Placing Racial Capitalism: South African Genealogies, Chinese Difference
Since the turn of the millennium, the return of the Peoples 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. In this talk, Huang provides an overview of racial capitalisms travels across South Africa and North America and three illustrations of Chinese racial accumulation: the exploitation of Black labor (heigong), Chinese proprietary relations, and channels for the circulation of surplus.
Mingwei Huang is an interdisciplinary scholar of race, migration, colonialism, and capitalism and assistant professor of womens, gender, and sexuality studies at Dartmouth College.
