F-V56: "Reformation" Beyond the Gate: State Power and the Making of Bare Life in the Xinjiang Uyghur Region

Virtual Organizer(s)

• LR

  Lauren Restrepo

  Bryn Mawr College, United States

Virtual Chair(s)

• 

  Joanne Smith Finley

  Newcastle University, United Kingdom

Virtual Paper Presenter(s)

• 

  Darren Byler

  Simon Fraser University, Canada
• AK

  Aynur Kadir

  The University of British Columbia, Canada
• LR

  Lauren Restrepo

  Bryn Mawr College, United States
• TG

  Timothy Grose

  Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, United States

Virtual Discussant(s)

• ST

  Sam Tynan

  Czech Academy of Sciences, Czech Republic
• EA

  Elise Anderson

  Uyghur Human Rights Project, United States

Session Abstract: The dominant mode of state violence against Uyghur and other Turkic people in Xinjiang does not will an end to physical life. Nevertheless, since 2014, it has become clear that while individual Uyghur bodies are generally kept alive, there has been a concerted effort to render conditions of bare life on a population level. Chaired by Joanne Smith Finley, this panel examines the suite of techniques the Chinese party-state employs outside of the prison or camp setting to strip away meaningful cultural and religious practices and a sense of homeland that form the political life of Uyghurs. Darren Byler centers the question of social death by examining the force of state narratives in the domestic and community lives of former detainees. Aynur Kadir studies state vilification and persecution of Uyghur elites as a form of structural violence and dispossession. Lauren Restrepo examines the redesign of pre-CCP Kashgar as an effort to strip the city of its political and symbolic power as a Uyghur metropolis. Finally, Tim Grose details domestic strategies for estranging Uyghurs from the wätän (homeland), as the state introduces new floorplans, furniture, and norms of homemaking in Uyghur residential space. Discussants Sam Tynan and Elise Anderson bring this wide-ranging research into discussion, respectively foregrounding on-the-ground resistance strategies and transnational advocacy efforts that create space for autonomous personal and cultural expression and allow for a vision of Uyghur identity that exists beyond the reach of the Chinese state.

Presentations:

• Life after the Camp: Cruel Trustworthiness and the Narrative Effects of the Crime that Never Was
  

  Virtual Paper Presenter: Darren Byler – Simon Fraser University
• Modernity and Dispossession: Rise and Fall of the Uyghur Intellectual Elites
  

  Virtual Paper Presenter: Aynur Kadir – The University of British Columbia
• Toward a Totalitarian Politics of Land In Kashgar
  

  Virtual Paper Presenter: Lauren F. Restrepo – Bryn Mawr College
• "Change Old Habits; Change Old Perspectives": State-Imposed Housing Reform and Dispossession in the Uyghur Homeland
  

  Virtual Paper Presenter: Timothy Grose – Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology