China’s Assistance Program in Xinjiang

Yuhui Li, Rowman & Littlefield Publishing, 15 August 2018 A link to the book can be found here. Summary China’s Assistance Program in Xinjiang closely examines and follows the impact of the partnership assistance program (PAP) in Xinjiang introduced in the 1990s. Yuhui Li notes PAP was expanded in 2010 as a response to the 2009 attack […]

The great dispossession: Uyghurs between civilizations

Ildikó Bellér-Hann and Chris Hann, LIT Verlag, January 2020 A link to the book can be found here. Summary Based on their fieldwork in Xinjiang in 2006-2009, Ildikó Bellér-Hann and Chris Hann trace the experiences of Uyghurs as the state has worked to bring them in line with China’s broader national identity. They examine how “macro-level […]

Negotiating Inseparability in China: The Xinjiang Class and the Dynamics of Uyghur Identity

Tim Grose, Hong Kong University Press, 15 January 2020 A link to the book can be found here. Summary Tracing the lives of several students from the “Xinjiang Class,” namely Uyghur students who went to boarding school in other parts of China under a state boarding program, Grose’s ethnography reveals the complicated identity formation processes that […]

The War on the Uyghurs 

Sean R. Roberts, Princeton University Press, 18 August 2020 A link to the book can be found here. Summary Roberts shows how China is using the US-led war on terror to erase the cultural identity of its Muslim minority in the Xinjiang region. Description Within weeks of the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington, […]

Securing China’s Northwest Frontier: Identity and Insecurity in Xinjiang

David Tobin, Cambridge University Press, September 2020 A link to the book can be found here. Summary Tobin analyzes the tense ethnic relations between Han and Uyghur peoples within a Chinese state, and argues that their enmity is further exacerbated due to the PRC Government treating Chinese identity as a matter of security. Description In the […]

Land of Strangers: The Civilizing Project in Qing Central Asia

Eric Schluessel, Columbia University Press, October 2020 A link to the book can be found here. Summary Schluessel’s book traces the consequences of the Qing empire’s nineteenth-century project to make Xinjiang’s Turkic-speaking Muslims embrace a culturally Chinese identity. Taking a social history perspective, the book examines the impact of this colonial project on families, on identity, […]

Worse than Death: Reflections on the Uyghur Genocide

Mantimin Ala, Rowman & Littlefield Publishing, February 2021 A link to the book can be found here. Summary In this book, Ala, an Uyghur diaspora scholar, reflects on the increasingly oppressive political climate Uyghurs experience in contemporary Xinjiang. He argues that the autonomous region was made a colony of the PRC in 1949, and that Uyghurs, […]

The Contest of the Fruits

Edited by Guangtian Ha and Slavs and Tatars, MIT Press, October 2021 A link to the book can be found here. Summary With half of its contributors being Uyghurs from the region, The Contest of the Fruit is a rare, refreshing book at a time when so much academic publishing on the topic of Xinjiang is […]

Xinjiang Year Zero

Edited by Darren Byler, Ivan Franceschini, Nicholas Loubere, ANU Press, January 2022 A link to the book can be found here. Summary Xinjiang Year Zero takes a decolonial and anti-racist stance in its examination of Xinjiang and argues that the colonization of Xinjiang must be linked to other instances of contemporary colonization in places like Hong […]

The Xinjiang Emergency: Exploring the Causes and Consequences of China’s Mass Detention of Uyghurs

Edited by Michael Clarke, Manchester University Press, February 2022 A link to the book can be found here. Summary This edited volume assembles an interdisciplinary collection of articles examining the experiences of Turkic Muslims in Xinjiang. Chapters discuss the historical trajectory that continues to shape these experiences, a wide array of past and present settler-colonial practices, […]