Soundscapes of Uyghur Islam Paperback / softback

by Rachel Harris

Part of the Framing the Global series

Paperback / softback

Available to Order - This title is available to order, with delivery expected within 2 weeks

Description

China's Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region is experiencing a crisis of securitization and mass incarceration.

In Soundscapes of Uyghur Islam, author Rachel Harris examines the religious practice of a group of Uyghur women in a small village now engulfed in this chaos.

Despite their remote location, these village women are mobile and connected, and their religious soundscapes flow out across transnational networks.

Harris explores the spiritual and political geographies they inhabit, moving outward from the village to trace connections with Mecca, Istanbul, Bishkek, and Beijing.

Sound, embodiment, and territoriality illuminate both the patterns of religious change among Uyghurs and the policies of cultural erasure used by the Chinese state to reassert its control over the land the Uyghurs occupy.

By drawing on contemporary approaches to the circulation of popular music, Harris considers how various forms of Islam that arrive via travel and the internet come into dialogue with local embodied practices.

Synthesized together, these practicies create new forms that facilitate powerful, affective experiences of faith.