Twenty-years writing on identity politics: western literatures on ethnic minorities in southwestern China

My Final year project ongoing is about the identity politics among Chinese ethnic minorities, a descriptive study aims to familiarize myself with western anthropological and sociological literatures on ethnic studies with a focus on identity issue. I just narrowed the topic on identity politics because when I read numerous books and articles, I felt western scholars on Chinese ethnic issues concerns a lot on the state ethnic identification, but not many existing literatures summarizing this feature and analyzing its implications.

They wrote the Chinese state not only identified ethnic minorities in Stalinist way, but promoted something like "ethnicization" through many kinds of socialization institutions; and they continued to write process as so-called "de-ethnicization" or "re-ethnicization" in China's reform era. I supposed that how the identified ethnic minorities respond/react to the state and Han majority, both in the pre-reform and post-reform eras can be considered as certain kind of identity politics. My key content of the study will be the investigation of the surrounding environment, including the politics [e.g. the state identification policy and education policy], economy [e.g. ethnic tourism], cultural [e.g. real ethnic culture and the labeled one] and social [ethnic relation, stratification, intermarriage etc.], how they construct or reconstruct [new] ethnic identity; as well as how the existing [new] identity they have make their reactions to the state and majority group: both these two dimensions create the discourse of identity politics in China.

For the first dimension, I put efforts to see how state implements policies to identify and regulate ethnic minorities, as you pointed out this afternoon, identity politics may not only refer to the oppressed social groups, but the policy implementation from the state, the exploitation and discrimination and something like that from the dominated groups can also be viewed as a kind of identity politics.

In the second dimension, I examine the reactions from ethnic minorities, for instance, some minority groups could relatively get along well with the Han Chinese like Hui and Naxi (a relative peaceful ethnic relation), they strategically deal with the official ethnic identification that benefits themselves in the Chinese context, a good example is the booming ethnic tourism; however, ethnic tourism [I generalize as an economic independent or even an interdependent variable] may also affect the ethnic minorities in the way of re-ethnicization which means they may be more awareness of their ethnic-ness, cultural practices, religions and so forth after they meet and interact with the culturally different Han tourists. But some like the Uyghur and Tibetan may not but experiencing ethnic conflict. So this afternoon I asked whether the “identity politics” can be practiced in peace or by force.

The books or articles I request from you are those have broad definition and extension of "identity politics", like including the discussions not only in how disadvantaged groups react with dominated ones, but the state/ dominated groups' behaviors which also are defined as "identity politics" process, because all materials I had read, and searched out from internet are limited to the definition on the reactions and protests from the oppressed social groups. And they will be better in a specialized discussion of ethnic identity issues.