Situating Racial Capitalism: South African Genealogies, Chinese Difference

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. Drawing from ethnographic research on Chinese capitalist projects in Johannesburg, Huang recasts these relations of power as racial capitalism in a global moment of Chinese ascendance. Drawing from Reconfiguring Racial Capitalism, in this talk, Huang provides an overview of racial capitalism’s travels across South Africa and North America and illustrates how Chinese racial accumulation takes shape through the exploitation of “Black labor” (heigong) and the circulation of surplus. The ethnography points to racial capitalist formations beyond North American contexts, urging a deprovincialization and recalibration of critical understandings of race, capitalism, and empire in the twenty-first ‘Chinese Century.’

Speaker: Minwei Huang