David O'Brien and Melissa Shani Brown's ethnography People, Place, Race, and Nation in Xinjiang, China: Territories of Identity examines the way the identities of Uyghurs and Han are shaped by everyday forms of racialization in northwest China. By situating their study in conversation with histories of racialization and ethnicity-making in China and cultural studies examinations of racialization elsewhere, the book presents one of the first systematic studies of the embodied expression of racialized ethnoreligious difference in this context. While other studies have looked at ethnic difference and identity in the region, this book, drawing on the lectures of Stuart Hall in The Fateful Triangle (Harvard University Press, 2017) among other scholarship, focuses particular attention on the way structures of power are inscribed, reinforced and legitimized through the production of difference (p. 25). By centring their analysis on power, as the ability to influence and dominate, and by showing how these relations are built between Han and Uyghur citizens of the region, the book offers a convincing theorization of the way new racial formations contribute to banal – or unthought – violence and dehumanization.
The book is the product of a long-term ethnographic research project conducted between 2009 and 2019 in Xinjiang and elsewhere in China. Drawing on interviews conducted primarily in Uyghur and Chinese as well as analysis of media reports, state policy and industry documents, it examines the politicization of public life, tourism and museums. The authors’ interpretation of this data as reflecting a racial discourse and practice, reveals the way framings of modernization, secularism and ethnicity actively mask structures of power even as they produce them in time and space.
The first two chapters of the book provide essential information for understanding the contributions of the book. The first chapter contextualizes of the current situation of mass internment in contemporary Xinjiang, situates the text in existing scholarship on the region and maps out the narrative arch of the book. The second chapter provides a conceptual tool kit for understanding terms like racism and ethnicity in the context of China, and the way such modernist projects index certain groups of people into superior positions relative to others. This process, they argue, in conversation with Kuan-Hsing Chen in Asia as Method (Duke University Press, 2010), is part of a mindset of “imperialization” which is taken up by Han authorities and citizens in Xinjiang (p. 53). As such a worldview is institutionalized, it becomes common-sense to conflate Han cultural values with civilization and modernity (p. 57). In this manner, Sinicization is internalized as an unquestioned good.
In chapter three, the book turns to the mass internment camp system as a limit case of this unquestioned attachment to Han values as a metric of “social health” (p. 72). The authors show how the logic of the camps centres around “curing cultural difference” by removing “weeds” from Uyghur society and improving the remaining population's “quality” through both Han-centred training and forced integration with Han populations. As this is carried out through arbitrary imprisonment, detention and removal at the scale of the population it produced the ultimate manifestation of an “ethno-eugenic” (p. 90) impulse that forms the end logic of an imperialistic mindset. At the same time, the authors are clear to show how top-down pressure reinforced support for anti-Muslim racism among low-level Han state workers who implemented the campaign.
The chapters four through six examine the way Han settlers in the region territorialize space by inscribing Han-centric values and how Uyghurs respond to this encroachment by measuring time in particular ways and choosing non-participation in aspects of Chinese life. They show how settler senses of time, space and taste were carried with them from home communities in eastern China and reproduced in Xinjiang Han communities, and how over time these values were weaponized by the state as the norm against which Uyghur “separatism” or “extremism” were measured. A threshold moment in this process, as discussed in chapter six, is the way the protests and violence of July 2009 in the city of Ürümchi solidified state protection of Han values. This resulted in a disavowal of the causes of the violence and thereby further perpetuated the structure of racialization that was already in motion.
The final three chapters of the book focus on the way state actors have revised official narratives of Xinjiang history through museumification, tourism and language over the past decade. They show how the Xinjiang Regional Museum, as a central arbiter of the official production of Xinjiang history, has worked to simultaneously indigenize Han in Xinjiang and imagine Uyghurs as descended from Han. This form of knowledge production is simultaneously a pedagogical tool used to “re-educate” Uyghurs and is also used to reshape Han understandings of Xinjiang as it is manifested in Han-centric theme parks, desecrated Uyghur shrines, and through the consumption of commodified versions of Uyghur culture. Together, these forms of symbolic domination produce a naturalization of Han-centric values as civilizational modernity.
This book is a significant contribution to the study of contemporary racialization. It does leave largely unexamined questions regarding the significance of capital accumulation in motivating the state and Han settlers to dispossess Uyghurs of their way of life via racialization – thus missing an opportunity to examine forces other than social power and ideology that motivate racialization as shown in an important body of scholarship on racial capitalism. However, by offering a comparative analysis of both Han and Uyghur encounters with state-directed ethnonationalism, this book shows how racism becomes structural in such a way that it becomes unthought – suffused in the atmosphere. This is significant in itself as a contribution to scholarship on Xinjiang, but it could also be placed in conversation with scholarship on contemporary racialization elsewhere in China and outside China in places like Shenzhen, the Middle East and Africa. Thinking through the way the racialization shown in this book can be related to Chinese anti-Blackness and anti-Islam elsewhere, and in dialogue with Euro-American racialization processes, is precisely how this text could be put to work in college classrooms.
