Erasure and Empire: Uyghur Muslim Cultural Resistance to Genocide under the Global War on Terror

Abstract

This article analyzes resistance of Muslim Uyghurs to the genocide perpetrated against them by the Chinese government under the global war on terror. We use historical, political, and cultural analysis of journalism, personal narrative, poetry, film, and traditional music to argue that Uyghurs use cultivation – bearing witness, zikr and remembrance, communal religious practices, and ecopoetry – as part of their practices to actualise survival and liberation. In doing so, we uncover how the global war on terror is employed as a policy and justification by a network of states (China, the United States, and countries in the Arab world) to serve the conflicting political and economic interests that enable settler-colonial dispossession, displacement, and elimination of Indigenous and racialised people – Uyghurs and Palestinians – especially women and children.