“A Measure of Sovereignty: Memory, Violence, and Ethnoreligious Policies in Southwest China,” with Dr. Ruslan Yusupov (Thursday, Feb. 2, 2023)

This talk explores how a community of Chinese Muslims remembers the painful decade of the Cultural Revolution and its aftermath. The small town where this community lives is infamous for an event of ethnoreligious violence during which the local resistance to the iconoclastic campaign led to military intervention. The event claimed the lives of some fourteen hundred residents and destroyed large parts of the town. Unlike other places that witnessed collective killings of similar scale, however, the town was subsequently rehabilitated: the government issued an official letter of redress, released from prison all survived participants of resistance, funded the construction of the destroyed mosque, and allowed victims to be the first to engage in mining that was privatized in the province. The attempt to remember both the incident and the hard-won redress today resulted in a future-oriented disposition that is locally described as “not forgetting history but not being entangled in it.” Drawing on two years of ethnographic fieldwork, I center on and seek to understand this disposition by exploring the competing demands of remembering but reconciling and forgiving but not forgetting that speak to such themes as legacies of violence, ethnoreligious violence, and Chinese state’s sovereignty in the face of cultural difference.