美中全球议题对话项目

In Reconfiguring Racial Capitalism (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. Huang discussed her book in this conversation with African studies scholars Anita Plummer and Christopher J. Lee.

This event was co-sponsored by Georgetown University’s Africa-China Initiative, the Initiative for U.S.-China Dialogue on Global Issues, and the African Studies and Asian Studies Programs at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, as well as Howard University’s Center for African Studies.