Land of Strangers: The Civilizing Project in Qing Central Asia

 Land of Strangers is a moving account of late Qing efforts to assimilate the “Musulmans,” or Uyghurs, in China’s newly established Xinjiang province. Shifting deftly between theoretical analysis and individual narratives, Eric Schluessel analyzes the resulting translation, entanglement, and estrangement across cultural boundaries in the oasis of Turpan. Schluessel’s rich exploration of political philosophy, burial practices, sexual enslavement, and history writing under Confucian-inflected colonialism challenges our understanding of China as well as Central Asia.