My dissertation, titled “Renovating Culture: Uyghur Music in China, early 20th-c. through the Present,” is an ethnographic and historical exploration of what I term cultural renovationist practices in the realm of the Uyghur arts, specifically focusing on the performance genre of the Uyghur on ikki muqami, or Uyghur twelve muqams. The various chapters of the dissertation explore the workings of the Xinjiang culture bureaucracy; the funding and execution of intangible cultural heritage projects; the many “lives” of culture products such as manuscripts, books, and recordings; the rise of professional muqam ensembles and their impact on performance techniques and aesthetics; the developmental impulses of institutional muqam pedagogies; and ideologies of language as negotiated and performed onstage.
This project has been funded by grants from Fulbright IIE (China, 2012-13) and Fulbright-Hays (China and Sweden, 2013-14), among other sources.