Infrastructural Promises: Developmentalism and the Rewriting of Tibetan Culture in China [electronic resource]

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This dissertation explores the place of culture within the logic of state infrastructural developmentalism and the contestations of Tibetan elites excluded from state discourses in Qinghai Province. I close read three sets of texts: the writings of provincial and local media officials, Tibetan writers and intellectuals, and a Tibetan-language literature website to argue that writing forms the discursive apparatus that agentivizes media infrastructures as drivers of national development, and later presses a depoliticized version of culture into the service of development. Though this dissertation focuses on the years 2000-2012, the implications of these discourses speak to similar ideologies of development in China and around the world today.This dissertation begins by examining the centrality of media infrastructure to the developmental narrative of the state. I read writings by Qinghai provincial and local employees on the construction and maintenance of television and communications technologies as "infrastructural fairy tales," revealing the rhetorical strategies and discursive work of writing that underpin the project of infrastructural development. State developmentalist discourses also shift in the mid-2000s toward writing culture as a depoliticized economic resource for rural development, posing a very real danger to Tibetans' discursive control over their own culture and cultural identities.This dissertation continues by exploring responses to development policies and developmentalism by two groups of Tibetan intellectuals: the "essayists" and the Third Generation of Tibetan poets. It argues that the Third Generation intervenes into the instrumentalist and progressivist conceptions of Tibetan writing and culture promoted by the essayists. The nominal leader of the Third Generation, Kyapchen Dedrol, makes this point by juxtaposing the Third Generation's ideology of the "great roar" against lines from Dondrup Gyel's famous poem "Waterfall of Youth." Through this, he claims that writing should not be progress-oriented, but rather subjective and express the drastic changes and disjointed experiences of contemporary Tibetan life.Finally, I bring the "great roar" of the Third Generation together with state developmentalism by examining the group's Tibetan-language literature website Chome, which sits at the intersection of the material and discursive dimensions of infrastructure. Chome was founded in response to the declining impact of Tibetan literature in print coupled with the growing potential of the internet and online literature throughout China. It utilized newly-built infrastructures to support the goal of developing Tibetan literature. The fortunes of the site are also emblematic of the debate over Tibetan writing and culture. Chome relies on the construction and promise of infrastructure to broaden literary access for Tibetans across China. However, the promise of infrastructure was always intertwined with state developmentalism. When push came to shove, no matter how promising infrastructure seemed, the interventions Tibetans made through infrastructure could only be made at the edges.By revealing the writing of infrastructures and the intensive discursive work of their maintenance, this dissertation helps ask better questions about infrastructural developmentalism as it appears in China and elsewhere today.