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In Northwest China, young Uyghur men foster friendships with one another as they flee colonial dispossession in their villages and migrate to the city. These friendships, which ultimately offer forms of protection in these migrants’ lives, are enacted through storytelling about colonial violence. Their storytelling is best understood as a processual staging of social life, one that holds in tension the violence of ethnoracialization and the palliative care of homosocial friendships. The stories of police brutality and job discrimination that these young men tell are an everyday enactment of the trauma staged in Uyghur‐language fiction about colonial alienation—a narrative form that both inspires Uyghurs to tell their stories and, in turn, is inspired by that experience. In a similar way, storytelling and anti‐colonial friendship can also pull ethnographers into relations of intersubjective obligation that shape their anthropological practice of listening and writing. In some contexts, then, anthropology itself can be regarded as the work of anti‐colonial friendship. [dispossession, anti‐colonial friendship, masculinity, storytelling, police, colonial violence, anthropology, Uyghur, China]

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2011 and 2018, this article examines howUyghurs, a Turkic-speaking ethnic minority in China, found ways to excel in English language learning despite efforts by the national education system to focus their training in Chinese, the language of the colonizer. It argues that the alienation that resulted from the devaluation of Uyghur knowledge and nonstandard Chinese usage pushed Uyghur students to embody expanded subjectivities in a "third space" of English learning. It concludes with a discussion of how an internment camp system has foreclosed this space of limited autonomy for Uyghur students since 2017. [Alienation, third space, Uyghur, English learning, China]In 2004, English learning among Uyghurs took center stage. When Kasimjan Abdurehim, the founder of the private English school Atlan, won the Audience Choice Award in the Chinese national English-speaking contest, Uyghurs across the country took notice. They saw how he had highlighted his ethnic and cultural difference to his advantage: from the clothes he wore and the story he told to the way he interacted with the audience members and judges. One of their own had succeeded; for a few moments, he had the attention of the nation and he had done it without using wealth and privilege, without giving up his pride in his heritage or toeing the Party line. Since that time, Uyghurs have competed in the final rounds of almost every major English speaking competition in the nation. Although Uyghurs represent less than one percent of China's 1.4 billion population, they proved over and over again that they were able to hold their own with their Han competitors from the best schools in the country. 1 However, Uyghur English learner success began to change in May 2014 when Chinese state authorities declared the "People's War on Terror" and started a mass internment campaign that targeted Uyghur cultural and religious leaders. While initially Uyghurs were allowed to continue English language training schools, by 2017, many of the schools were closed and the instructors had been detained. When Byler visited the region in April 2018, he observed that dozens of our former teaching partners and interviewees had disappeared into a system of "reeducation camps" along with more than 1 million other Uyghurs. Uyghur-managed schools that had enrolled between 8000 and 10,000 students just 2 years before were shuttered, their doors sealed shut by Civil Affairs Ministry workers. He found less than ten remaining artifacts of the vibrant English learning movement in two private book shops that remained open. For instance, in a hidden corner, he spotted a DVD set of lectures from one of the instructors we had interviewed on multiple occasions and whose teaching philosophy and pedagogy shaped the content of this article. His family and friends told us he was taken away in 2017.