Making the “Terrorist-Worker”: Uyghur Forced Labor and Colonial Racial Capitalism in Northwest China

This talk considers how Muslim farmers in Northwest China can be turned into unfree workers under the sign of “the terrorist.”  By placing the accounts of Uyghurs in the context of broader global economic and political transformations, it makes a broader argument about a global turn toward techno-political systems of racialized capital accumulation and state power.

Dr. Darren Byler is an anthropologist in the School for International Studies at Simon Fraser University. His research focuses on the Uyghur people in China, surveillance technologies and colonial racial capitalism. He is the author of Terror Capitalism: Uyghur Dispossession and Masculinity in a Chinese City and In the Camps: China's High-Tech Penal Colony.

This event is organized by the East Asia Center with generous support from the China Peace and Understanding Fund.