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

Dr. Guldana Salimjan

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.

Tuesday, May 6, 2025
3:00 PM – 5:00 PM
Online Webinar

Note: This lecture will take place as an online webinar. Registration is required for attendance.

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 with Kazakh women and close reading of PRC gazetteers and Communist Party histories, Guldana Salimjan uncovers a history of Kazakh dispossession and resistance erased by the discourses such as class struggle, women’s liberation, border security, and ecological conservation. This colonial erasure undergirds the continued racial/ethnic hierarchy and what Salimnjan refers to as a settler Han innocence in China.

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.

This event is co-sponsored by the History of Gender & Sexuality Working Group and the Program on Central Asia, under the auspices of the UCLA Asia Pacific Center.

Please note that this event will be held online. RSVP is required. To register, please do so through the Program of Central Asia website link: ww.international.ucla.edu/apc/event/17153