ABSTRACT
In April of 2018, I sat down in a classroom of first-year MA and Ph.D. students of ethnic literature at Minzu University in Beijing. Since this was the top university for minorities nationally, the class of about 15 was made up of predominantly non-Han students – Miao, Mongolian, Ewenke and several others – and most were women. We were to discuss my work on internal orientalism and othering, on the process by which China’s 55 minorities came to be portrayed in popular images as exotic counterparts to the urban Chinese self. I had decided not to lecture and to start with discussion. With some hesitation, a young man raised his hand, presented a paragraph-long question in English and ended with the query, “What do you mean by a non-binary model?” We then worked together on concepts, such as othering as discourse, on who has the power to produce discourse and on the issue of who represents the Other of Chinese. Within minutes, we had circled back to our very classroom, to this question: If minorities are always the mute Other, then who are the non-Han students at this elite university, earning higher degrees in the nation’s capital and poised to produce their own published scholarship and literature?
