Unruly Speech: Displacement and the Politics of Transgression

By Saskia Witteborn

Unruly Speech explores how Uyghurs in China and in the diaspora transgress sociopolitical limits with "unruly" communication practices in a quest for change. Drawing on research in China, the United States, and Germany, Saskia Witteborn situates her study against the backdrop of displacement and shows how naming practices and witness accounts become potent ways of resistance in everyday interactions and in global activism. Featuring the voices of Uyghurs from three continents, Unruly Speech analyzes the discursive and material force of place names, social media, surveillance, and the link between witnessing and the discourse on human rights. The book provides a granular view of disruptive communication: its global political moorings and socio-technical control. The rich ethnographic study will appeal to audiences interested in migration and displacement, language and social interaction, advocacy, digital surveillance, and a transnational China.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Release date: Jan 17, 2023
• ISBN: 9781503634312

Book preview

Unruly Speech

Displacement and the Politics of Transgression

SASKIA WITTEBORN

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Stanford, California

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Stanford, California

© 2023 by Saskia Witteborn. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press.

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper.

Cataloging-in-Publication Data available upon request.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022012262

ISBN: 9781503633391 (cloth), 9781503634305 (paper), 9781503634312 (ebook)

Cover design: Rob Ehle

Cover background: paper patterns from pxhere and Flickr | Renee, via CC 2.0 license.

Typeset by Newgen in Minion Pro 10/14.4

GLOBALIZATION

IN EVERYDAY LIFE

SERIES EDITORS

Rhacel Salazar Parreñas,

Hung Cam Thai

EDITORIAL BOARD

Héctor Carrillo

Jennifer Cole

Kimberly Kay Hoang

Sanyu A. Mojola

Saskia Sassen

For my parents who support me in all of my journeys

For my brother who gives me peace of mind

Contents

Preface

Introduction: Uyghurs and the Space of the Limit

1. Conceptual Reflections on Transgression, Communicative Practice, and Displacement

2. Xinjiang: Unity in Inequality

3. East Turkistan: Belonging and Human Rights

4. Testimonio as Embodied and Digital Practice

Conclusion: Unruly Speech and the Production of Difference

Notes

References

Index

Preface

I am writing the last sentences of this book in Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (SAR) in early 2022, in a city that is coping with the Covid-19 pandemic and with creating a sense of normality after the 2019–2020 political unrest and the introduction of a national security law. The law declares subversion, secession, terrorism, or collusion with foreign entities as crimes and regulates freedom of speech and the press.¹ As a woman born in East Germany, I did not think I would find myself in a rapidly changing system that replicates some of my early experiences with censorship of speech and thought. Yet here I am, finishing a book on unruly speech that I started writing in Hong Kong during intellectually and politically more open times with seed grants from The Chinese University of Hong Kong, followed by a General Research Fund grant from the University Grants Committee in Hong Kong (2008–2010). When I began my research journey, little did I know that this project would become a long-term observation of shifting geopolitical relations between China, Europe, and the United States. Like many of my students from across the border in mainland China, I have been a witness to the economic growth of the country during my visits to academic institutions and travels from urban to rural areas. Every time I have gone, I have been moved by the hospitality and curiosity of people and their eagerness to travel and study abroad. This was also true for the many Uyghurs I met, whose physical and digital mobility has been heavily regulated over time but who found ways to connect with the outside world.

This book traces communication practices like naming place and testimonio to explore how those practices transgress established political and social limits and create spaces for change. It illustrates what happens when not only people move but their unruly speech as well. Two of the largest Uyghur diasporas in the West—in the United States and in Germany—are part of this study. There are research site omissions such as Istanbul or the Central Asian countries of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Kyrgyzstan that have sizable Uyghur populations. The reason is that I turned to countries where I knew the legal, social, and political system well enough to conduct the research. While being difficult companions, distrust, self-censorship, and fear were important practical guides for me during my research. The East German system taught me well. These guides were theoretical signposts that eventually made me write about the most universal human symbol system—language—and humans’ capacity to use it in transgressive and actionable ways. Within these logics, I have not included the term Uyghur in the title of the book as the book is not an ethnographic area studies account of a bounded group. The book is about the universal ability of humans to be defiant against dominating cultural and political powers.

What makes the Uyghurs a particularly important case in our global political climate celebrating cultural diversity and human rights, on the one hand, and fear of difference, on the other, is the Uyghurs’ embodiment of this diversity, their struggle for socioeconomic and cultural rights, and their instrumentalization as a group to be feared. The book takes the angle of unruly communication, referring to transgressive practices and their sociopolitical and technological moorings. Speech, or more broadly, communication, is understood here as action and as the various types of expressive modes and practices, including oral and written, embodied and digital. By carving out the conditions for these modes and practices, the book also points to the systemic and moral challenges China and what is commonly called the West are facing today. These challenges include the negotiation of political and economic difference, increasing nationalisms and protectionism, and the question of fundamental personal and collective rights. Even more, this book is about the potential of alliances and transcending constructed categories of the ethnic, national, and religious bond.

Most of my gratitude goes to the many people who generously shared their time and experiences with me. Those whom I thank in particular include the men and women who invited me to their homes for food and tea, showed me their orchards, shared sweet grapes, and laughed about my bread-making skills. The same gratitude goes to the men and women in Germany and the United States who talked over pulled long noodles, lamb, and vegetables (laghman) and took the time to share their stories. A heartfelt thank you to the Uyghur scholars for sharing their impressive research, including Ildikó Bellér-Hann, Sean Roberts, James Millward, and Dru Gladney who answered my questions in personal interviews or via email.

I am indebted to Fengshi Wu, who journeyed with me to northwestern China for a project on nongovernmental organizations and the environment and whose research and social engagement I admire. The long conversations will stay with me as will the hotpot meals with friends in the TianShan and Kunlun mountains. I also extend my thanks to my colleagues in the Netherlands who gave me a platform for a keynote and for presenting this book. I am particularly grateful to my talented research assistant who contributed to the book through his computational analysis and the creation of the figures. The study benefited immensely from the dedicated readings and suggestions of the anonymous reviewers, for which I am deeply grateful. I wish to acknowledge the excellent editorial assistance provided by Marcela Cristina Maxfield and Sunna Juhn from Stanford University Press and by Charlie Clark and Anita Hueftle from Newgen. I also thank Michael Duckworth, who reviewed some earlier chapter versions.

I would like to express my great appreciation to my PhD supervisor Gerry Philipsen for teaching me how to listen, and listen again, to understand cultural logics at work. I am also deeply grateful to John Stewart, one of my best teachers, who introduced me to the philosophy of communication and to the theory and practice of dialoguing with people with very different points of view. I thank Tamar Katriel; meeting Tamar has been an intellectual and personal gift. Tamar’s intellectual companionship and dedicated writings on Palestinian-Israeli relations and peace activism have been a moral compass for me. Thank you for reading a draft of the book and for giving me valuable feedback. Moreover, the intellectual generosity, hospitality, and friendship of my Hong Kong colleagues, the school’s staff, and friends have nurtured me during my writing journey. There are too many to mention here but a heartfelt thank you to all for the warm welcome in Hong Kong, the intellectual stimulation, the many Thermos bottles of hot water in my office, my first taste of durian and soju, and the fun Cantonese, Shanghainese, and Taiwanese-themed cookouts over the years.

Without the support of my family who let me leave for the US and then Hong Kong, I would never have written this book. My most profound gratitude goes to my parents who have supported me in all my adventures and who provide a loving home whenever we return to Germany, to my wonderful brother who has shouldered many responsibilities due to my absence, and to my in-laws who have always been there for me. I was lucky to be raised by parents and grandparents who sensitized me and my brother to the art of contextual translation between public and private communication and who taught us to be inquisitive. Geopolitical constellations and peaceful disobedience resulted in the fall of the Berlin Wall and reunification of the Germanys. The reunification enabled me to study in various parts of the world and travel but, more importantly, to meet my husband Tim. His unwavering love and support, intellectual ingenuity, and fantastically cooked meals have been the main pillars of strength for me while writing this book. We were lucky but walls still exist. As of 2022, Uyghurs in China are enclosed by physical and digital walls and are punished for speaking out, as are many other people worldwide who refuse to remain silent in face of ongoing social injustices. This book is dedicated to them.

INTRODUCTION

Uyghurs and the Space of the Limit

I HAD CONDUCTED FIELD research in southern Xinjiang¹ for one week when I met an English-speaking Uyghur young man in a carpet store while looking at the woven products. He sat cross-legged on the floor next to a friend. After some negotiations and buying a piece, I asked him about the history of the province, and its linguistic diversity. I had become curious as the hotel staff had given me three maps in three scripts: one in Chinese characters, one in Cyrillic, and a third in the Uyghur script (Arabic). Neither the young man nor his friend said much, but when I inquired whether they knew tour guides for the city and its surroundings, the young man asked for my phone number. The next day I received a call, summoning me to to talk about the tour right away. When I arrived, the man gestured for me to enter a room in the back of the store and spoke to me in an urgent voice:

It is dangerous to ask about history. Very dangerous. Please stop. I have many stories of men who talked to tourists and were asked by undercover police to report to the police station. I sold a very nice carpet once to a tourist and then was questioned by the police. Sometimes they follow you, especially if you are with foreigners. They want to see whether you tell them something dangerous, like politics.

The speaker hesitated but went on to tell me that if I really wanted to know, the area was called a different name but neither he nor anybody else could talk about it. People stay quiet, they don’t want to get in trouble. Only when I got up to leave did the young man say under his breath, We call it East Turkistan. Don’t mention that name. He was immediately reprimanded by the friend who put his index finger briefly to his lips while saying: Stop the talk. The walls have ears. You know that. We cannot say it. It should be Xinjiang.

The verbal sanctioning of the name East Turkistan was an indicator that unruly speech had occurred. The speaker decided, if only for a brief moment, to break into a performative mode by using a repressed set of verbal resources. The urgency with which he spoke, the low voice, and the interruption by his friend were all indicators that the young man had transgressed a limit. The gesture of a hand to lead the listener into a safe space, the finger put before one’s mouth, and a smile indicating not knowing an answer were nonverbal cues that I learned to read as announcements of unruly speech and a transgression.

In contrast, East Turkistan was the name of choice of Uyghur migrants in Germany and in the United States. In 2008, I observed Uyghurs in Munich, Germany, holding signs during protests and shouting in English, "Free the Uyghurs, Stop massacres in East Turkistan, Stop the assimilation politics in East Turkistan, Human rights for East Turkistan," repeating the messages in German, using the name Osttürkistan. For bystanders, Osttürkistan or East Turkistan was a faraway place, and the people holding the flags an unfamiliar group protesting injustice. The boisterous group of Uyghur rights protestors looked like a tiny island in a sea of shoppers, ice cream–eating tourists, and busy, well-dressed Munich residents. In contrast to the case of Tibetans, very few of the passersby had heard of Uyghurs. An older man asked me, Who are they and what are they talking about? Yogurt? The man’s instinctive phonetic mistranslation demonstrated the large social distance between him and the protestors who had left China for Germany. Phrases like Free the Uyghurs or Human rights for East Turkistan gained traction when Uyghurs were joined on other days by Tibetan groups, Amnesty International, and UNPO, the Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organization, which helped raise general awareness about Uyghurs. Nevertheless, in contrast to Tibetans, Uyghurs have been little known in Europe or North America in the past. There are two main reasons, according to Uyghur interviewees in Germany and the United States. First, Uyghurs are Muslims. While Tibetans have gained support from Western governments and people, moral support for Muslims can be scarce as a result of suspicion and distrust after the September 11 attacks in the US, the violent deaths of critics of Islam in Europe such as in the Netherlands and France, and the one-sided and heavily mediated linkages between violence and Islam. Second, unlike the Dalai Lama, Rebiya Kadeer, the former long-time leader of Uyghurs in exile, has gained only marginal global attention and support.

East Turkistan is an example of unruly speech practice. Unruly speech refers to the oral, written, embodied, and digital modes of expression that exceed the limit of what is permitted to be said, written, or shown. Unruly speech calls the limit into question by illuminating its social and political mooring (Foucault 1977) and by pointing to the actors and mechanisms that allow for expression to happen. Unruly speech is transgressive precisely as it questions boundaries between set categories, exposes the limits of the sayable and doable, and reveals the conditions for what can be articulated, heard, and seen (Jervis, 1999) in a communicative space, as in the example in the carpet store. Merleau-Ponty describes this space as the means whereby the position of things becomes possible (1962, 167), including an imagination of alternative relations between self and other. The space announced by unruly speech has potential because taken-for-granted communicative roles are rearranged, providing the base for social change. The space can have the qualities of a safe environment in which the unspeakable can be told and trust can be created through productive debate about diverging ideas, as Conley (1997, 180) maintains:

In these moments pregnant with the fantasy of imminent communication, something is about to make manifest the taking of place in which, suddenly, among a collectivity of participants, a space becomes invented. In it circulated the affirmative interrogative, you, too?! that gives cause to solidarity.

Denis Hollier writes that traditional institutions are able to tolerate any message, including the most subversive ones, so long as they remain messages and do not call its code into question (1989, 1040). Speech is action, as discussed at length by speech act theorists (Austin 1962; Searle 1969) and communication scholars (Carbaugh 2017; Philipsen 1992). Culturally situated speakers draw from communicative norms, values, and codes and act upon them in daily life (Katriel 2021; Philipsen 1992, 1997; Philipsen and Coutu 2005). Unruly, transgressive communication engages the codes governing a social and political structure, including the codes to speak, be heard, and be (in)visible. Uyghurs who are represented in this book have called the political and social codes into question. They engaged not only the political code in China but social codes in Uyghur culture as well.

Transgressions also act as catalysts, as Stefan Horlacher maintains (2010, 15). The young man described in the encounter in the carpet store had a scared facial expression when making his transgressive move as he was not sure whether he could trust me as an outsider. At the same time, he seemed to release a pent-up energy through the urge to make known a collective perspective. This urge was expressed in the diaspora in Germany and the United States where Uyghurs advocated for human rights and belonging. In contrast, in Xinjiang, speaking about history became inextricably linked to the question about place and was eventually subject to speech censorship. Fear and distrust by local Uyghurs became even more tangible when I walked through the streets of Kashgar, an old oasis city on the fringes of the Taklamakan desert and a trading hub for centuries, close to the borders with Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. In the old town, Uyghurs hustled out of my way and closed their doors while avoiding my gaze. They were right to be wary of me, as I was shadowed throughout my stay. For example, after visiting the main mosque and standing outside the gate, I was photographed by a young man who exited the premises after prayer. The man also sat in the lobby of the hotel where I stayed the same evening, reading a newspaper. He observed me when I went online in the internet cafe of the hotel and when I went out.

Having grown up in East Germany, I was accustomed to the practice of being followed, along with my family members, physically and symbolically. Low-level surveillance, so it seemed, was a routine way of making the other internalize self-censorship and dissuading people from speaking in unruly ways. Moments of self-censorship represent a productive breach, however. These moments expose the repressed and unspeakable as a rich field for exploring transgression as part of the social process. Uyghurs’ self-censorship and discrepancies in naming place oriented me to the names Xinjiang and East Turkistan as practices that exemplify the crossing of limits.

Practices are understood here as spatially and temporally dispersed ways of acting (Shove, Pantzar, and Watson 2012). Practices are co-constituted by premises and symbols, with a symbol being a vehicle for a conception (Philipsen 1992, 8). Premises express beliefs of existence (what is) and of value (what is good and bad) (8). In this study, place names are conceived of as vehicles for imagined physical and social place, backed by beliefs of what is and their valuation. As such, premises encapsulate the implicit or explicit beliefs that interactants have about each other, the interaction, and the physical and social place in which they find themselves (Carbaugh 2017).

Like place names, testimonios were an unruly speaking practice. They were typically told in unelicited ways in personal interviews. Here is an example. Roshan, a Uyghur woman in her early thirties, was among those who had migrated to Germany. I met her in Munich in 2010 and interviewed her several times. Early on, in a personal interview, she witnessed to experiences of flight and persecution that transcended a personal experience and gestured to a collective narrative. During a business trip to Kazakhstan, she was informed that her mother had taken ill and that she had to return immediately. Roshan knew that her mother had no illness and that she was targeted for her activism and distribution of leaflets addressing forced abortions and discrimination against Uyghurs in the labor market. Roshan never returned to Xinjiang but used her friends’ networks to hide in Central Asian countries before starting the journey to Germany, reaching Munich in the early morning hours on a cold winter day and applying for asylum, which was granted. Roshan tried to participate in as many of the Uyghur protests as she could to raise awareness. Roshan’s story of flight and ongoing advocacy is typical for Uyghurs in the diaspora who mobilized politically and engaged in defiant ways of speaking and acting. Her testimonio is told in detail in chapter 4.

Even more, testimonios on websites and social media were practices that pushed the human rights discourse. The affordances of digital technologies, such as intertextual linkages and visibility, helped amplify the reach of the testimonios and are also explored in chapter 4. Witness accounts are conceptualized here as testimonio in reference to the Latin American political genre of seeking justice by linking individual to collective experience and narrating it to the world (e.g., Beverley 2005; Deeb-Sossa 2019; Figueroa 2015; Marquez 2019; The Latina Feminist Group 2001; Villenas 2019). Testimonio grew out of the persecutions, civil wars, and violence experienced by different populations in Latin and South America since the 1960s. I employ testimonio instead of the legalistic term testimony in this book to position the witness account as a political act. I use the term to highlight an ontology of violence that transcends geopolitical locales and is traceable through the marks it leaves on bodies, minds, words, and human-object relations.

In digital contexts, transgressive practices like naming place and testimonio cannot be discussed without the notion of visibility, as visibility is one main affordance of these contexts (Treem and Leonardi 2013). Media-type visibility is linked to what Brighenti (2007) calls social-type visibility, which means social recognition. Social recognition through mediated visibility is often controlled by political and social actors, including governments, legal bodies, and social groups with the power to influence public and political discourse. Control-type visibility transform(s) visibility into a strategic resource for regulation, writes Brighenti (2007, 339). Powerful are those who become visible on their own terms. Examples are governments and transnational organizations that create the parameters for what is visible in digital spaces and what remains hidden. Digital testimonios posted on activist, media, and advocacy organization websites, as discussed in chapter 4, are a showcase for open source data and mediated visibility, giving Uyghurs international exposure.

For example, a video witness account was posted on WeChat by a young Uyghur man named Merdan Ghappar. The account was published in an article by the BBC in August of 2020 (Sudworth 2020). Merdan sits handcuffed on the metal frame of his bed in a small room with bare walls. The windows are open and through the metal bars, one can hear public information announcements about Xinjiang politics and history. Xinjiang has never been ‘East Turkistan’ echoes through the loudspeaker, and neither has a state ever existed by that name. Two years back, Merdan had been the shining example of Uyghur integration, one learns from the BBC article. He had worked as a model for the online retailer Taobao in the southern Chinese city of Foshan and was an eloquent young man with very good Chinese language skills. He was sent to prison for sixteen months for the alleged sale of cannabis. Two months after his jail sentence was served, in January of 2020, he was flown back to Xinjiang and accompanied by two officers to his home town of Kuqa. Merdan then sent a video to his parents, followed by text messages on WeChat. The messages narrated in Chinese what had happened to him after arriving in Kuqa. He was kept in a police jail, wearing a black head sack and leg shackles and handcuffs, connected by an iron chain, according to the WeChat texts displayed in the BBC article (Sudworth 2020). Merdan’s whereabouts were still unknown by January of 2022.

Open source information has become important for researching, reporting on, and documenting human rights violations (Dubberley, Koenig, and Murray 2020). Nevertheless, there are challenges. Like Dubberley, Koenig, and Murray (2020), Guay and Rudnick (2020) discuss incidental threats when working with digitized materials and the potential harms for already vulnerable populations resulting from data experiments and unintended data disclosure. The digital testimonios analyzed in chapter 4 are publicly available witness accounts that were posted with the intention of raising awareness and to gather and archive evidence of rights violations. In addition to the empowering aspects of digital technologies, the discussion of digital surveillance of Uyghurs in chapters 2 and 3 illustrates control-type visibility and the power of technology for regulating Uyghurs’ speech.

To recapitulate, my research was guided by the questions of how transgressive communication practices challenge and dislocate established social and political limits, how they travel across geographical space, and how they create opportunities for sociopolitical change. Language is inherently dislocating (Cooren 2010) as it evokes principles, rules, persons, and things in whose name people speak. Those principles and things gain agency through the communicative process (Cooren 2010). Naming practices like East Turkistan and premises like belonging, human rights, and suffering are assigned agency as people make them say or do things, thereby acting in their name (Cooren 2010, 9). Communication can move local premises across borders and into a global discourse and