Books & Dissertation by Darren Byler
Australia National University Press, 2022
Since 2017, the Chinese authorities have detained hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs, Kazakhs and o... more Since 2017, the Chinese authorities have detained hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs, Kazakhs and other Muslim minorities in ‘reeducation camps’ in China’s northwestern Xinjiang autonomous region. While the official reason for this mass detention was to prevent terrorism, the campaign has since become a wholesale attempt to remould the ways of life of these peoples—an experiment in social engineering aimed at erasing their cultures and traditions in order to transform them into ‘civilised’ citizens as construed by the Chinese state. Through a collection of essays penned by scholars who have conducted extensive research in the region, this volume sets itself three goals: first, to document the reality of the emerging surveillance state and coercive assimilation unfolding in Xinjiang in recent years and continuing today; second, to describe the workings and analyse the causes of these policies, highlighting how these developments insert themselves not only in domestic Chinese trends, but also in broader global dynamics; and, third, to propose action, to heed the progressive Left’s call since Marx to change the world and not just analyse it.
‘Xinjiang Year Zero provides an analysis of the processes of dispossession being experienced by Uyghurs and other indigenous peoples of China’s Uyghur region that is sorely needed today. Most politicians and their followers today, whether on the left or the right, view what is happening to the peoples of this region through a twentieth-century lens steeped in dichotomies that are obsolete in describing the nature of states today—those of capitalism vs socialism and democracy vs totalitarianism. The contributors to this volume explore what is happening in Xinjiang in the context of the twenty-first century’s racialised and populist-fuelled state power, global capitalist exploitation, and ubiquitous surveillance technology. At the same time, they invite the reader to reflect on how the processes of dispossession in the Uyghur region during the twenty-first century are repeating the colonial practices of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that have shaped our current global system of inequality and oppression. The result offers an analysis of what is happening in Xinjiang that emphasises its interconnectedness to what is happening around us everywhere in the world. If you believe that the repression in this region is a fabrication to ‘manufacture consent’ for a cold war between the “West” and China, you need to read this book. Afterwards, you will understand that if you want to stop a return to the twentieth-century geopolitical conflicts embodied in the idea of a cold war, you must establish solidarity with the Indigenous peoples of China’s northwest and call for the end to the global processes fuelling their dispossession both inside China and outside.’
— Sean R. Roberts, Director of International Development Studies, The George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs, and author of The War on the Uyghurs
‘Xinjiang Year Zero provides a highly readable and utterly necessary account of what is happening in Xinjiang and why. By showing how the mass detentions of Uyghurs and other Xinjiang Muslims are linked to both global capitalism and histories of settler colonialism, the edited book offers new ways of understanding the situation and thus working toward change. A must-read not only for those interested in contemporary China, but also for anyone who cares about digital surveillance and dispossession around the globe.’
— Emily T. Yeh, University of Colorado Boulder, author of Taming Tibet: Landscape Transformation and the Gift of Chinese Development
‘The crisis in Xinjiang has engendered its own crisis of interpretation and action at a time of growing geopolitical rivalry: how to condemn the atrocities without supporting hawkish voices, particularly among US politicians, who seek to Cold War-ise the US relationship with “Communist China”? How to critique China for colonialism, racism, assimilationism, extra-legal internment, and coerced labour when many Western nations are built on a history of those same things? Xinjiang Year Zero not only provides non-specialists a thorough, readable, up-to-date account of events in Xinjiang. This much-needed book also offers a broader framing of the crisis, drawing comparisons to settler colonialism elsewhere and revealing direct connections to global capitalism and to the rise of technological surveillance everywhere.’
— James A. Millward, Georgetown University, author of Eurasian Crossroads: A History of Xinjiang
Duke University Press, 2022
In Terror Capitalism anthropologist Darren Byler theorizes the contemporary Chinese colonization ... more In Terror Capitalism anthropologist Darren Byler theorizes the contemporary Chinese colonization of the Uyghur Muslim minority group in the northwest autonomous region of Xinjiang. He shows that the mass detention of over one million Uyghurs in “reeducation camps” is part of processes of resource extraction in Uyghur lands that have led to what he calls terror capitalism—a configuration of ethnoracialization, surveillance, and mass detention that in this case promotes settler colonialism. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in the regional capital Ürümchi, Byler shows how media infrastructures, the state’s enforcement of “Chinese” cultural values, and the influx of Han Chinese settlers contribute to Uyghur dispossession and their expulsion from the city. He particularly attends to the experiences of young Uyghur men—who are the primary target of state violence—and how they develop masculinities and homosocial friendships to protect themselves against gendered, ethnoracial, and economic violence. By tracing the political and economic stakes of Uyghur colonization, Byler demonstrates that state-directed capitalist dispossession is coconstructed with a colonial relation of domination.
This study argues that Uyghurs, a Turkic-Muslim group in contemporary Northwest China, and the ci... more This study argues that Uyghurs, a Turkic-Muslim group in contemporary Northwest China, and the city of Ürümchi have become the object of what the study names "terror capitalism." This argument is supported by evidence of both the way state-directed economic investment and security infrastructures (pass-book systems, webs of technological surveillance, urban cleansing processes and mass internment camps) have shaped self-representation among Uyghur migrants and Han settlers in the city. It analyzes these human engineering and urban planning projects and the way their effects are contested in new media, film, television, photography and literature. It finds that this form of capitalist production utilizes the discourse of terror to justify state investment in a wide array of policing and social engineering systems that employs millions of state security workers. The project also presents a theoretical model for understanding how Uyghurs use cultural production to both build and refuse the development of this new economic formation and accompanying forms of gendered, ethno-racial violence. It argues that the violence of state-directed capitalist dispossession is shown to break the spirit and vitality of Uyghur sociality while linking Han life paths to this new form of domination and exploitation. 1 The "People's War on Terror" names the ongoing state of emergency that was declared by the Chinese state in May 2014 following a series of violent incidents involving Uyghur and Han civilians. See ZHANG Dan, "Xinjiang's Party chief wages 'people's war' against terrorism," CNTV,
Research Articles, Book Chapters & Academic Essays by Darren Byler
Georgetown Journal of Asian Affairs, 2021
While scholarship and press reports have focused on the political regime responsible for the inte... more While scholarship and press reports have focused on the political regime responsible for the internment camp system and framed it in relation to human rights discourses, less scholarship has focused on the economic logics of the system and their implications for Muslim societies. The work of Jennifer Pan and others demonstrates how nationwide poverty alleviation programs are related to surveillance and management of disfavored populations in China. This essay shows how the Xinjiang “reeducation labor regime” functions as a limit case of these broader “repressive assistance” programs. Drawing on interviews conducted in 2020 with formerly interned workers who fled across the border to
Kazakhstan in 2019, as well as examining industry documents, Chinese media reports, state assessments, and plans, this brief article presents evidence to show that the lives of many Muslims in Xinjiang have been radically transformed by an unfree labor system designed to turn them into isolated industrial workers and, by extension, transform their societies.
Anthropology and Education Quarterly, 2022
Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2011 and 2018, this article examines how Uygh... more Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2011 and 2018, this article examines how Uyghurs, a Turkic-speaking ethnic minority in China, found ways to excel in English language learning despite efforts by the national education system to focus their training in Chinese, the language of the colonizer. It argues that the alienation that resulted from the devaluation of Uyghur knowledge and nonstandard Chinese usage pushed Uyghur students to embody expanded subjectivities in a "third space" of English learning. It concludes with a discussion of how an internment camp system has foreclosed this space of limited autonomy for Uyghur students since 2017. [Alienation, third space, Uyghur, English learning, China]
Xinjiang Year Zero, 2022
It has been updated and edited for style for inclusion in this volume. Jessica Batke provided res... more It has been updated and edited for style for inclusion in this volume. Jessica Batke provided research for it. 14 Surveillance, data police, and digital enclosure in Xinjiang's 'Safe Cities' * Darren Byler S ometime in the summer of 2019, Vera Zhou, a young college student from the University of Washington, forgot to pretend that she was from the non-Muslim majority group in China, the Han. At a checkpoint at the shopping mall, she put her ID on the scanner and looked at the camera. Immediately, an alarm sounded and the guards manning the equipment pulled her aside. That was when she remembered that when she ventured outside the jurisdiction of her police precinct, she should pretend she had forgotten her ID and hold her head up high, playing the part of a wealthy, urban Han college student who could not be bothered by mall security and face scans. In fact, as much as Vera could pass as Han-she liked to wear chunky silver earrings, oversized sunglasses, and dress in black-her ID card said she was Hui, a Chinese Muslim group that makes up around one million of the population of 15 million Muslims who are the majority in the Xinjiang region. Now, a surveillance system connected to local police detected that she had ventured out of bounds. As a former detainee in a reeducation camp, she was not permitted to travel to other areas of town without explicit permission from both her neighbourhood watch unit and the Public Security Bureau. Recounting the ordeal several months later, Vera told me that as the alarm went off, she felt she could not breathe. She remembered her father had told her, 'If they check your ID, you will be detained again. You are not like a normal person anymore. You are now one of "those" people. ' Vera was living in her hometown of Kuytun (Kuitun) in Ili Prefecture, an area directly north of the Tian Shan mountains that border Kazakhstan. She had been trapped there since 2017, when-in the middle of her junior year at the University of Washington, where I was an instructorshe had taken a spur-of-the-moment trip home to see her boyfriend, a
Information and Culture, 57 (2), July, 2022
Infrastructure power announces the priorities of a state: who and what is authorized to move and ... more Infrastructure power announces the priorities of a state: who and what is authorized to move and act, whose lives and what materials have significance. In the colonial context of the Uyghur region in Northwest China, surveillance systems-checkpoints, cameras, digital forensic tools, and nearly 60,000 low-level "grid workers"-build forms of infrastructure power making hidden or resistant populations appear legible, decoded, and editable as "enemy intelligence." Drawing on a recently obtained internal police database of thousands of Chinese-language digital files, ethnographic observations and interviews with Muslims who recently fled from China to Kazakhstan, this article argues that in this location at the frontier of the neoliberal and illiberal East, a smart city functions in part as a neo-Taylorist assembly line that employs an army of grid workers to produce Muslim enemies and non-Muslim friends.
Wilson International Center for Scholars, 2021
This essay examines the way Turkic Muslims in the Uyghur Autonomous Region (Xinjiang) in Northwes... more This essay examines the way Turkic Muslims in the Uyghur Autonomous Region (Xinjiang) in Northwest China have found themselves caught in webs of surveillance and biometric control that restricts their movement and cultural practices. While tightly focused on an archive of thousands of recently obtained internal police files from the Ürümchi Public Security Bureau in the capital of the region, this research also assesses the extent to which these technologies have traveled to other spaces in China and around the world. This research presents five primary findings. First, the internal police reports, held in an Oracle database built by the state contractor Landasoft, document that around 80 percent of policing focuses on Uyghurs and other Muslims despite them representing less than 20 percent of the population in the city. Second, surveillance infrastructure is being used to eliminate or diminish the role of social institutions such as mosques and family life in Muslim society. The reports frame this process as intentional and a success. Third, the system depends to a significant degree on low level police labor at checkpoints and in home inspections. Fourth, political ideology is a key feature of the system—”flag-raising ceremonies” where people pledge loyalty to the state show up again and again in the reports. Fifth, top-down coercion is a strong feature throughout the system, with quotas, incentives, and punishments for both the surveilled and the surveillance workers. The density of policing infrastructure, combined with the ideological fervor of counter-terrorism, creates a criminalization of normative behavior and normalizes interpersonal cruelty that is unparalleled elsewhere in China. Without foreclosing the possibility that Uyghurs and other Muslims will find ways to protect their human autonomy from this new system of control, the essay concludes that it is likely that within a single generation Muslim embodied practice and Turkic languages in Northwest China will cease to provide essential ways for Uyghurs and other targeted groups to bring their knowledge systems into the present. At the same time, because of the specific ideological and human labor components of the system it is also difficult to replicate even in other frontier spaces of China such as Hong Kong. In order to mitigate harms to Muslims in Northwest China and toward other unprotected populations the essay proposes several policy recommendations.
Made in China Journal, 2019
A preventative policing system in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region has detained as many as 1... more A preventative policing system in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region has detained as many as 1.5 million Turkic Muslims deemed ‘pre-terrorists’ or ‘extremists’. This essay shows how a counterinsurgency mode of militarism that emerged in the United States, Israel, and Europe, has been adapted as a ‘Xinjiang mode’ of community policing in China. It argues that the scale of detentions and the use of surveillance technology make the ‘Xinjiang mode’ of counterinsurgency unprecedented.
The Asia-Pacific Journal, 2018
Since 2016 over one million Chinese civil servants have been ordered to spend a series of weeks v... more Since 2016 over one million Chinese civil servants have been ordered to spend a series of weeks visiting assigned Turkic Muslim "relatives." These mostly Han urbanites have been tasked with instructing Uyghur and Kazakh farmers in political ideology and subjecting them to tests of Chinese nationalism and Han cultural assimilation. When they occupy the homes of their Turkic "relatives" they assess whether or not they should be sent into the mass "reeducation" camp system. Drawing on ethnographic field research, interviews and state documents, this essay argues that the systematic normalization of state-directed violent paternalism has produced a new kind of banality in Turkic minority experiences of unfreedom.
Logic ISSUE 7 / CHINA 中国, 2019
In northwest China, the state is using technology to pioneer a new form of terror capitalism.
Central Asian Survey, 2018
Over the past two decades state-directed Han settlement and capitalist development in the Uyghur ... more Over the past two decades state-directed Han settlement and capitalist development in the Uyghur homeland in Chinese Central Asia, have uprooted thousands of Uyghurs, causing them to move to the city. These rapid changes in how Uyghurs practice local forms of knowledge. In this article, I explore how low-income male Uyghur migrants and Uyghur culture producers build a durable existence despite these challenges. Based on an analysis of migrant responses to the Uyghur language urban fiction and indigenous music as well as ethnographic observations of Uyghur migrants from Southern Xinjiang, I argue that indigenous knowledge provides underemployed male Uyghurs a means with which to refuse the alienating effects of settler colonialism and economic development. By broadening the scope of what counts as 'resistance' to Chinese attempts to eliminate aspects of Uyghur society, I show that 'refusal' can be a generative way of embodying sovereignty particularly when confronted by structural violence.
En fevrier 2019, deux spectacles musicaux d’envergure mettant en scene des residents de la Region... more En fevrier 2019, deux spectacles musicaux d’envergure mettant en scene des residents de la Region autonome ouighoure du Xinjiang ont ete largement diffuses sur les reseaux sociaux chinois. Ces deux spectacles, un gala des recoltes dans le canton de Mekit et une representation par une enseignante ouighoure de Qumul, montraient des Ouighours vetus de costumes culturels han et jouant de l’opera de Pekin. Ces cinq dernieres annees, depuis le lancement de la « Guerre populaire contre le terrorisme » (People’s War on Terror), l’espace dedie aux spectacles de chants et de danses traditionnels ouighours s’est profondement reduit. Dans le meme temps, celui consacre aux Ouighours mettant en scene leur hanite (Hanness) a travers l’opera traditionnel chinois et les chants rouges s’est considerablement accru. S’appuyant sur des donnees issues des medias de langues chinoise et ouighoure, une enquete de terrain ethnographique ainsi que sur des entretiens avec des Ouighours de la diaspora, cet arti...
China Perspectives, 2019
In February 2019, two major musical performances by residents of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous R... more In February 2019, two major musical performances by residents of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region were widely circulated on Chinese social media. These two performances, one a Mekit County Harvest Gala and the other a performance by a Uyghur school teacher from Qumul, featured Uyghurs dressed in Han cultural costumes performing Beijing Opera. Over the past five years, since the “People’s War on Terror” started, the space for Uyghur traditional song and dance performance has deeply diminished. Simultaneously, the space for Uyghurs performing Hanness through Chinese traditional opera and Red songs has dramatically increased. Drawing on open source Uyghur and Chinese-language media, ethnographic fieldwork, and interviews with Uyghurs in diaspora, this article analyses the changing role of music in Uyghur religious and ritual life by tracing the way state cultural ministries have dramatically increased their attempts to separate Uyghur music from its Sufi Islamic origins in order to produce a non-threatening “permitted difference” (Schein 2000). Since 2016, the re-education campaign of the Chinese government on Uyghur society has intensified this disconnection by promoting an erasure of even the state-curated “difference” of happy, exoticized Uyghurs on stage. Han traditional music is now replacing Uyghur traditional music, which shows an intensification of symbolic violence toward Uyghur traditional knowledge and aesthetics. In a time of Uyghur re-education, musical performance on stage has become a space for political rituals of loyalty to a Han nationalist vision of the Chinese state.
Journal of Chinese Contemporary Art. 4.1. (2017) Nottingham, England: Intellect Books.
Since the... more Journal of Chinese Contemporary Art. 4.1. (2017) Nottingham, England: Intellect Books.
Since the early 2000s many second-tier Chinese cities have begun to cultivate contemporary art scenes. Ürümchi, the capital city of the northwest province of Xinjiang, is no exception. Following Xi Jinping's announcement of the New Silk Road Economic Belt in 2013, a group of artists from the city received support from the Xinjiang Cultural Ministry to transform a decommissioned government building into the Xinjiang Contemporary Art Museum. Many of the exhibitions hosted in the space focus not only on themes of Silk Road revitalization but also representations of migration, frontier marginalization and the spectacle of rapid capitalist development. One outcome of this is the emergence of contemporary art rooted in the 'hybrid' traditions of Uyghur artists. In addition, a school of Han migrant documentary photography and figurative painting, which the art critic, curator and painter Zeng Qunkai has called 'black and white marginality', has begun to emerge.
American Ethnologist, 2021
In Northwest China, young Uyghur men foster friendships with one another as they flee colonial di... more In Northwest China, young Uyghur men foster friendships with one another as they flee colonial dispossession in their villages and migrate to the city. These friendships, which ultimately offer forms of protection in these migrants’ lives, are enacted through storytelling about colonial violence. Their storytelling is best understood as a processual staging of social life, one that holds in tension the violence of ethnoracialization and the palliative care of homosocial friendships. The stories of police brutality and job discrimination that these young men tell are an everyday enactment of the trauma staged in Uyghur-language fiction about colonial alienation—a narrative form that both inspires Uyghurs to tell their stories and, in turn, is inspired by that experience. In a similar way, storytelling and anti-colonial friendship can also pull ethnographers into relations of intersubjective obligation that shape their anthropological practice of listening and writing. In some contexts, then, anthropology itself can be regarded as the work of anti-colonial friendship. [dispossession, anti-colonial friendship, masculinity, storytelling, police, colonial violence, anthropology, Uyghur, China]
Contemporary Islam
By recuperating the Sufi poetics of the Uyghur past, “avant-garde” Uyghur poets such as Tahir Ham... more By recuperating the Sufi poetics of the Uyghur past, “avant-garde” Uyghur poets such as Tahir Hamut and Perhat Tursun are claiming a right to speak as heirs to both a religious and a literary tradition. For these modernist poets, finding one’s own way forward through the past is a way of reclaiming the discourse surrounding Uyghur identity, and the cultural symbols built into it, as an extension of the self. By channeling affect in such a way that it appears to derive from conventional Uyghur imagery, these poets demonstrate a measure of self-mastery that restores a feeling of existential security in the midst of political and religious change. This article argues that the purpose of their poems is to force the reader to accept new interpretations of images of Sufi embodiment and spirituality as valid and powerful. It further claims that the new indexing of Sufi imagery in this emerging corpus disrupts the unity of Uyghur poetry in the genres of Chinese Socialist Realism and ethno-nationalist Uyghur tradition, not in a negative process, but in order to create new forms of thought and subjectivity. It forces the reader to interpret the world not by trying to return to mythical Uyghur origins or reaching for a Socialist or an Islamic utopia but instead as a means of self-determination and affirming contemporary life itself.
By rendering 29 Uyghur names a kind of noise, the state is opening them up to contestation and, g... more By rendering 29 Uyghur names a kind of noise, the state is opening them up to contestation and, given the totalitarian force of the state, erasure. If a name is recognized as noise, it can throw into question the citizenship rights of the carrier of the name. Children with banned names are no longer seen as fully human and as having a life that matters. Their parents, by association, are subject to indefinite detention and as a result the children are subject to removal from their home and renaming by the state. The sight and sound of Uyghur Muslim identification in general is thus subject to a regulation. Uyghur citizenship rights in China appear to depend on the “purification” process laid out by the “overall goal” of the state and it’s so-called People’s War on Terror. Yet, of course, Uyghurs are Muslim. The vast majority of their bodies will never pass as Han, nor will their way of knowing and being in the world be eliminated in their life time. Thinking about the history of “final solutions” that seem to rhyme with the current “overall goal” perpetuated by the Chinese state, one is forced to think of the type of “cultural elimination” discussed by scholars of settler-colonialism around the world (see Wolfe 2006). It is now a question of speed. How soon will noise and static be eliminated in Northwest China?
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Books & Dissertation by Darren Byler
‘Xinjiang Year Zero provides an analysis of the processes of dispossession being experienced by Uyghurs and other indigenous peoples of China’s Uyghur region that is sorely needed today. Most politicians and their followers today, whether on the left or the right, view what is happening to the peoples of this region through a twentieth-century lens steeped in dichotomies that are obsolete in describing the nature of states today—those of capitalism vs socialism and democracy vs totalitarianism. The contributors to this volume explore what is happening in Xinjiang in the context of the twenty-first century’s racialised and populist-fuelled state power, global capitalist exploitation, and ubiquitous surveillance technology. At the same time, they invite the reader to reflect on how the processes of dispossession in the Uyghur region during the twenty-first century are repeating the colonial practices of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that have shaped our current global system of inequality and oppression. The result offers an analysis of what is happening in Xinjiang that emphasises its interconnectedness to what is happening around us everywhere in the world. If you believe that the repression in this region is a fabrication to ‘manufacture consent’ for a cold war between the “West” and China, you need to read this book. Afterwards, you will understand that if you want to stop a return to the twentieth-century geopolitical conflicts embodied in the idea of a cold war, you must establish solidarity with the Indigenous peoples of China’s northwest and call for the end to the global processes fuelling their dispossession both inside China and outside.’
— Sean R. Roberts, Director of International Development Studies, The George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs, and author of The War on the Uyghurs
‘Xinjiang Year Zero provides a highly readable and utterly necessary account of what is happening in Xinjiang and why. By showing how the mass detentions of Uyghurs and other Xinjiang Muslims are linked to both global capitalism and histories of settler colonialism, the edited book offers new ways of understanding the situation and thus working toward change. A must-read not only for those interested in contemporary China, but also for anyone who cares about digital surveillance and dispossession around the globe.’
— Emily T. Yeh, University of Colorado Boulder, author of Taming Tibet: Landscape Transformation and the Gift of Chinese Development
‘The crisis in Xinjiang has engendered its own crisis of interpretation and action at a time of growing geopolitical rivalry: how to condemn the atrocities without supporting hawkish voices, particularly among US politicians, who seek to Cold War-ise the US relationship with “Communist China”? How to critique China for colonialism, racism, assimilationism, extra-legal internment, and coerced labour when many Western nations are built on a history of those same things? Xinjiang Year Zero not only provides non-specialists a thorough, readable, up-to-date account of events in Xinjiang. This much-needed book also offers a broader framing of the crisis, drawing comparisons to settler colonialism elsewhere and revealing direct connections to global capitalism and to the rise of technological surveillance everywhere.’
— James A. Millward, Georgetown University, author of Eurasian Crossroads: A History of Xinjiang
Research Articles, Book Chapters & Academic Essays by Darren Byler
Kazakhstan in 2019, as well as examining industry documents, Chinese media reports, state assessments, and plans, this brief article presents evidence to show that the lives of many Muslims in Xinjiang have been radically transformed by an unfree labor system designed to turn them into isolated industrial workers and, by extension, transform their societies.
Since the early 2000s many second-tier Chinese cities have begun to cultivate contemporary art scenes. Ürümchi, the capital city of the northwest province of Xinjiang, is no exception. Following Xi Jinping's announcement of the New Silk Road Economic Belt in 2013, a group of artists from the city received support from the Xinjiang Cultural Ministry to transform a decommissioned government building into the Xinjiang Contemporary Art Museum. Many of the exhibitions hosted in the space focus not only on themes of Silk Road revitalization but also representations of migration, frontier marginalization and the spectacle of rapid capitalist development. One outcome of this is the emergence of contemporary art rooted in the 'hybrid' traditions of Uyghur artists. In addition, a school of Han migrant documentary photography and figurative painting, which the art critic, curator and painter Zeng Qunkai has called 'black and white marginality', has begun to emerge.
‘Xinjiang Year Zero provides an analysis of the processes of dispossession being experienced by Uyghurs and other indigenous peoples of China’s Uyghur region that is sorely needed today. Most politicians and their followers today, whether on the left or the right, view what is happening to the peoples of this region through a twentieth-century lens steeped in dichotomies that are obsolete in describing the nature of states today—those of capitalism vs socialism and democracy vs totalitarianism. The contributors to this volume explore what is happening in Xinjiang in the context of the twenty-first century’s racialised and populist-fuelled state power, global capitalist exploitation, and ubiquitous surveillance technology. At the same time, they invite the reader to reflect on how the processes of dispossession in the Uyghur region during the twenty-first century are repeating the colonial practices of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that have shaped our current global system of inequality and oppression. The result offers an analysis of what is happening in Xinjiang that emphasises its interconnectedness to what is happening around us everywhere in the world. If you believe that the repression in this region is a fabrication to ‘manufacture consent’ for a cold war between the “West” and China, you need to read this book. Afterwards, you will understand that if you want to stop a return to the twentieth-century geopolitical conflicts embodied in the idea of a cold war, you must establish solidarity with the Indigenous peoples of China’s northwest and call for the end to the global processes fuelling their dispossession both inside China and outside.’
— Sean R. Roberts, Director of International Development Studies, The George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs, and author of The War on the Uyghurs
‘Xinjiang Year Zero provides a highly readable and utterly necessary account of what is happening in Xinjiang and why. By showing how the mass detentions of Uyghurs and other Xinjiang Muslims are linked to both global capitalism and histories of settler colonialism, the edited book offers new ways of understanding the situation and thus working toward change. A must-read not only for those interested in contemporary China, but also for anyone who cares about digital surveillance and dispossession around the globe.’
— Emily T. Yeh, University of Colorado Boulder, author of Taming Tibet: Landscape Transformation and the Gift of Chinese Development
‘The crisis in Xinjiang has engendered its own crisis of interpretation and action at a time of growing geopolitical rivalry: how to condemn the atrocities without supporting hawkish voices, particularly among US politicians, who seek to Cold War-ise the US relationship with “Communist China”? How to critique China for colonialism, racism, assimilationism, extra-legal internment, and coerced labour when many Western nations are built on a history of those same things? Xinjiang Year Zero not only provides non-specialists a thorough, readable, up-to-date account of events in Xinjiang. This much-needed book also offers a broader framing of the crisis, drawing comparisons to settler colonialism elsewhere and revealing direct connections to global capitalism and to the rise of technological surveillance everywhere.’
— James A. Millward, Georgetown University, author of Eurasian Crossroads: A History of Xinjiang
Kazakhstan in 2019, as well as examining industry documents, Chinese media reports, state assessments, and plans, this brief article presents evidence to show that the lives of many Muslims in Xinjiang have been radically transformed by an unfree labor system designed to turn them into isolated industrial workers and, by extension, transform their societies.
Since the early 2000s many second-tier Chinese cities have begun to cultivate contemporary art scenes. Ürümchi, the capital city of the northwest province of Xinjiang, is no exception. Following Xi Jinping's announcement of the New Silk Road Economic Belt in 2013, a group of artists from the city received support from the Xinjiang Cultural Ministry to transform a decommissioned government building into the Xinjiang Contemporary Art Museum. Many of the exhibitions hosted in the space focus not only on themes of Silk Road revitalization but also representations of migration, frontier marginalization and the spectacle of rapid capitalist development. One outcome of this is the emergence of contemporary art rooted in the 'hybrid' traditions of Uyghur artists. In addition, a school of Han migrant documentary photography and figurative painting, which the art critic, curator and painter Zeng Qunkai has called 'black and white marginality', has begun to emerge.
What is the work that stories do? “Literature, Writing, and Anthropology” seeks to address this question by creating a space in which fiction and anthropology converge, collide, and collapse into one another. This collection, a collaboration between Cultural Anthropology and the literary journal American Short Fiction, features articles, interviews, short stories, and a lecture by eleven authors. In assembling these pages, we have been surprised by the affiliations that form across the fiction, ethnography, and criticism. Though we’ve separated the fiction from the anthropology, there is no way to easily demarcate where fiction ends and anthropology begins.
Articles
The Postmodern Crisis: Discourse, Parody, Memory
by Vincent Crapanzano
Cancer Butch
by S. Lochlann Jain
Stories and Cosmogonies: Imagining Creativity Beyond "Nature" and "Culture"
by Stuart McLean
Death and Memory: From Santa María del Monte to Miami Beach
by Ruth Behar
Beyond Writing: Feminist Practice and the Limitations of Ethnography
by Elizabeth Enslin
Keywords: Affect, Ritual, Disposability, Biopolitics, New Documentary, Xu Xin, Xinjiang, China
In (2014) Transnational Chinese Cinema: Corporeality, Desire, and Ethics. Brian Bergen-Aurand, Mary Mazzilli, and Hee Wai-Siam eds. Los Angeles: Bridge21 Publications.
Translated from the Uyghur by Darren Byler and Mutellip Enwer. Published in Guernica Magazine, December 1, 2014
(https://www.guernicamag.com/fiction/festival-for-the-pigs/)
Translators’ Note: A city between Beijing and Baghdad. A city south of Siberia, north of the Himalayas; an oil town booming in the desert. This is Tahir Hamut’s Ürümchi. Written over eight years these poems narrate how Tahir has been seduced by the gray streets of a Chinese city – the capital of the expansive Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. They show us how despite himself he can’t escape; a rural boy from Kashgar has been captured by an urban world. They are poems filled with longing and exhaustion, enchantment and release.
Like most of Tahir’s work these poems refuse extravagance. They build a persona of the city out of textures and feelings, and slowly, reluctantly, this world comes alive. There is a foreboding here that hints at the difficulties of minority life in China’s most ethnically-diverse city. The millions of migrants who have come or been forced to leave over the past decade make appearances as fragile lovers, water splattered, and worthless stones. Tahir puts on his skin in this city every day, but at night he prowls and looks for clarity. As one of the leaders of the modernist movement in Uyghur poetry, Tahir has been writing poems for over two decades, but the poignancy of his voice has never been stronger than in his most recent burst of writing. What emerges in the play of Tahir’s most recent work is a renewed sense of vision; around the folds of his playful turns of phrase are deeply-honed edges of seriousness.