With wide-ranging support from within the Library and from campus partners, Princeton University Library (PUL) has acquired the Aziz Isa Elkun collection of Uyghur literature, culture, language, and history, thereby preserving an important part of the Uyghur people’s written cultural heritage for future generations. The acquisition makes PUL home to one of the largest collections of Uyghur materials outside of East and Central Asia, which features a unique focus on literary cultural heritage from the 1930s to the early 21st century, especially the 1950s-70s.
The material in this collection was published in different scripts (Arabic Uyghur, Cyrillic Uyghur, and Latinized Uyghur), and was collected over 35 years by Elkun, Uyghur scholar, poet, and Director of the Uyghur PEN Centre Online Revitalisation Project. It includes Uyghur books, magazines, newspapers, and posters from the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in north-western China, from several post-Soviet Central Asian countries (especially Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan), and from the Uyghur diaspora in Turkey and the West. It also includes material from the Eastern Turkestan Republic of the 1940s. Much of the material is very rare and does not exist in any Western library collection, and is often unavailable to scholars inside China as well.
The Elkun collection nicely complements the already rich collections in Chinese that PUL holds on Xinjiang, which have already attracted numerous researchers of the region. “The study of Chinese history has been dominated by Han-centric perspectives and Chinese-language sources, especially those generated by the state,” said Janet Y. Chen(Link is external), Professor of History and East Asian Studies (EAS). “We need more collections like this one, to enhance our understanding of the histories and cultural heritage of ethnic minority groups living in today’s PRC.”
In 2023, Elkun edited, and translated with others, the widely acclaimed unprecedented one-volume book “Uyghur Poems” (in Penguin Random House’s Everyman’s Library collection), a tour of this ancient and vibrant poetic tradition and a vital witness to a threatened culture.
While Princeton has strong East Asian, Slavic-Eurasian, and Middle Eastern collections, Uyghur material sat uneasily at the intersection of those areas, and hence has mostly been overlooked in overseas area studies library collections. To make up for these past gaps, the relevant Princeton subject librarians Joshua Seufert, Thomas Keenan, and Deborah Schlein) collectively supported the acquisition of the Elkun collection for Princeton and plan to support expanding the collection in the future. Currently, Uyghur is not taught at Princeton, but there has been over the years steady interest by individual faculty members and graduate students in Uyghur material.
The collection was first brought to the attention of Princeton in late 2021, when the then Link-Cotsen Postdoctoral Fellow Joshua Freeman (translator of Tahir Hamut Izgil’s “Waiting to Be Arrested at Night(Link is external),”), who had been in contact with Elkun, informed the Library about this large private collection when Elkun was looking for an academic home for it.
In addition to the acquisition of the material, librarians also addressed the issue on how to make this collection available to the wider community, given the lack of a dedicated Uyghur cataloger at PUL. Fortunately, a grant-raising project to finance a three-year term temporary Uyghur cataloging position was met with enthusiastic support from a wide variety of the following campus partners: the Department of Comparative Literature, the Department of Near Eastern Studies, the East Asian Studies Program, the Institute for the Transregional Study of the Contemporary Middle East, North Africa, and Central Asia (TRI), the Paul and Marcia Wythes Center on Contemporary China, the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies (PIIRS), the Program in Near Eastern Studies, and the Program in Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies (REEES), in addition to discretionary funds from PUL. The three-year cataloging project will also update some of the previously acquired Uyghur holdings at Princeton and any new acquisitions.
Apart from some of the rarest material, in view of the still dispersed and nascent community of Uyghur scholars, much of the material will be also made available through interlibrary loan. “It is important that this collection will be available to visitors, scholars, and students from other institutions as well, and therefore we at the EAS Program were happy to make a substantial contribution to make that happen,” said Chen.
The purchase, and its efforts to make it available to researchers by having it cataloged within three years, have already raised considerable interest among the Uyghur diaspora.
Freeman, currently at the Academia Sinica in Taiwan, is enthusiastic about its research applications. “This represents a major step forward both for Uyghur studies and for the preservation of Uyghur cultural and literary heritage at a moment when that heritage is under relentless assault,” Freeman said. “Many of the materials are difficult to find outside the region; some—including nearly all of the Mao-era materials—are unavailable to researchers even in the region. Our knowledge of twentieth-century Uyghur history and literature will be much enriched by this collection, and we are indebted both to Aziz Isa Elkun for compiling it and to Princeton’s librarians for helping make it available.”
Eric Schluessel, Director of the Sigur Center for Asian Studies at the Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washington University, and himself a past user of Princeton’s Xinjiang material in Chinese, added: “Princeton [University] Library now possesses a leading collection for Uyghur studies in North America. It has long been difficult to access historical materials from the Uyghur region from the 1930s through the 1970s—a critical but under-researched period. Uyghur-language journals, which represent a rich tradition of scholarship not available in Chinese, have been held piecemeal in scattered libraries. The Aziz Elkun Collection changes all of that. This collection represents a rich foundation for Uyghur studies, as well as a permanent preserve of Uyghur literature, scholarship, and culture for a diasporic community in crisis.”
Source: Princeton Library
Written by Martin Heijdra, Director of East Asian Library
Media Contact: Stephanie Oster, Publicity Manager
