Transforming the “Barbarian” Margins into Multiethnic National Centers: Photographic Reportage and Ethnic Imagination in Republican-Era China

This paper investigates the visual and epistemological construction of ethnic frontiers in the Himalayan regions bordering the Sino-Tibetan territories in the 1930s and 1940s. The 1930s and 1940s were a pivotal moment in which modern Western disciplines, such as ethnology and anthropology, were first introduced to China to imagine the relationship between ethnic minorities and the Chinese nation. I trace how the “translated modernity” of ethnonational discourses in China was construed through China’s indigenization of Western multimedia technologies and epistemological methodologies, such as ethnography, photography, and illustrated magazines. Particularly, this paper focuses on the photographic reportage of Zhuang Xueben, a Shanghai-based ethnic Han reporter, who produced epistemologically complex and visually alluring photographic images of non-Han groups, such as the Yi and the Tibetans, for the famous Liangyou (Young Companion) magazine. The paper argues that Zhuang Xueben’s photographic reportage produced a deeply interwoven social space where ethnicity, nationhood, gender, visual culture and anthropology came into intimate contact to redefine the controversial ethnic frontier regions of a rapidly transforming multicultural Chinese nation. Ultimately, this paper demonstrates how modern visual technologies and epistemological methodologies challenge the Confucian understanding of borderland ethnic groups and re-center these groups as the core of a multiethnic Chinese nation. The paper also explores how photographic reportage humanizes ethnic minority groups for Han readers and unsettles the ideological boundaries and borders between “civilization” and “barbarity” that were historically imagined and maintained in the Himalayas.