Uyghur Identity and Culture

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 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).

• 1. Introduction: Maintaining Cultural Identity in a Changing Political Landscape Part I: Cultural Erosion and Identity 2. Promoting, Then Censoring Uyghurness in PRC Uyghur Language Cookbooks, 1984-2021 3. Uyghur-Chinese Mandarin Code-Switching and Government Censorship in an Online Show: Anar Pishti 4. Lost in Different Scripts Part II: Cultural Resilience and Identity 5. A Transnational Perspective on Uyghur Cultural Maintenance and Preservation 6. Role of Teaching Uyghur Language in Shaping Cultural Identity of Children of Uyghur Diaspora 7. “It is So Painful Not to Have a Country”: Challenges and Dilemmas of Uyghur immigrants in Canada 8. Freire’s Critical Literacy as a Tool for Public Pedagogy in Uyghur Diaspora Cyberspace: A Case Study of Two Uyghur YouTubers Part III: Politics and Identity 9. Survivor Guilt among Uyghurs in the Diaspora 10. Family or Freedom: The changing landscape of Uyghur diaspora activism 11. Türkiye’s Official and Public Response to the Uyghur Issue 12. Conclusion: Ensuring the Resilience and Vitality of Uyghur Lifeways and Language in Diaspora

“Since 2014, PRC state violence conducted in the name of the ‘People’s War on Terror’ has caused accelerated numbers of Uyghurs to hemorrhage into every corner of the globe. This volume, edited by two established experts on Uyghur education, religion, culture and folklore, first outlines coercive practices of cultural erasure in the Uyghur homeland. It then proceeds to explore how Uyghurs in diaspora attempt in that context to maintain, preserve (but also adapt) their language and culture, across generations, in the face of ongoing anxiety, trauma and depression. Many contributors are themselves members of the Uyghur diaspora. In sharing their extensive fieldwork (in some cases, pseudonymously), they emerge sensitively as scholars, advocates and, above all, human beings.”- Joanne Smith Finley, Reader in Chinese Studies, Newcastle University, UK