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. In this talk, Huang provides an overview of racial capitalism’s 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 women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at Dartmouth College.
Co-sponsored by Rutgers Center for Chinese Studies and Rutgers Global Asias Initiative