State of Dispossession: Politics of Land and Memory on the Sino-Kazakh Borderland

How does a self-described anti-imperial socialist state conceal a settler colonial project on its frontiers? How are embodied memories and practices entangled with colonial secular reterritorialization? Chinese state-building is contingent on settler colonialism, whether in the Maoist era, the reform era, for national border security during the Sino-Soviet split, or for ecological security in the 21st century. The experience of dispossession on the Inner Asian borderland happens, irreversibly and consistently, as the state’s rhetoric about development and modernity changes. Analyzing the contentious narratives of the Chinese state and Muslim Kazakh epistemologies of ancestral land and kinship expressed through life-cycle rituals, oral poetry, and storytelling, this talk demonstrates what it means to be Muslims living through a continuing colonial occupation and the precarious future it unfolds.

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About the speaker

Guldana Salimjan is a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Historical and Cultural Studies at the University of Toronto. She applies feminist interdisciplinary methods in in her work on colonial technologies, environmental injustice, and lived experience in China’s peripheries.