Thinking with Palimpsests: China, South Africa, and the Postcolony
Cultural Studies Salon Seminar with Dr. Mingwei Huang
Event Details
-
Thursday, September 25, 2025
7:30 PM - 9:00 PM
Zoom
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. Huang argues that Chinese migrants act within enduring structures of white supremacy, anti-Blackness, racial capitalism, and colonialism that they did not create but still perpetuate, albeit in different forms. This methods-oriented book talk illustrates palimpsestic approaches that work through overlapping colonial histories and conceptual disjunctures for writing histories of the present and theorizing colonialism, racism, and racial capitalism in “south-south” contexts.
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. She holds a PhD in American Studies from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. Huang’s first book Reconfiguring Racial Capitalism: South Africa in the Chinese Century will be published in November 2024 with Duke University Press. An ethnography of contemporary Chinese world-making in Johannesburg, South Africa, the book explores racial formations, racial accumulation, and capitalist exploitation in the 21st “Chinese Century,” while situating these emergent forms in longer entangled histories of Euro-American empire-making and global racial hierarchies. Her new research is focused on artisanal mining and extractivism in South Africa, anti-extraction activism, and reading mine archives for relational histories of global race-making, indenture, and migrant labor. Her writing has been published in Scholar & Feminist Online, Radical History Review, International Journal of Cultural Studies, Public Culture, Verge, Safundi, Made in China Journal (forthcoming pieces in African Studies Review, Critical Asian Studies, and Theory and Event) as well as edited volumes Anxious Joburg: Space, Affect, and Experience in a Global South City (Wits University Press/NYU Press, 2020) and New World Orderings: China and the Global South (Duke University Press, 2022), and online in Anthropology News and The Chronicle of Higher Education. She has been affiliated with the former Centre for Indian Studies in Africa at the University of Witwatersrand.
Contact Info
Zoom link available upon request