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Darren Byler, “Terror Capitalism: Producing the ‘Terrorist-Worker’ in Northwest China”

  • Darren Byler, “Terror Capitalism: Producing the ‘Terrorist-Worker’ in Northwest China”
  • Event Date: October 19, 2023
  • Event Start Time: 4:00 PM
  • Event End Time: 5:00 PM
  • Event Type: Book Talk
  • Event Location: Zoom

Terror Capitalism: Producing the 'Terrorist-Worker' in Northwest China

DARREN BYLER, PhD

Simon Fraser University

Darren Byler is an anthropologist at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, British Columbia and the author of Terror Capitalism: Uyghur Dispossession and Masculinity in a Chinese City (Duke University Press 2022) and In the Camps: C

Abstract:

This talk focuses on some of the key ideas of Byler's 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, internal police documents, and 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 are produced digitally and materially as unfree workers under the sign of terrorism.

You are cordially invited to attend a talk with cultural anthropologist Darren Byler on October 19, 4-5PM, on Zoom. The title of the talk is “Terror Capitalism: Producing the ‘Terrorist-Worker’ in Northwest China.”

In this talk, Prof. Byler will be drawing on key ideas from his recent book “Terror Capitalism: Uyghur Dispossession and Masculinity in a Chinese City,” published by Duke University Press in 2022. Based on more than 24 months of ethnographic research in the Uyghur region of Northwest China and nearby Kazakhstan between 2011 and 2020, internal police documents, and 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 are produced digitally and materially as 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 frontiers of global economy, the talk 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 control. 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.

Darren Byler is an anthropologist at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, British Columbia and the author of Terror Capitalism: Uyghur Dispossession and Masculinity in a Chinese City (Duke University Press 2022) and In the Camps: China’s High-Tech Penal Colony (Columbia Global Reports 2021). His current research and teaching are focused on theories of policing, infrastructure development and global China.