illuminists: popular song & the waking of the uyghur nation 173

Chapter Four

Illuminists: Popular song and the waking of the Uyghur nation

Anthropologist Stevan Harrell once stated: ‘The answer to whether the subaltern can speak is that the subaltern can speak on the sufferance of the civilizer’ (1994: 34). According to this thesis, peripheral peoples have a voice only when granted one by the centre, and the centre grants that voice only on condition that peripheral peoples speak in its favour. Yet in some contexts it has been possible to promote an alternative politics through the vehicle of elite or popular cultural forms. In 1930s Algeria, for example, Islamic reformers of the Algerian Association of Ulama (AAU)1 found fertile ground in popular culture—specifically, poems, especially those recited orally—as they sought to mobilise Islam for nationalist purposes: ‘The major themes found in these works are a celebration of the past glories of Islam; the portrayal of the enemy as a powerful demon, an unbeliever (Christian France) who violates the law of Islam; the belief that the current humiliation in Islam at the hands of the unbeliever will be avenged’ (Es- posito 1984: 82-83). Such a strategy is not without precedent in . As Bellér-Hann points out, legends about folk heroes, Muslim saints, historical events, and so on, have long been communicated in oral form via a tech- nique of memorising which formed the core of formal and informal learn- ing: ‘Orally transmitted tales and songs were potentially the property of all, they could be repeated at home and handed down to the next generation’ (2000: 32-33, 39). Uyghur intellectual elites of the 1920s employed a ‘poetry of resistance’ and oral recitation as a way to disseminate political ideas and encourage Uyghur nationhood against a backdrop of heavy taxation by Chinese warlord governors, Zengxin and Shuren (Rudelson, 1997: 146-53). Moreover, conditions of accelerated modernisation since the ear- ly eighties have paradoxically favoured the continuation of oral transmis- sion rather than its disappearance. Literate regard the official

1 The AAU, founded in 1931 and formally organized on May 5th, 1935, was a body of Muslim religious scholars who, under French colonial rule, advocated the restoration of an Algerian nation rooted in Islamic and Arabic traditions. The Association was heavily influ- enced by the views of Muslim jurist and reformer Muḥammad ʿAbduh (1849–1905). 174 chapter four media as unreliable owing to high levels of state censorship, and find oral- ly circulated information far more credible than written sources. Indeed, oral transmission has been the only way to spread news concerning violent incidents provoked by the state family planning policy, such as attacks on hospital staff or local officials for the part they played in the performance of forced abortions on Uyghur women (Bellér-Hann 2000: 73, 84). From the late 1980s through the 1990s, orally transmitted popular culture played an important role in the mobilisation of Uyghur national identity in the con- text of dramatic political change at domestic and international levels. Po- litical dissidence in Xinjiang, unable to find voice in the form of official associations, found alternative expression in the historical novel, folk song, humour, stories and oral histories (cf. Harris 2002, Smith 2007, Dautcher 2009 and Bovingdon 2010). It was in this context that the late Uyghur nov- elist, poet, and historian, Abdurehim Ötkür, became a symbol of Uyghur aspirations to national independence. In September 1996, an estimated ten thousand Uyghurs attended Ötkür’s funeral in Ürümchi’s Döngköwrük district; they carried his casket high above their heads, and stopped traffic for four hours. The works of certain folk singers from this period similarly struck an emotional resonance with the Uyghur populace, and in some cases transcended underlying social divides of oasis origin, occupation, generation, political orientation, level of education and degree of religios- ity. By focusing on the inter-ethnic boundary between the Uyghurs and a monolithic Han ‘Other’, these singers blurred to a significant degree intra- ethnic divides within the Uyghur group itself. At the same time, the hier- archy of older/younger sibling inherent in state rhetoric surrounding Han-minority relations (Harrell 1994; Bovingdon 2002) was challenged and re-cast as a relationship of coloniser to colonised. This chapter deals with the third—and arguably most effective—means of symbolic resistance operating during the mid-1990s: the dissemination of ethno-nationalist ideologies via Uyghur popular song. It opens with two examples of the state’s preferred type of minority artist—whom I term the ‘musician-com- prador’—before going on to discuss the advent of ‘new folk’ and the pos- sibilities for mass mediation of ideas furnished by the pop music cassette. Through an interpretation of key songs chosen from among the repertoires of two rival ‘Voices of the Uyghurs’, Ömärjan Alim and Abdurehim Heyit, I show how lyrical metaphor served to: a. re-cast the fraternal relationship (as represented by the state) between and Uyghurs as one of coloniser and colonised;