| This thesis investigates identity politics among some diverse native groups in southwest China in the making of the contemporary Chinese nation-state. It explores the processes by which these groups in and outside the province of Guizhou were merged to form the Miao ethnic minority in various forms during the late imperial period, the Nationalist regime, and the People's Republic, whereas the Ge in Southeast Guizhou struggled against the official classification which has considered them as Miao since the 1950s. A particular focus is on a social movement launched by the Ge elite to appeal for recognition as a unitary minority during the post-Mao reforms through the construction of new local histories, the resurrection of ritual practices, and the staging of cultural performances for tourists. The analysis of these historical processes allows the author to explicate how the minority subject in contemporary China has been constituted, defined and negotiated through subjects' interactions with particular authorities under specific social and historical conditions; how dominant discourses have worked to standardize ethnicity; and how identity politics among the natives has contributed to the entrenchment of the "ethnicity model" that has shaped the social order on the margins of the Chinese nation-state.;The author approaches the issues of identity politics by exploring how representational practices constitute the subject under specific historical and social conditions. He finds that the dominant authority, through its discursive representations, postulates subject-positions that define individuals in terms of specific power relationships with the authority; yet it is through "self-representation" that individuals transform those subject-positions into conscious identity. The main task of this thesis is to investigate how native elites undertook self-representation in relation to dominant discursive representation to define themselves under specific historical and social conditions, and how they subsequently promoted their acquired vision of identity in the native community. This politics of representation worked to fix the multiple and non-fixed subject, yet the author also explicates how the condensation of identity proceeded through the mediation of multiple subject-positions--such as kinship, class and gender--in the Ge social movement, sometimes in orchestration and sometimes in contestation. |
