Tracks: temporal shifts and transnational networks of sentiment in Uyghur song

Abstract

This paper explores constructs of memory and history through music in the transnational networks maintained by Central Asian Muslim Uyghurs. The paper is based on fieldwork with the Uyghur diaspora in Kazakhstan in 2003, and also direct involvement in the circulation of music on the Uyghur internet: the virtual spaces which host online exchanges between Uyghurs living in the homeland in northwest China and in the diaspora. The paper focuses on the ways in which electronically and digitally mediated transnational flows of music, and ideas about music, inform the structures of feeling which produce national identities.