Over the last five years, as Africa-China relations have moved beyond the honeymoon period and into a more complex stage, a number of incidents have exploded into global controversies about ‘race,’ ‘racism’ and racial hierarchies. Given this context, research on ‘race’ and ‘racism’ in Africa-China relations has been scarce and fraught with methodological issues and challenges. In this seminar, I first provide a critical analysis of the ways in which the existing body of Africa-China relations knowledge engages with the analytical categories of ‘race’ and ‘racism’. After that, following Monson (2015) and Lan (2016), who have both argued for the need of a ‘triangulation’ to better understand ‘racialisation processes’ in the relationship, I introduce the notion of ‘multiple triangulations’ to both analyse these processes and to distance the discussion from Euro-American binaries and dichotomies around ‘race’ and ‘racism’. This is followed by a brief discussion on one of the most recent controversies relating to ‘race’ and ‘racism’ in Afro-Chinese mediascapes. Towards the end of the seminar, I reflect on the most common methodological issues and challenges in the research on Afro-Chinese encounters. Finally, I discuss the need to develop a global (post-imperial) vocabulary of ‘race’ and ‘racism’, and indicate what may be the early steps towards doing so.

 

Roberto Castillo is an assistant professor at the Department of Cultural Studies at Lingnan University in Hong Kong. His academic training is in Cultural Studies, International Relations, History and Journalism. He has been researching African presence in China since 2010. His research interests are: transnationality; migration and mobility; the critique of nationalism and globalisation; China’s changing ethnoscapes with a focus on foreign presence in the country; Africa-China relations; the cultural politics of media representations of race/ethnicity; critical theory; and Chinese politics. He administers the website: http://www.africansinchina.net 

 

A recording of this seminar is available to view on the Centre's YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XdnECN5bCb0