Imaging Peripheral Others: Medium, Ethnographic Representation, and Empire

Session Submission Type: Organized Panel Proposal Application

Abstract

This panel examines representations of non-Han peoples on the periphery of the Chinese Empire in the context of imperial and cross-cultural encounters. Scholars on the panel share several interests. First, concerned with the intersection between ethnographic representation and empire-building, the four papers on this panel seek to understand how ethnographic representation, verbal or visual, is used by different dominating groups as a tool of historiography, knowledge production, imperial conquest and control, or trade expansion. Second, all four scholars are concerned with the question of medium. Indeed, by bringing together four papers that engage a variety of mediums from a wide scope of period from the Tang to the Republican era, this panel highlights the evolution of mediums of ethnographic representation. Focusing on depictions of southwestern cultures in medieval poetry, Patterson considers how requirements of genre and medium shape Chinese poets’ portrayals of their cultural others. Guo’s paper examines both verbal and visual materials, with focus on how word (news reports) affects the meaning of image (photographs). Both Wang and Matsumoto focus on photography. While Wang examines a Chinese photographer’s role in the production of ethnographic knowledge in Republican China, Matsumoto concentrates on the collective effort of Japanese imperialists in photographing Mongolians and Hui Muslims during the Sino-Japanese war. Geographically, the four papers cover different portions of China’s “peripheral” regions, from the north, the west, to the southwest. Whereas Patterson and Wang concentrate on Chinese portrayals of marginalized cultures, Guo and Matsumoto call attention to the British and the Japanese, who, as China’s rivals, were also active participants in the production of ethnographic knowledge about ethnic groups on the periphery of China.

Area of Study

• China and Inner Asia

Session Organizer

• Jie Guo, University of South Carolina

Chair

• Masumi Matsumoto, Muroran Institute of Technology

Individual Presentations

• Images of Southwestern Cultures in Medieval Chinese Poetry - Gregory Patterson, University of South Carolina

• Uses of Early British Photographs of Indigenous Peoples in the Yunnan-Burma Borderland - Jie Guo, University of South Carolina

• Visual Propaganda on China’s Frontier Others: Newsreel Wong's Ethnic Photojournalism in the Republican Period - Peng-hui Wang, Academia Sinica

• Images of Mongolians and Hui-Muslims from Japanese Photographers’ Eyes: What the Kahoku Kotsu Photo Collection Tells Us - Masumi Matsumoto, Muroran Institute of Technology

Discussants

• Shih-pe Wang, National Taiwan University

• Jie Guo, University of South Carolina