Primo Levi, Camp Power, and Terror Capitalism: A Conversation with Darren Byler
Darren Byler And Ivan Franceschini
What does Italian writer and Holocaust survivor Primo Levi have to tell us about life in reeducation camps in Xinjiang today? What role does labour play in these facilities? What is terror capitalism and how does it relate to other frontiers of global capitalism? Can there be such a thing as ‘benign’ surveillance? These and other questions are at the centre of this conversation with anthropologist Darren Byler, who in recent years has emerged as a leading voice in documenting the mass detention of Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in northwestern China. The impending publication of three books of his—In the Camps: China’s High-Tech Penal Colony (Columbia Global Reports, October 2021), Xinjiang Year Zero (co-edited with Ivan Franceschini and Nicholas Loubere, ANU Press, forthcoming 2022), and Terror Capitalism: Uyghur Dispossession and Masculinity in a Chinese City (Duke University Press, January 2022)—offers us an opportunity to revisit some key aspects of his work.