Darren Byler is Assistant Professor of International Studies at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, British Columbia, and the author of the forthcoming book Terror Capitalism: Uyghur Dispossession and Masculinity in a Chinese City. He writes a regular column for SupChina and his work has appeared in The Guardian, Foreign Policy,Noema Magazine, Prospect Magazine, Guernica, ChinaFile, as well as many academic journals. He received his PhD in anthropology at the University of Washington.
“In the Camps is short, highly readable, and will appeal to anyone
interested in violence and social justice.” —Los Angeles Review of
Books
“[An] intimate, sombre and damning account.” —Financial Times
“The voices of detainees filter through the pages of Darren Byler’s
new book.” —The Economist
“Darren Byler has unwound this truly bone-chilling story about the
methods the Chinese state is using to construct essentially a city
that is a prison.... This is a really important work.” —MSNBC’s
Chris Hayes
“Deeply argued and deeply human.” —China Review International
“In the Camps is both a powerful testament on its own to one of the
most disturbing developments in contemporary world politics, and a
call for the kind of further scholarship that is needed to fulfill
the charge this work clearly illuminates.” —The China Quarterly
“The best short guide to the Xinjiang dystopia as it currently
stands. In the Camps is a highly readable series of personal
stories and vignettes from real people that shows how the Chinese
state is using technology and its vast powers to pursue a cruel and
ruthless policy of social engineering.” —Jeremy Goldkorn,
SupChina
“In this essential work Byler, an expert on Uyghur culture whose
research has been instrumental in exposing the Xinjiang camps, lays
out the case with a particular focus on the use of
technology—facial and voice recognition, smartphones as tracking
and surveillance devices—as a tool of control.... Tough, but vital,
reading.” —Alec Ash, The Wire China
“Enriched by the author’s dogged reporting and deep empathy for the
victims, this is an authoritative account of a real-life dystopia.”
—Publishers Weekly
“A chilling indictment of the direction of global capitalism and
its failure to respond to the ethical wasteland promoted by the
Chinese state.” —Mekong Review
“[Byler] offers more chilling evidence of the ‘smart’ camps in
northwestern China, designed to restrict, punish, and ultimately
exterminate the Indigenous population.... A book full of harrowing
revelations of systematic injustice in China and the disturbing
involvement of its foreign enablers.” —Kirkus Reviews
“Essential, accessible, erudite, empathetic, and deeply troubling.
Told through individual stories of a handful of the hundreds of
thousands trapped within China’s ‘extrajudicial mass internment
program,’ In the Camps is required reading for anyone who wants to
better understand the plight of Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims in
China today, and more generally for those concerned about the
proliferation and deployment of new hi-tech methods of state
surveillance and control over vulnerable populations.” —Himal
Southasian
“While structural racism in the context of Chinese settler
colonialism in Xinjiang evokes similar racisms in different parts
of the world, Byler documents and analyzes how the new, digitized
racialization of China’s Muslim minorities—an ‘automated
racialization’ in a vast system of internment camps—has taken the
meaning of dehumanization to a completely different level. Stark
and devastating, and yet filled with empathetic detail for the
victims, this book is required reading for anyone interested in
racial justice across the world. Byler’s book shows us that this is
not just China’s reality, but a global reality where the violence
of one colonial regime cannot be disaggregated from global
complicity.” —Shu-mei Shih, President, American Comparative
Literature Association, and Edward W. Said Professor of Comparative
Literature, UCLA
“While the central contributions of the book are the interviews
with Uyghurs impacted by Xinjiang’s security state, Byler carefully
underlines the foundational role Silicon Valley
companies—particularly Microsoft—played in its construction.” —Jack
Poulson, Executive Director, Tech Inquiry
“In the Camps offers an urgent and deeply humane intervention in a
discourse often clouded with nationalism and Sinophobia. While
presenting an unflinching picture of the Islamophobic human rights
abuses perpetrated against Muslim populations in Xinjiang by the
Chinese state, Byler highlights the ways in which these practices
draw from familiar settler colonial logics, which work to construct
racialized ‘others’ against whom exploitation and harm is made
permissible.” —Meredith Whittaker, Minderoo Research Professor at
NYU and Faculty Director of the AI Now Institute
“It's true, no matter how much the Chinese government denies it—in
this richly sourced book, Darren Byler describes not only how
members of Muslim ethnic groups in China are thrown into
re-education camps just for practicing their religion, but also how
those outside the camps are deprived of their freedom by a web of
electronic and human surveillance. Built around true personal
stories, the book is a riveting—and terrifying—account of one of
the worst human rights abuses being perpetrated in the world today.
—Andrew J. Nathan, Class of 1919 Professor of Political Science,
Columbia University
“Byler’s concise book is a vital read because it foregrounds the
experiences of people detained in the camps, stories that overlap
and cohere into a raw portrait of systematic brutality and
dehumanising routines.” —Nick Holdstock, author of China’s
Forgotten People: Xinjiang, Terror and the Chinese State
“Is it fair that the pairing of ‘Chinese government’ and
‘surveillance’ has become contemporary shorthand for the atrocity
of technologically tainted dehumanizing authoritarianism? Darren
Byler’s brave and meticulously researched book, In the Camps,
presents such a chilling account, even historically informed,
cynical readers will be shocked by the scale, intensity, and
soul-crushing brutality of the systems of control that he portrays,
in painstaking detail, as normalized in Xinjiang while forgotten
about by the rest of the world.” —Evan Selinger, professor of
philosophy, Rochester Institute of Technology
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