While conducting ethnographic fieldwork in Northwest China in 2014, anthropologist Darren Byler found that an Uyghur language novel, The Backstreets, helped Uyghurs to narrate their own stories. By shifting the frame of the narrative of colonial violence away from the authority of the state toward the work it takes for the colonized to live, this difficult, absurdist fable gave young Uyghurs a way to articulate experiences of dehumanization and rage. Its English-language translation and publication also gave the novelist, Perhat Tursun, a way of refusing his own silencing through censorship and, ultimately, imprisonment.

Darren Byler is an anthropologist and Assistant Professor of International Studies at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, British Columbia. He is the author of Terror Capitalism: Uyghur Dispossessionand Masculinity in a Chinese CityandIn the Camps: China's High-Tech Penal Colony. His current research is focused on state power, policing and carceral theory, infrastructure development, and global China.

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