Visualising Ethnicity in the Southwest Borderlands

Download or read book Visualising Ethnicity in the Southwest Borderlands written by Jing Zhu and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-01-29 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the mutual constitutions of visuality and empire from the perspective of gender, probing how the lives of China’s ethnic minorities at the southwest frontiers were translated into images. Two sets of visual materials make up its core sources: the Miao album, a genre of ethnographic illustration depicting the daily lives of non-Han peoples in late imperial China, and the ethnographic photographs found in popular Republican-era periodicals. It highlights gender ideals within images and develops a set of “visual grammar” of depicting the non-Han. Casting new light on a spectrum of gendered themes, including femininity, masculinity, sexuality, love, body and clothing, the book examines how the power constructed through gender helped to define, order, popularise, celebrate and imagine possessions of empire.