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Religious Book Store > Religious books beginning with D
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Dislocating China: Muslims, Minorities, and Other Subaltern Subjects |
Author: Dru C. Gladney
Published: 2004-04-01 |
List price: $25.00
Our price: $24.50
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As of: January 05th, 2009 07:36:30 PM
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Customer comments on this selection.
 Solid and Reliable Introduction to Ethnicity and Religion in Contemporary China
Gladney's Dislocating China is an excellent introduction into the ways in which ethnicity and religion intersect in contemporary China today. Although many of the chapters deal with China's Muslims the book as a whole is more wide ranging examining ethnic representation in Chinese cinema, ethnic 'culture parks' and in popular culture. One of the central themes of the book is Gladney's contestation of "Han" as a legitimate ethnic group. The book while theoretical is highly readable and a good introduction for anyone who wants to grapple intellectually with the People's Republic of China's policies towards its Muslim population.
Beyond the 'real' in China
This book provides an immideately captivating analysis of cultural/ethnic/religious politics that have shaped Chinese society in the past decades. It offers a very new look at the society whose cultural landscape and history have been traditionally viewed through the lens of Confucian/Christian debate. This debate (perhaps unwittingly) silenced significant minorities whose voices, whenever heard, were subordinated to the agendas other than their own. This book breaks such pattern by placing new views and perspectives at the center of analysis. Such repositioning expands our vision of China but, as another review here shows, not everyone appreciates this turn (after all, none of us is a neutral observer); however, the critique of the book demonstrates its great relevance to the polarized world of today.
Why I use Dislocating China in my courses and work
This book is definitely the best and most updated treatment of several fraught issues and subjects in China and in Chinese studies-ethnicity, minority, religion, and race-all of which are often hard to distinguish between. Dru Gladney skillfully and confidently navigates between these categories and shows that even though they tend to be very elusive and slippery a meaningful, and useful, critique of them is possible. As a student of Chinese Islam, I benefited again from another great work on the Muslims of China, which are hardly known, but extremely important. China's Muslims' impact on Chinese history is unsurpassed by any other group that is considered today as a "minority," ethnic or religious, in China. Gladney had already done a great service to our understanding of this impact in the past, and in this book he is doing it yet again. Furthermore, we have yet to fully understand and assess their role and place in the Islamic world. This is a huge task and Dislocating China takes us another step further towards fulfilling it.
dislocating china
Dru Gladney did a good job to liberate "China" from Confucianism and Communism that have been taught in the past decades by armchair scholars such as Sinologists and Christian missionaries alike. This book challenges the way of looking at the so-called "Chinese" and "China." It discusses religious and gendered groups, which are often minority in number, and their relations with the majority and the state. Thus, his research presents a more complicated picture of what is China than taught before. More importantly, Gladney acutely notices the importance of Muslims, not Christian or Jews, to the Chinese society in history and reality, which makes old-fashioned scholars (whose talks on China are always full of Confucianism and Christianity) uncomfortable.
 A question of religion or ethnicity
THis book committs several flaws right off the bat. FIrst of all it fails to make a disinction between religion and ethnicity. China has both religious and ethnic minorites, although these do not always go hand in hand. But in order to appease the left this book works hard to show that 'muslims' are being suppressed and defined racially as 'others'. But one must find it hard to beleive that the book ignores the persecution of chinese christian, merely because devoting any time to such a subject wouldnt make it readable to the anti-christian sorts who enjoy books on minorities. Unfortunatly this is the great flaw here. The Book totally ignores the actual ethnic minorities of china in order to create a fake ethnic minority of the Hui, who are in fact Chinese. The real ethnic minorities exist along Chinas borders, in Tibet, Xinjiang and other places. A tregedy of a book that had greatness in its grasp. China is a country with many minorities, but this book shows the ultimae flaw of trying to creat minorities out of thin air and then trying to apply western ideas such as 'racism' onto and asia society where such ideas are either foreign or nonsense.
Seth J. Frantzman
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