Mingwei Huang, an Assistant Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Dartmouth College, explores the complexities of racial capitalism in South Africa influenced by Chinese economic activities. He discusses the nuanced power dynamics between Chinese entrepreneurs and African migrant workers, emphasizing how these relations perpetuate historical legacies of colonialism and white supremacy. Huang sheds light on sojourner colonialism, the complexities of migration, and critiques traditional neo-colonial narratives, challenging listeners to rethink Sino-African interactions in the context of global capitalism.
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insights INSIGHT
Understanding the Chinese Century
The Chinese century signals a global order shift with China's rise as a premier economic power.
It challenges Western-centered theories of capitalism, race, and empire, urging a reorientation in understanding these concepts.
insights INSIGHT
Racial Capitalism Beyond Whiteness
Racial capitalism applies beyond white and Black dynamics, including Chinese and African contexts.
Chinese capital in Africa reconfigures but does not erase legacies of white supremacy and colonialism.
insights INSIGHT
Overlay of Chinese on Colonial Legacies
Chinese racial capitalism overlays European colonial legacies in South Africa without displacing them.
Though Chinese migrants exploit labor similarly, scale and historical context differ significantly from Western colonialism.
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Mingwei Huang's "Reconfiguring Racial Capitalism" examines the evolving dynamics of racial capitalism in 21st-century South Africa, focusing on the interactions between Chinese entrepreneurs and African migrant workers in Johannesburg's 'China malls.' The book challenges traditional understandings of racial capitalism by analyzing how these power relations operate even in the absence of white actors. Huang argues that these new forms of racial capitalism build upon and extend existing structures of exploitation and racialization, highlighting the enduring legacies of colonialism. The study employs a palimpsestic approach, revealing the layered histories and complexities of race, capital, and power in the Sino-African context. Ultimately, the book offers a nuanced perspective on the transformations of global capitalism and its impact on race relations.
China's Second Continent
Don Hagen
Howard French
In Reconfiguring Racial Capitalism: South Africa in the Chinese Century(Duke UP, 2024), 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.
New Books in Sociology 