Visualising Ethnicity in the Southwest Borderlands

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Visualising Ethnicity in the Southwest Borderlands is written by Jing Zhu and published by BRILL. It's available with International Standard Book Number or ISBN identification 9004422765 (ISBN 10) and 9789004422766 (ISBN 13).

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.