Book Talk on Reconfiguring Racial Capitalism: South Africa in the Chinese Century

 

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 (November 2024, Duke University Press) recasts these relations of power as racial capitalism in a global moment of Chinese ascendance.

 

In this book talk, Huang argues that Chinese migrants act within global structures of white supremacy, anti-Blackness, racial capitalism, and colonialism that they did not create but still perpetuate. Toward this end, she gives an ethnographic account of Han Chinese racial formations and anti-Black racism as they are refracted through the intimacies and proximities of race, gender, and sexuality in South Africa. These emerging colonial formations urge a deprovincialization and recalibration of critical terms for the “Chinese Century.”

 

 

Mingwei Huang is an interdisciplinary scholar of race, migration, colonialism, and capitalism and assistant professor of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at Dartmouth College. Huang’s book Reconfiguring Racial Capitalism: South Africa in the Chinese Century (November 2024, Duke University Press) explores racial formations, racial accumulation, and capitalist exploitation in the 21st "Chinese Century” from South Africa.