Speaker Dr. Mingwei Huang

Theorizing in the Chinese Century
Friday, September 30, 2022
12:00 pm to 1:30 pm in Bryan Hall Room 229-230

In the new millennium, the storied return of the People’s Republic of China to the African continent and African migration to China have engendered novel configurations of global racial capitalism and empire. With new flows between China and South Africa also come new encounters, desires, and anxieties and changing ideas about racial Blackness, Chineseness, and whiteness. In this talk, Dr. Huang draws on ethnographic fieldwork on Chinese migration to South Africa to consider Han Chinese racial formations and anti-Black racism through intimacies, proximities, gender, and sexuality. Sino-African worlds invite us to consider racial, capitalist, and imperial formations more expansively, and recalibrate the keywords race, racial capitalism, and empire when dislodged from their more familiar historical, geographical, and disciplinary contexts. If the 21st century will be the “Chinese Century,” what kinds of difference are emerging? What theoretical and methodological reorientations does this moment ask of us?