In late imperial China, so-called Miao albums illustrated the non-Han people of Southwest China in ways that visually highlighted their differences from the Han in physiognomy, attire, and customs. Jing Zhu's Visualising Ethnicity in the Southwest Borderlands argues that representations of ethnic others in Miao albums are necessarily gendered, and this visual nexus of gender and ethnicity also informs photographs of ethnic minorities that emerge in the Republican era. Visualising Ethnicity in the Southwest Borderlands lays out these arguments over four thematic chapters, each of which addresses late imperial images in its first half and Republican images in its second half. Zhu shows mastery of a wide range of primary sources: though she mainly uses illustrations and photographs, she supplements these with relevant writings from late imperial literati (including gazetteers), and twentieth-century scholars and journalists.
The introduction gives an overview of gendered visual representations of ethnic otherness in the Chinese imperium. Zhu discusses how images—both illustrations and photographs—produce truth about those they represent. In representations of non-Han people in Southwest China, this truth is explicitly ethnic and implicitly gendered: depictions of Miao men and women ostensibly highlight their distinctive ethnic characteristics, but, as Zhu argues, ethnic difference maps onto perceived variations from Han gender norms. Furthermore, gendered images of non-Han people constitute an “imperial visual order” (p. 26) that operates affectively by evoking surprise, anxiety, pleasure, and disgust.
Chapter 1 takes up illustrations and photographs that depict non-Han women in ways that register as masculine for viewers acculturated to Han gender norms. Zhu observes that scholars of ethnicity in modern China emphasize the feminization of ethnic minorities by (for example) disproportionately representing ethnic groups with images of young, attractive women in “traditional dress.” In contrast, Miao albums highlight non-Han women's masculinity through images of “female officials” (nüguan 女官) and images of women working outside. Though working minority women were less popular in Republican-era photography than sexualized minority women, some Republican-era intellectuals and activists who advocated women's rights drew inspiration from photographs of non-Han women at work.
The second chapter considers visual representations of non-Han people's sexuality, especially practices that diverge from Confucian ideals governing sexual behavior. Miao albums emphasize the nakedness of Short-skirt Miao (Duanqun Miao 短裙苗) and Shui Baiyi (e.g., 水百夷, 水擺彝) women. Similarly, the albums illustrate Miao men and women dancing and engaging in public sexual encounters. Republican-era photographers also highlighted ethnic minorities’ beauty, music, and dance. These features metonymically referenced sexual inhibition as well as values championed by the New Culture movement, including romantic love (lian'ai 戀愛) and love marriage.
Clothing and body are the focus of chapter 3. Two common physiognomic features of non-Han people in Miao albums are dark skin and bare natural feet, both of which signified ethnic, gender, and class differences to an elite Han audience. Contrary to modern depictions of ethnic minorities wearing festival attire, the Miao albums illustrated their subjects wearing simple, casual dress. In the Republican era, scholars introduced anthropometric photography to catalog racial difference, but Zhu notes that this data did not actually inform ethnic classification projects, perhaps because it challenged the idea of a single Chinese nationality (Zhonghua minzu 中華民族). More influential Republican-era innovations were the practices of representing minority ethnicities with young women in festival dress and exhibiting minority material culture in museums.
The fourth and final chapter shifts focus to analyze how these images of non-Han people naturalized imperial power and Han cultural superiority in the late imperial and Republican eras. Zhu argues that the pleasure of viewing these images was crucial to their ideological work. Visualising Ethnicity in the Southwest Borderlands concludes by summarizing its core arguments and making a broader case that visual culture is more than a supplement to text.
There are a few areas where Visualising Ethnicity in the Southwest Borderlands falls short of its aims. Comparisons between Chinese and British imperialism distract from the book's focus, and some summaries of other scholars’ work read more like a dissertation than a monograph. This book would have benefited from another round of proofreading, as several typos and inconsistent romanizations remain in the published edition. However, Visualising Ethnicity in the Southwest Borderlands makes an important contribution to the study of visual culture, ethnicity, and gender in late imperial and Republican-era China. It is in close conversation with work by scholars such as Laura Hostetler and Emma Teng, but it also has much to offer for scholars of visual culture, imperialism, gender, and ethnicity.
