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Lookup NU author(s): Dr Jo Smith Finley
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0).
In this paper, I explore how geo-political territory (Xinjiang, tr. ‘New Dominion’), regional identity and cultural ownership are transmitted, represented and contested through lyrical texts, musical styles and instrumentation in popular song, as well as through visual texts in pop music videos and new media (e.g. YouTube). I examine two singers popular among the region’s urban youth in the past decade: Arken ‘Guitar King’, the Uyghur singer who embodies a style of pop fusion known as ‘New Flamenco’, originally inspired by the Gypsy Kings; and Dao Lang, a Sichuanese (Han Chinese) immigrant to Ürümchi who paints himself as a Xin Xinjiangren - ‘new Xinjiangese’ - and draws on traditional Uyghur musical instruments to infuse his rock versions of Chinese revolutionary classics. I analyse how the production, transmission and consumption of oral, musical and visual texts is manipulated by artists and audience in order to represent contrastive regional identities: Xinjiang as an inalienable part of the New China vs. Xinjiang as a space open to and influenced by Central Asian, Middle Eastern and Western cultural flows. In doing so, I emphasise how the language of the coloniser is increasingly the vehicle through which urban Uyghur youth (since 2002 educated in Chinese-medium schools) transmit these alternative identities.
Author(s): Smith Finley J
Editor(s): Hayes, A.; Clarke, M.
Publication type: Book Chapter
Publication status: Published
Book Title: Inside Xinjiang: Space, Place and Power in China's Muslim Far Northwest
Year: 2016
Pages: 75-99
Print publication date: 14/12/2015
Acceptance date: 01/06/2014
Series Title: Routledge Contemporary China Series
Publisher: Routledge
Place Published: London, UK
URL: https://www.routledge.com/products/9781138780798
Library holdings: Search Newcastle University Library for this item
ISBN: 9781138780798
