Reconfiguring Racial Capitalism: South Africa in the Chinese Century
Thursday, 22 February, 2024 - 13:00
WiSER Seminar room or register here for Zoom.
WISER invites you to join us for a hybrid seminar:
Reconfiguring Racial Capitalism: South Africa in the Chinese Century (Forthcoming October 2024, Duke UP)
Presented by Mingwei Huang
Since the turn of the millennium, the return of the People’s Republic of China to the African continent has been framed as a neocolonial scramble or revival of south-south cooperation. An ethnography of Chinese capitalist projects in Johannesburg, Reconfiguring Racial Capitalism: South Africa in the Chinese Century recasts these relations of power as racial capitalism in a global moment of Chinese ascendance. The book draws on historical analysis and ethnographic research sited at a Chinese wholesale mall along Johannesburg’s old gold mining belt to offer a palimpsestic method for reading the colonial present. It argues that Chinese migrants act within global structures of white supremacy, anti-Blackness, capitalism, and colonialism that they did not create but perpetuate. The incorporation of Chinese from margins to center expands and fortifies racial capitalism and empire while urging a deprovincialization of critical terms based in Euro-American contexts. The book offers an ethnographic analysis of “Chinese capitalism” as racial capitalism, while also engaging South African theorizations of racial capitalism. A study of Chinese racial formations, it explores the emergence of racial and imperial forms “after whiteness.”
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