Surviving from the Uyghur Crisis: Ethnicity, Gender, and Ethics

Language: English and Putonghua, with a Uyghur channel translating summaries

语言：英语与普通话，同时提供维吾尔语频道翻译概要

تىل: ئېنگىلىزچە ۋە خىتايچە ( ئوخشاش ۋاقىتتا يەنە ئېنگىلىزچە – خىتايچە، ئۇيغۇرچە – خىتايچە ۋە ئۇيغۇرچە – ئېنگىلىزچە نەق مەيدان تەرجىمە قانىلى تەمىنلىنىدۇ)

Information about the event i Uyghur ئۇيغۇر ھەرىكەتلىرى ھەققىدە ئۇچۇرلار (PDF, 2 MB, new tab)

The premiere issue of multi-lingual literature journal She& (accessible on Amazon Kindle) focuses on Testimony from Female Uyghur Survivors—a Crisis of Ethnicity, Culture and Political Identity. This issue publishes a collection of poems written by Uyghur women, and a first Chinese-language work of literary witness to the Uyghur re-education camps—a 124 thousand characters semi-autobiography novel Banu’s Redemption. The novel sets against the backdrop of the current administration of Xinjiang, of protagonist Banu (a minkaohan Chinese teacher) who, after being set up as a terrorist financing suspect, escapes the fate of being locked in a camp. This webinar will present:

• A conversation with Modanhan, the author of Banu’s Redemption;
• Jinyan Zeng and Xibai Xu’s study “Ethnicity, Gender, and Ethics in Banu’s Redemption”. The study explores how the protagonist Banu, through her process of witnessing a re-education camp, and through female kinship and friendship, she reconstructs her ethnic Uyghur, national and gender identity. Banu’s Redemption provides actionable ethics for both survival and redemption: resisting re-education through labour as a policy of dehumanization through parresia (speaking everything, freely) in the Foucauldian sense. And
• Vanessa Frangville’s research report “Women and Activism in the Uyghur Crisis”. Facing current Uyghur crisis, this research discusses how women took a leading role in traditional institutions such as the World Uyghur Congress or local Uyghur organizations, but also in new types of associations, as testifiers for their disappeared relatives or as direct witnesses of life in camps. This talk, based on in-depth interviews conducted in 2018 and 2019 with Uyghur women from North America, Australia and Europe, will show how women gradually came to the forefront and reconfigured Uyghur activism.

• Register for the event here

Speakers

Modanhan (Pen Name), author of Banu’s Redemption, co-founder and editor of She&. Modanhan was born in 1961 in Shawan County, Xinjiang. She graduated from the Department of Chinese at Xinjiang University in 1982. She is a professor in Chinese Literature and holds a PhD in Turkic Literature. Before 2017, she was teaching International Chinese in a university in China. Currently, she lives in Berlin.

Jinyan Zeng is a Post-doctoral Fellow at the Centre for East and South-East Asian Studies, Lund University. Her creativity and research focus on gender and sexuality, culture and politics, intellectual identity and social activism, and ethnicity, with particular emphasis on China. She is the co-founder and editor of She&.

Xibai Xu is formerly a D.Phil. candidate in Politics at the University of Oxford. He is currently completing his doctoral thesis on how the Chinese state regulates social organizations through the increasing use of market mechanisms and tools, including direct procurement of social services and indirect control over private charitable foundations.

Vanessa Frangville is a Senior Lecturer in China Studies at the Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB) and Director of EASt, ULB’s research centre on East Asia. She is also the co-director of Routledge’s “Contemporary East Asian Societies” series. Her current projects deal with cultural and artistic expressions of trauma and nostalgia in the Uyghur diaspora since 2018, with a focus on performative and audio-visual arts.