“<i>Reconfiguring Racial Capitalism</i> is a tour de force in terms of its original and nuanced theoretical interventions into scholarship on racial capitalism. Its originality lies in its move beyond reliance on the binaries of the West and the rest, first world/third world, or a generic Global South. Instead, Mingwei Huang challenges the widespread, reductive debate about whether China is merely replicating Western imperialism. She offers an incredibly insightful analysis of how racial capitalism works in a south-south relationship where the superiority of Euro-American whiteness is not at the center but nonetheless lingers. This is one of the most important books on racial capitalism I’ve read in a long time.”

- Lisa Rofel, author of, Desiring China: Experiments in Neoliberalism, Sexuality, and Public Culture

“Mingwei Huang significantly challenges the representation of China’s capitalist ventures as distinct and unbridled. She shows that we cannot understand Chinese capitalism without recognizing its deep imbrication in the global racial hierarchy that was established through European expansion and the emergence of white supremacy over the past five centuries. A timely, smart, innovative, and important book.”

- Jemima Pierre, author of, The Predicament of Blackness: Postcolonial Ghana and the Politics of Race

In Reconfiguring Racial Capitalism, Mingwei Huang traces the development of new forms of racial capitalism in the twenty-first century. Through fieldwork in one of the “China malls” that has emerged along Johannesburg’s former mining belt, Huang identifies everyday relations of power and difference between Chinese entrepreneurs and African migrant workers in these wholesale shops. These relations, Huang contends, replicate and perpetuate global structures of white supremacy, anti-Blackness, capitalism, and colonialism, even when whiteness is not present. Huang argues that this dynamic reflects the sedimented legacies and continued operation of white supremacy and colonialism, which have been transformed in the shift of capitalism’s center of gravity toward China and the Global South. These new forms of racial capitalism and empire layer onto and extend histories of exploitation and racialization in South Africa. Taking a palimpsestic approach, Huang offers tools for understanding this shift and decentering contemporary Western conceptions of race, empire, and racial capitalism in the Chinese Century.
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An ethnography of Chinese capitalist projects in Johannesburg that traces everyday relations of power and difference between ordinary Chinese migrant entrepreneurs, southern African workers, and South African communities at a Chinese wholesale mall along Johannesburg’s old gold mining belt.
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Preface  ix Acknowledgments  xiii Introduction: Theorizing in the Chinese Century  1 Part I. Layered Histories 1. Palimpsest City  35 2. Sojourner Colonialism  62 3. Afro-Asian Adjacencies  92 4. Afterlives of Gold  123 Part II. Racial Formations 5. Criminal Obsessions and Racial Fictions  157 6. The Erotic Life of Chinese Racism  189 Part III. Frictions and Futures 7. Follow the Surplus  219 Epilogue: Afro-Asian Futures  243 Notes  251 References  261 Index  289
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Produktdetaljer

ISBN
9781478026792
Publisert
2024-11-15
Utgiver
Vendor
Duke University Press
Vekt
680 gr
Høyde
229 mm
Bredde
152 mm
Aldersnivå
UP, 05
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Innbundet

Forfatter

Biographical note

Mingwei Huang is Assistant Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Dartmouth College.