The lecture will explore the construction and maintenance of ethnic identity in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. Through interviews with both Han and Uyghurs, ethnography at a variety of sites, as well as an analysis of government texts and propaganda, the lecture explores how notions of culture, nation, history, ethno-racial categories, and discourses of victimhood and violence are interwoven. The lecture will draw on critical race theories and post/de-colonial perspectives in order to explore the complex lived experiences of these ethnic categories as played out in everyday life. The variety of ways in which differences between ethnic groups are hierarchized and stereotyped is the basis of everyday prejudice, but it also underlies wider justification of imprisonment and violence in the region. The lecture explores this from both the Han and Uyghur lived experience in order to demonstrate how these discourses take on meaning.

In doing so this lecture explores ethnic identity in Xinjiang as well as China more broadly. It explores some of the ways in which ‘Chineseness’ is increasingly conceptualised in official rhetoric as a culturally, and racially homogenous identity. Such discourses have serious repercussions for Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities who are positioned as ‘infected’ by ‘foreign influences’, namely, their religion.