303pp., illus., paperback, Duke University Press, Durham, 2024

ISBN: 9781478031031

Mingwei Huang's study is based on 18 months of ethnographic research at China City, one of the wholesale shopping centres along Johannesburg’s old mining belt selling low-cost goods from China. Focusing on the Chinese merchants' interactions with the African migrant shop workers, she argues that these relations perpetuate global structures of white supremacy, anti-Blackness, capitalism, and colonialism, even when whiteness is not present, and extend histories of exploitation and racialisation in South Africa.

“Reconfiguring Racial Capitalism is a tour de force in terms of its original and nuanced theoretical interventions into scholarship on racial capitalism. Its originality lies in its move beyond reliance on the binaries of the West and the rest, first world/third world, or a generic Global South. Instead, Mingwei Huang challenges the widespread, reductive debate about whether China is merely replicating Western imperialism. She offers an incredibly insightful analysis of how racial capitalism works in a south-south relationship where the superiority of Euro-American whiteness is not at the center but nonetheless lingers. This is one of the most important books on racial capitalism I’ve read in a long time.” Lisa Rofel, author of Desiring China: Experiments in Neoliberalism, Sexuality, and Public Culture

“Mingwei Huang significantly challenges the representation of China’s capitalist ventures as distinct and unbridled. She shows that we cannot understand Chinese capitalism without recognizing its deep imbrication in the global racial hierarchy that was established through European expansion and the emergence of white supremacy over the past five centuries. A timely, smart, innovative, and important book.” Jemima Pierre, author of The Predicament of Blackness: Postcolonial Ghana and the Politics of Race

Mingwei Huang is Assistant Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Dartmouth College.

RECONFIGURING RACIAL CAPITALISM, South Africa in the Chinese Century

: Huang (M.)

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