Paper short abstract:

Drawing on in-depth interviews with Uyghur and Kazakh former-detainees this paper argues that a digitized diagnosis of social “untrustworthiness” functions as a type of social brutality from which recovery is perpetually beyond reach and normalized as an excessive social violence for its own sake.

Paper long abstract:

Questions of digital confinement intersect with broader questions regarding social subtraction and social futures. Taking the digital and ritual narrative spaces of public shame where prior “untrustworthiness” is enacted by criminalized Uyghurs and Kazakhs in Northwest China as its object of analysis, this paper examines the way former Muslim detainees and their families attempt to recover their social life after internment. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 13 former detainees it examines the liminal post-internment reentry phase when individuals attempt to publicly atone for their prior “terrorist” actions in on-line declarations and ceremonial speeches. It considers how rituals of shame are enacted and at times, refused, by examining how former detainees aspire to denarrativize and reclaim their social roles. Ultimately it shows how the digitized and spectacularized diagnosis of “untrustworthiness” functions as a type of social brutality from which recovery is perpetually beyond reach and normalized as a type excessive social violence for its own sake. It shows that this unthought violence is enacted through ostracization of former detainees. Family fracture often follows as guilt moves through association. In this manner the subtracting process of social death starts from legal and political narratives and rituals and then radiates through the community. By mapping these narratives and their effects, this paper makes a larger intervention in social science literature on systematic humiliation and the strategies and social infrastructures of contemporary state power.