Derek Sheridan

Among Chinese migrants in Tanzania, “Heiren (黑人)” (black person/ people) is a ubiquitous term with many referents, encapsulating everyone from labourers to state officials, and ranging from an ethno-racial category to an individual pronoun. In English translation, the term bears on a contentious debate regarding racialisation in Africa-China relations. In this paper, based on seventeen months of fieldwork among Chinese migrants in Tanzania, I examine racialisation in everyday discourse, and also the politics of (white) ethnographic reportage on (non-white) racism. I focus on the social lives of the word heiren among Chinese, examining how it is deployed in heterogenous social situations and discursive contexts. I argue that the use of ‘Heiren’ flattens otherwise heterogeneous experiences with and attitudes towards Tanzanians, contributing to the construction of an African other. Specifically, talking about Heiren becomes a way that economically privileged but politically vulnerable Chinese migrants talk about the tense relations they have with Tanzanians. However, I argue the significance of Heiren talk is not that it defines ‘the Chinese’ in isolation as ‘racist’, but rather how it becomes discursively complicit with global anti-blackness.

Among Chinese migrants in Tanzania, “Heiren (黑人)” (black person/
people) is a ubiquitous term with many referents, encapsulating
everyone from labourers to state officials, and ranging from an
ethno-racial category to an individual pronoun. In English
translation, the term bears on a contentious debate regarding
racialisation in Africa-China relations. In this paper, based on
seventeen months of fieldwork among Chinese migrants in
Tanzania, I examine racialisation in everyday discourse, and also
the politics of (white) ethnographic reportage on (non-white)
racism. I focus on the social lives of the word heiren among
Chinese, examining how it is deployed in heterogenous social
situations and discursive contexts. I argue that the use of ‘Heiren’
flattens otherwise heterogeneous experiences with and attitudes
towards Tanzanians, contributing to the construction of an African
other. Specifically, talking about Heiren becomes a way that
economically privileged but politically vulnerable Chinese
migrants talk about the tense relations they have with Tanzanians.
However, I argue the significance of Heiren talk is not that it
defines ‘the Chinese’ in isolation as ‘racist’, but rather how it
becomes discursively complicit with global anti-blackness.

Many accounts of Chinese migration in Africa compare China to “the
West.” However, lived historical experiences, social hierarchies and moral
mappings of the division of labour have mediated how different peoples in
different contexts have received, interacted with and given meaning to
Chinese migrants. In Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, Tanzanians talk about so called Chinese “wamachinga” (petty traders) who have complicated longstanding ideas about “African” and “non-African” roles in the economy,
and who have both opened and closed opportunities for different African
traders. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in the key Tanzanian wholesale
market of Kariakoo, I examine how the entry of Chinese goods and traders
has been associated with shifting local economic hierarchies. I argue that
debates over the presence of Chinese traders are less about “China” than
about the politics of which roles belong to whom in a hierarchical division
of labour.

Keywords: migration; trade; racialization; moral economy; Africa–China;
Tanzania

Vivian Chenxue Lu, from the Fordham University, Derek Sheridan, from the Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica, and Mingwei Huang, from the Dartmouth College, had a fascinating conversation on the implications of the ethnographies of mobility. After their presentations, the speakers shared comments and their questions, as well as responded to questions from audiences. The session is moderated by Cheryl Schmitz, from the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin

Based on the life histories of several Chinese migrants and their families to Tanzania and neighbouring countries, Sheridan examines how “Africa” became both an imagined and desired destination at specific moments when China’s changing domestic development made existing livelihoods and strategies of social mobility no longer possible. This talk examines how “Going to Africa to develop” has been premised on the historically contingent (and also continuously changing) uneven geography of development between Africa and China after reform; and how these conditions have afforded the different ways Chinese migrants have thought about their own potentialities and those of their African interlocutors

In a Tanzanian seaside dojo, Sempai Ali Issa Hassan, a Swahili martial artist, filmmaker, and healer, offers an alternative history claiming the East Asian martial arts originate in the Afro-Islamic world. Starting from his reaction to a visit by a Chinese Shaolin master, we trace the contours of our experience making sense of claims which both challenge and recast assumptions about Afro-Asian cultural exchange.

Despite open US support for the Kuomintang (kmt) during the martial law period, opposition and pro-independence politics to this day have been haunted by the spectre of the American empire. Imaginings of US power and intentions, however, have often exceeded the actual institutional traces of US presence, both extending and subverting US power. In this article, I explore how imperial conditions during martial law were imagined through the relationships Taiwan dissidents had with two kinds of US expatriates: foreign service offfijicers and civilian anti-kmt activists. While the former were formally bound to the principle of 'non-interference' despite local appeals, the latter justifijied 'intervention' as resistance against existing US support of the kmt. Based on a close reading of memoirs and historical surveys by former diplomats and activists, I examine how the micro-politics of the Cold War US presence contributed to spectres of American empire beyond the intentions of its putative planners.

Call for Papers

Workshopping Approaches to Race, Racism, and Racialization in Ethnographic Examinations of China-Africa and South-South Encounters

January 13, 2017
New York University

The spectre of race haunts the China-Africa moment. A consequence of the steady stream of sensational stories about South-South interactions is the realization of W.E.B Du Bois’s observation that “crossings of the global color line make for anxious investigations.” The historian Jamie Monson argues that the study of “China-Africa” has become a “hot” topic precisely because the expansion of Chinese capital and migration to Africa (and vice versa) has disturbed implicit racial geographies and global hierarchies of value. Surprisingly however,  critical or intersectional perspectives on race have been limited in the emerging field of China-Africa studies. Political economists and ethnographers have frequently gestured towards issues of race, racism and racialization in African-Chinese interactions (or talked around it in terms of culture, language, ethnicity etc.), but a sustained in-depth, critical, and reflexive conversation is needed.  Instead, we have seen a pattern of impassioned apologetic or polemic responses that follow periodic “racist scandals” which appear in international media reporting on the topic. These scandals, ranging from a restaurant in Nairobi that banned black patrons after sunset, to a Chinese laundry detergent ad that recycled the trope of “washing” a black man into whiteness, have frequently become focal points in a predominantly “West-East” narrative of comparative racisms originating in the global North.  These scandals have been simultaneously interpreted as either tokens of “deep-seated” Chinese racisms or hypocritical “Western” media constructions or misinterpretations. These debates touch on the very definition of “racism” and its use in the discussion of global inequalities, discourses, and practices, both in the context of a “rising” global South and the lingering inequalities of the “West and the rest.” Missing from these discussions, however, have been the insights that ethnographic approaches could offer, or a critical stance on the positionality of experiences and claims about race, racialization, and racism.

On January 13, 2017, we will gather at New York University to move beyond periodic scandals and grapple with the concepts of race, racialization, and racism more broadly within the context of China-Africa or South-South interactions. We invite up-and-coming scholars who are wrestling with these issues, particularly in Chinese-African connections, but also in transnational Afro-Asian, and South-South formations more generally. What we are seeking is not so much completed or polished work, but rather thinkpieces, reflections, and works in progress which evince attempts to think through these issues. We especially welcome scholars who have conducted (or plan to conduct) ethnographic fieldwork or in-depth historical research. The aim of the workshop is to promote a conversation which we hope will both sharpen critical approaches to race in the study of China-Africa, and also contribute to the anthropology of race more broadly.

We hope to address the following questions during the workshop:

Are expressions of anti-black racism in China best understood as “ignorance,” “ethnocentrism,” “colorism,” classism, products of nationalism informed by social Darwinism, or what? What is the relationship between racial prejudice and structural racism? Can they be independent of each other?

What does it mean to map concepts like race and racism onto the study of these issues? How do we approach racism critically in these domains? What intellectual genealogies are we building upon? How do ethnographic treatments of race shape the positionality of the ethnographer and his/her interlocutors along axes of racial identity, gender, and/or class? How does one write critically about race in China-Africa interactions without themselves reproducing racial categories of Chineseness and Blackness?

Topics of discussion might include, but are not limited to:

Citizenship, migration, and labor regimes
The afterlives and affordances of “Afro-Asian solidarity”
Interpersonal trust and ethics
The everyday language of race in quotidian Chinese-African interactions
Global hierarchies of value
Convergences and divergences between “race” and “suzhi”
(In)commensurabilities between “race,” “ethnicity,” “nation,” “minzu,” “zhongzu,” culture, and civilization in China
“Yellow Peril” narratives globally and in Africa particularly
Chinese migrants as “Asian middlemen” in Africa
Interracial desire and miscegenation anxieties
Blackness and Whiteness
Afro-Orientalism
Discourses of race in both Chinese and African print, television, and online media
Cyber-racism, “polite” racism, and anti-racism
Representations of race in literature and film
Racialized geographies and “empire”
The “social lives” of race-based categories
Race, racism, and politics in the production of social scientific knowledge about China-Africa
The semiotic politics of identifying discourses, images and practices as “racist” or “racialized”
Anti-racist discourses and projects in China
Critical comparative treatments of "black" experiences in China versus the global north and other parts of the global south
Structural racism and global inequality
Racialization of labor, consumption, and exchange

We welcome pieces that touch on the questions and/or discussion topics above. Please send a short description of your research questions and topic along with a CV to Derek Sheridan (derek_sheridan@brown.edu) and Melissa Lefkowitz (mfl270@nyu.edu). The deadline to apply is Friday, November 18, 2016.

The workshop will take place from 8:30 am to 1:00 pm in Room 706, Rufus D. Smith Hall (25 Waverly Place), New York University.

Sincerely,

Melissa Lefkowitz (Department of Anthropology, New York University)
Derek Sheridan (Department of Anthropology, Brown University)
Event sponsored by the Department of Anthropology at New York University.