In the past century, the Western view of Tibet has evolved from an exotic Shangri-la filled with golden idols and the promise of immortality, to a peaceful land with an enlightened society now ravaged by outside aggression. How and why did our perception change? How accurate are our modern conceptions of Tibet? Imagining Tibet is a collection of essays that reveal these Western conceptions. Providing an historical background to the West's ever-changing relationship with Tibet, Donald Lopez, Jeffrey Hopkins, Jamyang Norbu, and other noted scholars explore a variety of topics - from Western perceptions of Tibetan approaches to violence, monastic life, and life as a nation in exile, to representations of Tibet in Western literature, art, environmentalism, and the New Age movement.

Neuhaus explores the roots of the long-standing European fascination with Tibet, from the Dalai Lama to the Abominable Snowman. Surveying a wide range of travel accounts, official documents, correspondence and fiction, he examines how different people thought about both Tibet and their home cultures.

The ten papers presented in this eight volume of the Proceedings of the Ninth Seminar of the IATS, 2000, provide examples of the colourful and lively range of Tibetan self-expressions that exist within the modern homeland and in exile. The scholars here represent the fields of anthropology, sociology, literary studies, history, and political science. Four papers are based in studies in the modern Tibet Autonomous Region, five are grounded in the Tibetan diaspora, and one deals with both classical Tibetan history and current affairs. The mass representation of Tibetan self, delivered through various literary vehicles, by linguistic competence, body decoration, landscape, or individual deportment, constitutes the basic theme of this collection. The volume is useful for any student of Tibet and those interested in the process of identity formation and presentation.

An interdisciplinary collection of essays, Reworking Postcolonialism explores questions of work, precarity, migration, minority and indigenous rights in relation to contemporary globalization. It brings together political, economic and literary approaches to texts and events from across the postcolonial world.

Based on the author’s cross-regional fieldwork, archival findings, and critical reading of memoirs and creative works of Tibetans and Chinese, this book recounts how the potency of Tibet manifests itself in modern material culture concerning Tibet, which is interwoven with state ideology, politics of identity, imagination, nostalgia, forgetting, remembering, and earth-inspired transcendence. The physical place of Tibet is the antecedent point of contact for subsequent spiritual imaginations, acts of destruction and reconstruction, collective nostalgia, and delayed aesthetic and environmental awareness shown in the eco-religious acts of native Tibetans, Communist radical utopianism, former military officers’ recollections, Tibetan and Chinese artwork, and touristic consumption of the Tibetan landscape. By drawing connections between differences, dichotomies, and oppositions, this book explores the interiors of the diverse agentive modes of imaginations from which Tibet is imagined in China. On the theoretical front, this book attempts to bring forth a set of fresh perspectives on how a culturally and religiously specific landscape is antecedent to simultaneous processes of place-making, identity-making, and the bonding between place and people.

Geopolitical Exotica examines exoticized Western representations of Tibet and Tibetans and the debate over that land’s status with regard to China. Concentrating on specific cultural images of the twentieth century—promulgated by novels, popular films, travelogues, and memoirs—Dibyesh Anand lays bare the strategies by which “Exotica Tibet” and “Tibetanness” have been constructed, and he investigates the impact these constructions have had on those who are being represented. Although images of Tibet have excited the popular imagination in the West for many years, Geopolitical Exotica is the first book to explore representational practices within the study of international relations. Anand challenges the parochial practices of current mainstream international relations theory and practice, claiming that the discipline remains mostly Western in its orientation. His analysis of Tibet’s status with regard to China scrutinizes the vocabulary afforded by conventional international relations theory and considers issues that until now have been undertheorized in relation to Tibet, including imperialism, history, diaspora, representation, and identity. In this masterfully synthetic work, Anand establishes that postcoloniality provides new insights into themes of representation and identity and demonstrates how IR as a discipline can meaningfully expand its focus beyond the West. Dibyesh Anand is a reader in international relations at the University of Westminster, London.

The subject of Tibet is highly controversial, and Tibet, as a political entity, is defined differently from source to source and audience to audience. The editors of this path-breaking, multidisciplinary study have gathered some of the leading scholars in Tibetan and ethnic studies to provide a comprehensive analysis of the Tibet question. "Contemporary Tibet" explores essential themes and issues concerning modern Tibet. It presents fresh material from various political viewpoints and data from original surveys and field research. The contributors consider such topics as representations and sovereignty, economic development and political conditions, the exile movement and human rights, historical legacies and international politics, identity issues and the local society. The individual chapters provide historical background as well as a general framework to examine Tibet's present situation in world politics, the relationship with China and the West, and prospects for the future.

Using film as a lens though which we can witness the global transformations in politics, economy, culture, and communication, this book analyzes Hollywood's shift in its depictions of China and Tibet.

Focusing on contemporary Tibetan Buddhist revivals in the Tibetan regions of the Sichuan and Qinghai Provinces in China, this book explores the intricate entanglements of the Buddhist revivals with cultural identity, state ideology, and popular imagination of Tibetan Buddhist spirituality in contemporary China. In turn, the author explores the broader socio-cultural implications of such revivals. Based on detailed cross-regional ethnographic work, the book demonstrates that the revival of Tibetan Buddhism in contemporary China is intimately bound with both the affirming and negating forces of globalization, modernity, and politics of religion, indigenous identity reclamation, and the market economy. The analysis highlights the multidimensionality of Tibetan Buddhism in relation to different religious, cultural, and political constituencies of China. By recognizing the greater contexts of China’s politics of religion and of the global status of Tibetan Buddhism, this book presents an argument that the revival of Tibetan Buddhism is not an isolated event limited merely to Tibetan regions; instead, it is a result of the intersection of both local and global transformative changes. The book is a useful contribution to students and scholars of Asian religion and Chinese studies.

With its analytic focus on the cultural production by Tibetans-in-exile, this volume examines contemporary Tibetan fiction, poetry, music, art, cinema, pamphlets, testimony, and memoir. The twelve case studies highlight the themes of Tibetans’ self-representation, politicized national consciousness, religious and cultural heritages, and resistance to the forces of colonization. This book demonstrates how Tibetan cultural narratives adjust to intercultural influences and ongoing social and political struggles in exile.