Jan Ke-Schutte, "Angloscene: Compromised Personhood in Afro-Chinese Translations" (U California Press, 2023)
New Books in Higher Education
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The Association of Nature and Blackness
A number of synologists read it and thought to themselves, oh my goodness, but this is not racism at all. This is merely just somebody attributing aesthetically appropriate naturalistic features as a contrast to a robotic Chinese society in some sense. So I would warn against the easy relativisms within which we read these associations in the, let's say, synological archive in China. The association of nature and blackness could be construed in benign ways, but it can certainly be construed in the types of violent ways that we see here. It was something that has been a very prominent bugbear on the job market before the book came out. A lot of hostility in synological audiences who
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