Mystifying China's Southwest Ethnic Borderlands: Harmonious Heterotopia

The Confucian notion of “Harmony with difference” (he er bu tong) has great political and cultural resonance in contemporary China, which propagates the quest for a pluralist harmony between cultural and ethnic components of society. In an attempt to examine a range of responses to this state-envisioned ideal of accommodating ethnic differences, this book analyzes the literary and cultural discourses that surround three minority regions in Southwest China — Dali, which was once the location of the ancient Nanzhao and Dali Kingdoms; the homeland of the matrilineal Mosuo known as the Country of Women; and the Tibetan areas associated with utopian Shangri-La. This book borrows Foucault’s concept of “heterotopia” to address the contradictory and often simultaneously existing views of the minority region as rich treasure house of tradition and as intractable barrier to modern development which combine to give rise to productive tensions in scholastic and artistic creations. Through reconstituting and performing the myths and legends of or about minority culture, the representations of the three places turn into heterotopias which are posed between the mythical and the real in different ways. Functioning as a self-reflective mirror, they simultaneously offer images of the actual habitats of the ethnic other which have been subject to socialist projects of modernity, and become a viable means by which to exert material effects on the real landscape. Products of a fascination with alternative social spaces, the three mystified lands all contain conceptualizations of harmony — be it spiritual, gender-based or ecological — that are conceivably absent in the imperfect actuality of the Chinese heartland. In conclusion, these aesthetically constructed spaces of the other negotiate and enrich the discourse of “Harmony with difference,” reacting to ethnic politics in PRC history and creating an audience that grows attentive to the traditions of minorities.

Table of Contents:
Part I: When the Past is Present: Creating a Path to the Ancient Kingdom of Nanzhao Chapter 1: Recapturing the Past: Configuring a Narrative Identity from Folklore Chapter 2: Reimagining the Past: Creating New Narratives of Baijie Chapter 3: Displacing the Past: Baijie’s Modern Transformation Part II: Leaving “the Country of Women”: A Remote Eden Chapter 4: From “Representational Violence” to the Construction of a Harmonious Mosuo Land Chapter 5: Unrequited Love for the Remote Country of Women Chapter 6: The Controversial Writing Career of a Mosuo Woman Part III: In Search of Faith: The Indigenization of the Shangri-La and Shambhala Myths Chapter 7: The Localization of Shangri-La Chapter 8: Lost on the Way to Shambhala: “Tibet, a Soul Knotted on a Leather Thong” Chapter 9: Fully-Fledged Shambhala: The Tibet Code

About the Author :
Yuqing Yang teaches at Minzu University of China.

Review :
As a whole, Mystifying China’s Southwest Borderlands offers rich insights into how certain minority regions and cultures have been imagined in Chinese literature. Eloquently rendered, this new study deepens insight into minority representation in China by expanding the symbolic analysis of space. Yuqing Yang delves into the ambivalences and contradictions, the passions and nostalgias, that mark China’s fraught encounter with modernity and its imaginary of a space apart where the past is preserved—and potentially oppositional. Fusing Foucault’s notion of heterotopia with the dynamics of otherness, Yang develops a theory of mirroring, however asymmetrical, to illuminate the mythologization of minority places. Through close and politically canny literary interpretation, we journey through the fantasized terrains of Dali, Shangri-La, and Mosuoland where the ethnic other becomes an indispensable outside that is not absolute but is rather complexly entwined with a Chinese self, constituted through difference.