Uyghur Women Activists in the Diaspora: Restorying a Genocide

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This book explores the life stories of ten Uyghur women, all prominent political activists in the international Uyghur advocacy movement. Born and raised in East Turkestan/Xinjiang in the 1970s-90s, each woman departed from China before 2005 and chose to settle in Western countries. Today, they work tirelessly to defend the rights of Uyghurs and Turkic peoples in China, to raise public awareness of the PRCs campaign of colonization and population reduction, recognized by eight countries today as a genocide. These narratives are based on interviews conducted over Skype or Zoom between 2020 and 2021, collected as a form of oral history. Relying on techniques of narrative analysis, the book focuses on the escalating tensions, turning points and other motivating factors (religious, political, psychological) that prompted their transformation in self-identity, ideology, and the emergence of a new Uyghur-Muslim feminism. The book describes how these women activists are navigating the competing reality constructions of the situation in Xinjiang, and effectively restorying a genocide that is ongoing in their homeland to bring about social and political change.

Author Bio

Susan J. Palmer is an Affiliate Professor at Concordia University, Canada, and is also the Principal Investigator on the four-year SSHRC-funded research project, "Children in Sectarian Religions" at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, where she teaches courses on new religious movements. Dilmurat Mahmut is an independent researcher and his research interests include Muslim identity in the West, immigrant/refugee integration and Uyghur diaspora identity. Abdulmuqtedir Udun is a Uyghur researcher, journalist and interpreter based in Ottawa, Canada.