How do the Uighur people negotiate ways of being under the Chinese government's strict anti-Uighur policies? Uighurs are Muslim, speak a Turkic language closely related to Uzbek, and live primarily in rural, subsistence communities. About 10 million Uighurs live in China's Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region; another 300,000 in neighbouring Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan.
The 2008 Dorothea Lange-Paul Taylor Prize was awarded to Carolyn Drake and writer Ilan Greenberg to further their...
more »How do the Uighur people negotiate ways of being under the Chinese government's strict anti-Uighur policies? Uighurs are Muslim, speak a Turkic language closely related to Uzbek, and live primarily in rural, subsistence communities. About 10 million Uighurs live in China's Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region; another 300,000 in neighbouring Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan.
The 2008 Dorothea Lange-Paul Taylor Prize was awarded to Carolyn Drake and writer Ilan Greenberg to further their work on this issue. The $20,000 award is given annually by the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University to encourage collaboration in documentary work in the tradition of acclaimed photographer Dorothea Lange and writer and social scientist Paul Taylor.
"Xinjiang was briefly an independent state prior to World War II before collapsing into Mao's China, and Uighurs continue to aspire to cultural and political autonomy, and at times to independence," write Drake and Greenberg. "Since the late 1980s, however, China has sent millions of migrants into Xinjiang in an effort to populate the country's west with loyal Chinese. Uighurs are now a minority in Xinjiang; expressions of Uighur culture such as Uighur-language media and repositories of Uighur ethnic identity such as the mosque are severely constrained. Uighurs are under intensive pressure to shed their ethnic identity and assimilate into the larger Han culture."
Greenberg and Drake propose "to document the nodes of the Uighur network: the truck stops, livestock markets, secondary schools, and county offices where Uighurs connect with each other, sometimes furtively." Through their characters, they "will tell a story of Uighurs negotiating a path forward, those who obstruct, circumgyrate, or submit to the state's program of Uighur cultural disappearance."
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