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

Abstract: How does anti-imperial nation-state-building justify and conceal a settler colonial project on its frontiers? This talk traces a seven-decade long process of the PRC’s dismantling and destruction of nomadic Kazakh lifeways and demonstrates the ways it mirrors earlier and concurrent processes of settler colonialism elsewhere. Through oral history interviews and close reading of PRC gazetteers and Communist Party histories, I uncover a history of Kazakh dispossession and resistance erased by the discourses of socialist collectivization, border securitization, agricultural development, and ecological conservation. This colonial erasure undergirds the continued racial/ethnic hierarchy and what I refer as a settler Han innocence in China.

Bio: 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. She has published writings in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Funambulist, Human Ecology, and a number of other venues.