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This article examines the changing relationship between ethno-national and local narratives in the historiography of Kazakhstan's Uyghurs through the parallel analysis of general and local histories compiled in the Soviet and post-Soviet periods. Uyghur history writing in the post-Soviet period is discussed in relation to the divided loyalty of the Uyghur community: while interest in writing ethno-nationalist histories is based on the growing feeling of being a part of the broad, transnational category of the Uyghur, deep attachment to the Semirech'e region is expressed in the emerging histories of Uyghur villages and neighbourhoods. In analysing the local histories of Kazakhstani Uyghurs in the post-Soviet period, the author focuses on the gradual transition from Soviet-style local histories praising the uniqueness of the ‘Soviet’ Uyghurs to new local histories emerging ‘from below’ as exemplified by the history of the Sultanqorghan neighbourhood of Almaty. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Focusing on representations of the Muslim dynasty that exercised power locally under the Qing dynasty until 1930 in the oasis of Qumul in eastern Xinjiang, this article challenges the binary notions of ‘official’ versus ‘unofficial’ discourse by looking at the production of historical knowledge on the ground. Versions of local histories are communicated both in censored publications and in informally transmitted oral narratives, which are not independent realms but in constant dialogue with each other. Produced at the interface of the oral and the written, these representations are laden with contradictions and ambiguities, portraying the Muslim dynasty sometimes as feudal exploiters, at other times as models of good governance. It will be shown how historical knowledge is produced at the junctures of the oral and the written, and of official and unofficial discourses. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An introduction is presented in which the authors discuss topics connected to Central Asian local history that are addressed in the issue, including Uyghur history writing, Kyrgyz genealogy, and local history in Tajikistan's Murghab Valley.

Kashgar's seventeenth-century ruler-saint, Afaq Khoja, is remarkable for the amount of historical writing he has inspired, both outside and within Chinese Turkestan. His reputation among Uyghur historians is one of the few aspects of local Uyghur historical knowledge production that has attracted the attention of foreign scholars. In this essay the author uses the now-familiar example of Afaq Khoja's reputation to show that much of what is distinctive about local Uyghur approaches to history has been so little understood as to be missed even in this often-discussed case. This article describes how the local historical appropriation of Afaq's reputation, particularly the recording of narratives about Afaq in writing, began as a typical product of the Naqshbandi maqāmāt tradition, was reshaped into Kashgarian local history in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and then reshaped again as an ethno-national history beginning in the 1930s, culminating in the publication of the popular historical novel, Apaq Khoja, and its subsequent burning by officials of the People's Republic of China. While the reputation of Afaq in the present certainly reflects the current political context, it also bears significant marks of these earlier traditions through which it has passed. Thus this article argues for an understanding of ‘local history’ as a form of knowledge production that embraces a host of historical approaches, including transnational devotional literature, popular local oasis history and nationalist historical fiction. The author also suggests that these transformations of local history have reflected shifting senses of what is ‘local’ over the last 300 years. The argument is advanced through philological investigation of the manuscript sources, ethnographic fieldwork and literary analysis of the recent novel Apaq Khoja. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]