Full Description
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.
Contents
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
