Unruly Speech: Displacement and the Politics of Transgression

Saskia Witteborn's ethnographic volume Unruly Speech: Displacement and the Politics of Transgression examines the forms of speech used by Uyghurs in locations around the globe to open up spaces of resistance and negotiation across Uyghur, Chinese, and English linguistic frontiers. Unruly Speech explores how Uyghurs, a diaspora formed by the Turkic Muslim group from China's Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, use what Witteborn identifies as testimonios (witness accounts of state violence) and geopolitical toponyms to subvert Chinese state narratives and situate themselves in a global human rights discourse and international legal regime. Taking the English and Chinese speech acts of the Uyghur diaspora, as well as interviews with Uyghurs in China, as her object of study, Witteborn presents a theoretical model for understanding the digitization of social movements and flows of stateless populations in the face of emergent illiberal state formations around the world.The book is the product of a long-term mixed-methods research project that moved from China to Germany and the United States over the course of fifteen years, between 2006 and 2021. It is one of the first to carefully examine Uyghur diaspora discourse to understand how displacement shapes transnational political speech. This framing is important because, as the author makes clear, it does not reflect the perspectives of the majority of the twelve million Uyghurs who remain in their homeland in Northwest China; rather it is primarily a study of the way Uyghurs, who have been forced into exile, represent themselves to non-Uyghur audiences. Drawing on ethnographic interviews in China, and English and Chinese-language policy, media discourse, and interviews in and outside of China, the book centers on what Witteborn refers to as “unruly speech”: an inherently transgressive mode of communication because it challenges imposed social orders.Chapter 1 situates the project in existing scholarship on displacement and political speech practice. Witteborn argues that strategic visibility is crucial for Uyghurs to make themselves legible relative to international legal discourses and Western mass media. This practice is paradoxical since this legibility also opens Uyghurs to the gaze of the Chinese surveillance state and, potentially, to misreading by audiences that are both sympathetic and antagonistic to the Uyghur struggles for autonomy and community safety.Chapters 2 and 3 examine the usage of the geopolitical toponyms Xinjiang and East Turkistan, respectively. The term “Xinjiang,” which was assigned to the Uyghur and Kazakh homelands during the Qing Empire (1644–1911) literally means “new frontier,” or, as some Chinese-English language dictionaries from that era defined it, “colony.” It is therefore an overtly political toponym that connects the region to what is commonly referred to as China's “inner land” (Ch. neidi; Uy. ichki jaylar). Witteborn suggests that Uyghurs that she interviewed in Southern Xinjiang in 2000–2010 who used this term were internalizing an understanding of “backwardness” or inequality relative to other parts of the country. Nevertheless, by positioning themselves as participants in China's nation-building project even as they were also advocating for forms of Uyghur autonomy, they were showing that the term “Xinjiang” still carried with it an imaginary of community safety within the Chinese state.A decade later in her research among Uyghur diasporic communities in Germany and the United States, Witteborn found a near-universal usage of the term East Turkestan—which refers to the historical names of the East Turkestan Republics founded in the 1930s and 1940s. Drawing on analysis of social media data in Germany and the United States, Witteborn demonstrates how East Turkestan gained currency in among the Uyghur diaspora following the Xi administration's declaration of the People's War on Terror back in the Uyghur homeland in 2014. This is significant, because as Sean Roberts has shown for much of the previous two decades, the term “East Turkestan” had been closely tied in Chinese and English-language discourse with two inchoate organizations, the East Turkestan Islamic Movement and East Turkestan Islamic Party.1 These largely fictional associations based in Pakistan were labeled as “terrorist organizations” first by China and then the United States, as the Bush administration attempted to include China in a coalition to invade Iraq. That is to say, the term “East Turkestan” had to be reclaimed by the Uyghur diaspora in order to successfully disassociate it with the “terrorism” label. It was really only when the mass internment of Uyghur and other Muslim civilians began in 2017 that this reclaiming really took hold. Although largely unstated in the text, Witteborn's book is demonstrating this process of reclamation.In chapter 4 Witteborn examines the way Uyghurs in the diaspora enact testimonios through embodied and digital performances that evoke the mass trauma that the Uyghur community has faced as a result of mass internment and forced family separation. These testimonies, which often began with direct communication with the media in the form of interviews, were built into a self-organized movement to narrate and document shared experiences of state violence. Without them the statistics and policy related data gathered independently by non-Uyghur researchers would have been far less effective in moving mass audiences to be concerned about Uyghur struggles.Witteborn concludes the book by scaling up the argument of the book to show how communication practices create understandings of social reality and, as they do this, transform the abilities of communities to be recognized and new forms of solidarity to emerge. The speech acts of the Uyghur communities she studied have allowed them to reclaim an ethnonational imaginary and to evoke the human cost of state violence in the form of mass internment and surveillance, and corporate violence in the form of forced labor.Unruly Speech is an important book for understanding the ability of the Uyghur diaspora to shape their own futures despite processes of dispossession that mitigate against this. Though the deeper and more recent history of the toponym East Turkestan is not the central focus of Witteborn's reading of its diaspora usage, the book nevertheless opens up questions considered by Partha Chatterjee and others regarding the way colonized people imagine nationalist movements in ways that both replicate and deviate from received nation-state forms.2 Undergraduate and graduate students and scholars could utilize this text as a starting point to further examine how testimonios might themselves offer an opportunity for Uyghurs to build anti-colonial solidarity with Chinese citizens and the Sinophone world.

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