2023.6.7 Terror Capitalism: Producing the 'Terrorist-Worker' in Northwest China
講者：Darren Byler (Assistant Professor of Simon Fraser University School of International Studies)
講題：Terror Capitalism: Producing the 'Terrorist-Worker' in Northwest China
時間：2023/6/7（三）15：00-17：00，
地點：清華大學人社院C304教室
主辦單位：清華大學人類學研究所、清大世界南島暨原住民族中心
線上參與連結：https://meet.google.
報名表單：https://docs.google.com/
摘要：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 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 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.
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.
