In her article, Dr. Wangmo observes that since 1950, the Chinese government has determined the status and position of Tibetans, but it has not won the battle for Tibetans’ hearts and minds. On the contrary, ongoing Tibetan resistance under Chinese rule points to serious fissures in the Chinese state’s ideological and cultural project of “liberating” Tibet. Wang Hui’s article “The ‘Tibetan Question’ East and West: Orientalism, Regional Ethnic Autonomy, and the Politics of Dignity” analyzes the March 2008 “riots” in and around Lhasa in order to understand the impediments to a real solution to the crisis in Tibet. Although Wang Hui offers productive ways of moving beyond the status quo, Dr. Wangmo suggests that his analysis of Tibet is limited by multiple ideological contradictions that ultimately fail to lift Tibet out of the advanced/backward binary that typifies late nineteenth-century orientalism.
Dr. Wangmo also travelled to Columbia University in New York last week to give a talk at the Weatherhead East Asian Institute. Her presentation, entitled "Reenacting Homecoming," discussed literature produced by Tibetan refugees and exiles in the 1960s-70s and their relation to place. She looked at literature as a logbook of events where the function of memory was not simply to recollect but to attempt to recover and to recreate the meaning of place outside the lost territory, and spoke of the function of literature in relation to the production of history and nation in exile.
