Reconfiguring Racial Capitalism: South Africa in the Chinese Century [Hardcover]

InReconfiguring 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.USAn 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.Mingwei Huang is Assistant Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Dartmouth College.“Reconfiguring Racial Capitalismis 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 offerlã)