Reconfiguring Racial Capitalism: South Africa in the Chinese Century - Hardcover

Huang, Mingwei

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1478026790 ISBN 13: 9781478026792

Publisher: Duke University Press Books, 2024

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

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

Edition details

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Publication date: 2024
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1478026790
• ISBN 13: 9781478026792
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 328