iPhones as Compromised Talisman: Data Control and the “Imperial In-Between” in Northwest China

Abstract This essay examines how Turkic Muslims in Northwest China have attempted to use a US consumerist technology regime to circumvent aspects of Chinese state contractor surveillance. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted over the past decade in and across the border from the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, it considers the utility of iPhone consumer privacy protections as an Uyghur uptake of something it calls the “imperial in-between”—a practice of using imperial sovereignty of one digital regime against another as a tactic of protection. This framing juxtaposes the imperial ambition of global Apple data control, as an outgrowth of US capitalist hegemony, with the colonial data harvesting of the People's War on Terror in China and the talismanic frisson that emerges in this tension. By opening up a critical examination of imperial multipolarity, the essay invites an understanding of the way targets of contemporary imperialism endure even as they are immobilized by it. Such a mode of becoming, it argues, can turn a fetish object into an anti-colonial talisman—an object that enables a powerful protection of relationships and the self.