Saskia Witteborn's ethnographic volume Unruly Speech: Displacement and the Politics of Transgression examines the forms of speech used by Uyghurs in locations around the globe to open up spaces of resistance and negotiation across Uyghur, Chinese, and English linguistic frontiers. Unruly Speech explores how Uyghurs, a diaspora formed by the Turkic Muslim group from China's Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, use what Witteborn identifies as testimonios (witness accounts of state violence) and geopolitical toponyms to subvert Chinese state narratives and situate themselves in a global human rights discourse and international legal regime. Taking the English and Chinese speech acts of the Uyghur diaspora, as well as interviews with Uyghurs in China, as her object of study, Witteborn presents a theoretical model for understanding the digitization of social movements and flows of stateless populations in the face of emergent illiberal state formations around the world.
The book is the product of a...
