Rebecca Ruth Gould
Bio
I am author of the award-winning book Writers and Rebels: The Literature of Insurgency in the Caucasus (Yale University Press, 2016). My Wikipedia page.
Subscribe to my YouTube Channel Poetry & Protest. ⬆️
Stories (18/0)
The War on the Uyghurs
Since 2017 the Uyghur people — the largest ethnic group of Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of northwest China — have been systematically detained in secret concentration camps, tortured, forced to work against their will, and coercively re-educated by the Chinese state in order to erase their Muslim identities and distinctive cultural heritage. The Uyghurs are an indigenous Turkic people of China who converted to Islam a thousand years ago. Closely related to the Kazakh, Uyghur is a language written in the Arabic script with a long and developed literary tradition. In recent decades, when Uyghurs sought de facto political independence from China, the Chinese state has responded by accusing these “separatists” of “terrorism.” Although the atrocities currently being perpetrated against the Uyghurs are now public knowledge, significant activist initiatives have yet to emerge from the left. This should change, because the oppression of the Uyghurs is as urgent an issue as others on which the left is more active, such as Palestine.
By Rebecca Ruth Gould3 years ago in The Swamp
The politics of refusal
In the opening chapter of I Refuse to Condemn: Resisting Racism in Times of National Security, edited by Asim Qureshi, contributor Shenaz Bungalwala documents the contradictory expectations that British Muslims have navigated since the onset of the US-led "war on terror" in 2001.
By Rebecca Ruth Gould3 years ago in The Swamp
What the Tsarnaevs Didn’t Know
When the Boston bombing trial dominated the media, its perpetrators, the Tsarnaev brothers, were associated with a geography scarcely known by Americans: Chechnya. If there was any examination in Chechnya’s history, rarely did it go beyond this: the bombers hailed from a Republic whose leader, Dudaev, had briefly made a bid for independence in 1992, the upshot of which was a catastrophic twenty-year-long war that decimated the local population.
By Rebecca Ruth Gould3 years ago in The Swamp