This is part of Lissa Crane's class, "Anthropology of China." The talk is open to the public. Everybody is welcome. It is generously co-sponsored by Rutgers Global.
Abstract
This talk examines the Chinese party-state’s project to effect total control of Uyghur space through urbanization and the re-development of indigenous urban space in Xinjiang. I focus on the case of Kashgar: the two-thousand-year-old node for a sprawling transnational network of co-ethnic trade routes, the material and symbolic heart of Uyghur urbanism, and, most recently, a backdrop for Han social media influencers and host city for the 2024 annual China Central Television (CCTV) lunar new year gala. I will trace the evolution of twenty-first century development logics in southern Xinjiang’s largest city and show the physical changes wrought at each moment. I argue that, since the Orientalist curiosity of Han academics was piqued in the early 2000s, the symbolic destruction of urban space in the heart of the pre-modern city has evolved from Haussmann-style securitization and generic Disneyfication to something arguably more sinister. Since 2015, the city has been remade into a sort of Uyghur-themed Westworld set at the precise peak of Qing Imperial power – while its residents are coerced to either enthusiastically perform imperial subjecthood or risk removal and re-engineering.
Bio
Lauren Hansen Restrepo is an assistant professor in the Growth and Structure of Cities Department at Bryn Mawr College. Her research interests include Chinese urban planning, state-society relations in Chinese cities, and Chinese ethnopolitics. She earned a PhD in City and Regional Planning from Cornell University in January 2017. She is currently working on a manuscript, Coercing Urbanism: Toward a Totalitarian Politics of Land in Xinjiang, which examines the central state’s efforts to re-engineer everyday life in Xinjiang through a re-assertion of spatial control and an erasure of indigenous cultural and economic relationships to local space.