Peng Hai

My current book manuscript combines analyses of cultural products and the institutional history of a state-led cultural production nexus to advance a cultural historical turn in explaining China's broken and token autonomies for the Inner Asian peoples--Tibetans, Uyghurs, Inner Mongols, and Sufi Muslims--today. It accounts for the visual construction of a Chinese ethnopolitical hierarchy whereby centrally controlled cultural production was tasked with reconstituting, solidifying, and curating state-promulgated Inner Asian identities inhabiting the roles of subordinate minorities to the superordinate Han majority. My second book project probes the emerging issue of ethnic domination and majoritarian ethnic populisms in so-called post-colonial states. Specifically, this study seeks to address the question of how anti-colonialism has backtracked on its moral and political premises of national self-determination(s) for the weak while rearticulating and even replicating the social Darwinism rhetoric and praxis of the dominant nations and dominant ethnicities in the form of constructing ethnocratic statehood in multiethnic postcolonial countries.

Fields:

• Twentieth-century China
• Inner Asia since the 1800s
• East Asian Cinematic Histories
• Ethnic Populisms in Postcolonial States
• Ethnocracy, Borderlands, and Peripheralities