ICM Spring 2022 Events Series
DARREN BYLER
Terror Capitalism: Uyghur Dispossession and Masculinity in a Chinese City
Wednesday, March 2, 2022, 4:45 p.m. ET, virtual
The third installment of ICM's year-long series, "Settler Colonialism, Sovereignty, Apartheid," this new book talk is co-hosted and co-organized with the Comparative Muslim Society Program, and moderated by Cornell faculty members Eric Tagliocozzo, John Stambaugh Professor of History and Esra Akcan, Michael A. McCarthy Professor of Architectural Theory.
ABSTRACT
This talk focuses on some of the key ideas of my ethnographic monograph Terror Capitalism: Uyghur Dispossession and Masculinity in a Chinese City. Drawing on more than 24 months of ethnographic research in the Uyghur region of Northwest China and nearby Kazakhstan between 2011 and 2020, open-source and internal police documents, and extensive interviews with current and former “terrorist-workers” before their detention in 2017, interviews with their family members since detention, and in several cases post release, it considers how Muslim farmers can be turned into unfree workers under the sign of terrorism. By placing these accounts in the context of broader economic transformations in the region and considering how the rise of the “terrorist-worker” figures in scholarship of the colonial frontiers of global economy, the book makes a broader argument about a global turn toward techno-political systems of capital accumulation and state power. Specifically, it considers the roles that dataveillance and legal frames of exclusion play in the rise of what I name terror capitalism—an ethno-racialized system of data and labor expropriation and social segregation that operates under the sign of the “terrorist.” It shows how such a system can generate capital by holding targeted groups in place through biometric and social surveillance, producing forms of self-discipline and unfree labor for private manufacturers.
BIO
Darren Byler is an assistant professor of international studies at Simon Fraser University. In addition to the newly published book Terror Capitalism: Uyghur Dispossession and Masculinity in a Chinese City (Duke University Press, 2022) he is also the author of In The Camps: China’s High-Tech Penal Colony (Columbia Global Reports, 2021).
