In Ginkgo Village: Trauma and Transformation (ANU Press, 2024), Tamara Jacka takes readers deep into a village in central-eastern China. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Ginkgo villagers experienced terrible trauma and far-reaching socioeconomic and political change. At the heart of this book are eight tales that draw on ethnographic and life-history research to re-create […]
Writing about race in Africa–China relations is contentious. On the one hand, there is an audience which assumes anti-Black racism in China to be self-evident and regards efforts to contextualise if not downplay it to be puzzling and problematic. On the other hand, there are those who consider discussions of anti-Black racism in China to be unreflectively imposing Western frameworks and contexts on a distinctively Chinese context. This essay argues that this tension is related to other contentions about the nature of political economic asymmetries in Africa–China relations, and the politics of knowledge production regarding who is speaking about whom.
In Black Ghosts: A Journey into the Lives of Africans in China (Canongate Books, 2023), Noo Saro-Wiwa investigates the experiences of economic migrants from Africa in today’s China. While the countries of Europe and North America and others in the Global North have established substantial roadblocks to commerce with African nations and African people, China […]
As in many other rural villages across China, the 300 or so residents of Upper Jidao in Guizhou Province have been ‘living with tourism’ (to use Hazel Tucker’s 2003 book title) since the early 2000s, when rural tourism development was widely and enthusiastically promoted by the Chinese State as the path to rural poverty alleviation […]
This essay delves into the language ideologies of the Uyghur diaspora community in the United States and their efforts to maintain their heritage language. It argues that the language ideologies of these Uyghurs significantly influence their language maintenance practices, such as forming social connections with like-minded individuals and enforcing rules at home for language maintenance. Additionally, the ongoing settler-colonial process of eliminating Uyghur identity in the Uyghur homeland is fostering a transnational language ideology that views the Uyghur language as integral to Uyghur identity and speaking Uyghur as a form of resistance.
How does settler-colonial imperialism operate in Asia, and what are the ways in which Asian Indigeneities become mobilised? To address this question, in 2017, I brought together scholars who are observing various settler-colonial and imperial dynamics and developments across Asia for a panel discussion titled ‘Asian Settler-Colonialisms and Indigeneities’ at the 116th annual American Anthropological […]
In Economic Thought in Modern China: Market and Consumption, c. 1500–1937 (Cambridge University Press, 2020), Margherita Zanasi skilfully marshals a wide range of primary sources and secondary literature in several languages to take readers on a fascinating journey through several hundred years of Chinese economic thought. Ghassan Moazzin: Your first book, Saving the Nation: […]
Over the past four decades in China’s forward march to capitalist modernisation, the nation’s vast urban expansion has been contingent on demolition and relocation. Since Xi Jinping came to power, projects such as the ‘Traditional Village’ heritage scheme have sought to gear development towards a new era in which Chinese heritage sits at the core. […]
World, Meet World is the title of this brief intervention. When considering what to call this, I was thinking of that quip I heard retold by a weary African thinker leaving a forum: ‘China comes to Africa to talk about trade, culture, and investment. The West comes to Africa to talk about China.’ I enter […]
Yabi is a controversial subcultural phenomenon active in China since 2019. Like the Western ‘hipster’, the yabi mash-up appropriation of styles from the ‘global supermarket of culture’ is deemed messy, superficial, and shamelessly middle class by mainstream critics. Through a historical analysis, this essay argues that the yabi exemplify the return of the feminine supernatural—present throughout imperial and modern Chinese history—as a response to the challenges of the Anthropocene from the present-day involuted generation.
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