EVENTS

Abstract

The presentation looks at the manner in which issues of ethnic culture and minority rights in Tibet and Xinjiang are getting subsumed under the dominant discourse of development and nation building. This allows for any demands based on ethnicity to be disparaged as backward and superstitious. The speaker argues that this is both intrinsic to modern nation building and more so within the domains of communist countries where homogenisation under the demand of loyalty to the party is encouraged through overt and covert pressures. This is also a strategy of economic and geostrategic expansion and part of neo-nationalist discourses of national rejuvenation leading in turn to radical counter discourses more anchored in ethnic identity. For the minorities the go west strategy has economic and cultural consequences that contradict claims made on behalf of development. 

About the Speaker

Dr. Ravni Thakur is a Sinologist, with a PhD from Leiden University. She has been engaged with Chinese studies since her undergraduate days and has lived and travelled extensively in China.  She was Professor of Chinese studies at Jamia Millia IslamiaUniversity and is currently teaching at the Department of East Asian Studies, University of Delhi.  Her recent publications include (co-editor with Tan Chung) Across the Himalayan Gap II: Chinese Perspectives on India.