spent the 2018–2019 academic year as a Mellon Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ. Schluessel has also completed a translation and critical edition of of Mullah Mūsa Sayrāmī, which is an important Chaghatay-language chronicle of nineteenth-century Xinjiang.

Host or Publisher Sigur Center for Asian Studies at GW