{"id":2037,"date":"2022-10-27T19:16:53","date_gmt":"2022-10-27T19:16:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/akademiye.org\/en\/?p=2037"},"modified":"2023-09-03T19:18:32","modified_gmt":"2023-09-03T19:18:32","slug":"the-uyghur-novel-published-by-columbia-university-press-that-everyone-is-talking-about","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/akademiye.org\/en\/?p=2037","title":{"rendered":"The Uyghur Novel Published by Columbia University Press That Everyone Is Talking About"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Perhat Tursun\u2019s \u201cThe Backstreets\u201d has been wowing critics with its literary merit and its account of the hardships faced by Uyghurs in China.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

By Eve Glasberg, October 27, 2022<\/div>\n<\/header>\n
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Perhat Tursun, author of “The Backstreets, is a leading Uyghur writer, poet, and social critic. He is seen here before he was detained by the Chinese authorities in 2018, and reportedly given a 16-year prison sentence.<\/div>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Serendipity has been key to some of the steps that\u00a0Christine Dunbar<\/a>, an editor at\u00a0Columbia University Press<\/a>\u00a0(CUP), has taken in her career. Back in 2011, she dropped out of her Princeton PhD program in Slavic Languages and Literature. \u201cI was ABD (all but dissertation), looking for a job that would let me keep all the parts of an academic life that I loved\u2014books and reading\u2014minus the part that I disliked: sitting alone in a room writing my dissertation,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

One day, out of the blue, someone she swam with regularly at Princeton suggested looking at academic publishing, which immediately attracted her. A job at a university press would afford continued access to \u201cpeople at the top of their field,\u201d she said, \u201cwho are excited about their work and love talking through high-level ideas.\u201d<\/p>\n

So Dunbar pursued that path, which is how she ended up as a 30-year-old unpaid intern at CUP in 2012, assisting the editor for religion and philosophy. By 2016 she was an editor at the press, and added Asian humanities and translations to her portfolio.<\/p>\n

A Uyghur Work of Fiction\u00a0<\/strong><\/h4>\n

Fast-forward to 2020, when another serendipitous turn of events transpired. Darren Byler (GSAS ’09), an assistant professor of international studies at Simon Fraser University in Canada, and the co-translator of\u00a0The Backstreets<\/em><\/a>, a novel by Perhat Tursun, a prominent Uyghur writer, poet, and social critic, contacted Dunbar. CUP has a very strong modern Asian translation list, so Byler thought the press would be a good fit for\u00a0The Backstreets<\/em>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cDarren told me about a collection of Uyghur fiction\u2014some previously published, some new translations\u2014but it was clear to me from the way he talked about it, and certainly once I started reading, that\u00a0The Backstreets<\/em>\u00a0was on another level,\u201d said Dunbar. \u201cWe very quickly agreed to concentrate on it as a stand-alone work.\u201d<\/p>\n

The book was published by CUP in September 2022 to widespread acclaim, garnering not only strong reviews in media outlets ranging from NPR to\u00a0The<\/em>\u00a0Wall Street Journal<\/em>, but also a\u00a0feature story<\/a>\u00a0in\u00a0The New York Times<\/em>. While CUP books are regularly reviewed by these sorts of media outlets, no one at the press can remember the last time a Columbia book earned a\u00a0Times<\/em>\u00a0feature.<\/p>\n

Dunbar thought the book would get a lot of press attention because of the political situation with Uyghurs in Xinjiang, an autonomous territory in northwestern China. Additionally, \u201cit\u2019s just a really good book that grabs you,\u201d she said. The reviews have consistently recognized that the novel is not only an important artifact, but also a significant piece of world literature. Ed Park, in\u00a0The Atlantic<\/em>, called\u00a0The Backstreets\u00a0<\/em>\u201cclose to a perfect work of art.”<\/p>\n

A Strength in Asian Works<\/strong><\/h4>\n

Founded in 1893 as a separate entity affiliated with Columbia, CUP is one of the oldest and largest American university presses. Only recently, in 2016, under the leadership of\u00a0Jennifer Crewe<\/a>, the first woman to direct an Ivy League university press, CUP finally changed its status from a separately incorporated company to a fully fledged unit of the university within the offices of the provost.<\/p>\n

For years, the press occupied space in McBain Hall on West 113th<\/sup>\u00a0Street near the Morningside Campus, but in 2000 it moved to its current location on West 62nd\u00a0<\/sup>Street between Lincoln Center and Columbus Circle. The offices are bright and modern with occasional reminders of the press\u2019s storied past in the form of multi-volume series such as\u00a0The Papers of Alexander Hamilton\u00a0<\/em>and\u00a0Granger\u2019s Index to Poetry<\/em>\u00a0lining the shelves.<\/p>\n

Although more than 50 people work at CUP, its offices, like so many in New York now, are sparsely occupied. Dunbar left the city during the pandemic to be closer to her family in Norwich, Vermont, and now works full-time from there, where, she noted, \u201cI\u2019m across the Connecticut River from Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, so I still have access to a university library.\u201d<\/p>\n

Asian books have long been a strength of the press, which publishes between 180 to 200 works a year. In the 1950s, CUP started publishing material for teaching\u00a0Core Curriculum<\/a>\u00a0courses in Asian Studies. Over time, these anthologies of Chinese, Indian, Korean, and Japanese texts in translation were expanded to include entire works, as well as Vietnamese and Tibetan texts, along with modern and contemporary fiction.<\/p>\n

Today, CUP\u2019s robust Asian translation list includes other recent books that have been widely and enthusiastically reviewed, such as titles similar to\u00a0The Backstreets<\/em>: Ari Heinrich\u2019s translation of a queer Taiwanese sci-fi novel,\u00a0The Membranes<\/em><\/a>, by Chi Ta-wei, published in 2021, and Immanuel Kim\u2019s translation of\u00a0Friend<\/em><\/a>\u00a0<\/em>by North Korean novelist Paek Nam-nyong.<\/p>\n

The Back-story to\u00a0The Backstreets<\/em><\/strong><\/h4>\n

Byler, a leading scholar of Uyghur culture and Chinese surveillance, said that back in 2014, when he was\u00a0co-translating\u00a0The Backstreets<\/em>\u00a0into English<\/a>, doing so felt subversive. The book\u00a0<\/em>is believed to be the first longform Uyghur work of fiction to appear in English. Tursun wrote the novel in the early 1990s, and even though it had already been published online in a Uyghur literary forum in 2013, its publication in English would dramatically increase its audience globally.<\/p>\n

The Backstreets\u00a0<\/em>tells the story of an unnamed Uyghur man who, seeking to escape the pain and poverty of the countryside, comes to Urumqi, the capital city of Xinjiang, after getting a temporary job in a government office. He finds only scorn and rejection by the dominant Han Chinese, the largest ethnic group in China, and wanders the streets, accompanied by the fog of winter pollution, and reciting an interior monologue of loathing, numbers, and madness.<\/p>\n

Tursun wanted to have his novel come out in the U.S., but Byler was wary. The text, which Byler translated in Xinjiang with A., a Uyghur man who requested anonymity, was ready by 2015. Yet because of the ongoing repression campaign in Xinjiang of predominantly Muslim ethnic minorities\u2014including the Uyghur\u2014by the Chinese government, Byler waited. He felt that publishing\u00a0The Backstreets<\/em>\u00a0in English could bring risky media attention to Tursun and Byler\u2019s co-translator.<\/p>\n

In 2017, A. reached out to Byler to tell him that he could no longer remain in direct contact. Several months later, a mutual friend told Byler that A. had disappeared, and had presumably been taken to a reeducation camp. In 2018, Tursun was also detained by the Chinese authorities, and was reportedly given a 16-year prison sentence. At this point, Byler decided it was time to publish Tursun\u2019s novel, and started that process, eventually connecting with Dunbar at Columbia.<\/p>\n

Tursun recently received the Swedish PEN 2022 Tucholsky Prize, which is awarded annually to a writer or publisher who faces persecution or has been forced into exile. Although comparisons to other books that are both relevant political documents and powerful works of art are inevitable,\u00a0The Backstreets\u00a0<\/em>is in a class of its own. \u201cOne thing that is particularly potent about the novel is how specific it is,\u201d Dunbar said. \u201cIt\u2019s so visceral, full of smells and fog and car horns. Perhat is writing in a literary tradition of racial, urban, and modern alienation.\u201d<\/p>\n

Added Byler: \u201cIt is deeply sad that the work of my co-translator and Tursun is being acknowledged to such acclaim in their absence. They would have been so pleased to see it find its audience and be recognized as a Uyghur telling of existentialist traditions.\u00a0The Backstreets<\/em>\u00a0is living for them in their absence.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Perhat Tursun\u2019s \u201cThe Backstreets\u201d has been wowing critics with its literary merit and its account of the hardships faced by Uyghurs in China. By Eve Glasberg, October 27, 2022 Perhat Tursun, author of “The Backstreets, is a leading Uyghur writer, poet, and social critic. He is seen here before he was detained by the Chinese […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2037","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uyghurs-language-education"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/akademiye.org\/en\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2037","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/akademiye.org\/en\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/akademiye.org\/en\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/akademiye.org\/en\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/akademiye.org\/en\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2037"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/akademiye.org\/en\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2037\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2038,"href":"https:\/\/akademiye.org\/en\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2037\/revisions\/2038"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/akademiye.org\/en\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2037"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/akademiye.org\/en\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2037"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/akademiye.org\/en\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2037"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}