6 × 9  SPINE: 0.

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A ngloscene examines Afro-Chinese interactions within Beijing’s aspirationally cos-

Ke-Schutte
mopolitan student class. Jay Ke-Schutte explores the ways in which many contem-
porary interactions between Chinese and African university students are mediated
through complex intersectional relationships with whiteness, the English language, and
cosmopolitan aspiration. At the heart of these tensions, a question persistently emerges:
How does English become more than a language—and whiteness more than a race?
Engaging in this inquiry, Ke-Schutte explores twenty-first century Afro-Chinese encoun-
ters as translational events that diagram the discursive contours of a changing transna-

ANGLOSCENE
tional political order—one that will certainly be shaped by African and Chinese relations.

“A tremendously nuanced book that moves beyond the verities of postcolonial theory
as much as liberal illusions of postracialism in the academy. The ethnographic richness
of Angloscene in its expositions of tropes and situated encounters is remarkable and
pointed—even poignant.”—DILIP M. MENON, editor of Changing Theory: Concepts from
the Global South

Compromised Personhood in Afro-Chinese Translations

“Reflecting a critical sensibility from the Global South, Jay Ke-Schutte’s book defies Euro-
American-centric perspectives on language, race, and colonialism. The innovative concept

ANGLOSCENE
of the Angloscene offers an imaginative way to unpack the transnational power matrix
that conditions Afro-Chinese encounters.”—FAN YANG, author of Faked in China: Nation
Branding, Counterfeit Culture, and Globalization

“This book reveals the manner in which talk about signs of race and the racialization of
those engaged in talk readily emerge hand in hand within social encounters, so that to iso-
late them from each other is to lose sight of the processes through which inequity persists
in social life even when it is abjured.”—ASIF AGHA, Francis E. Johnston Term Professor of
Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania, and Editor-in-Chief, Signs and Society

JAY KE-SCHUTTE is a linguistic anthropologist and interdisciplinary

ethnographer in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at
Zhejiang University in Hangzhou.

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

www.ucpress.edu

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos,

University of California Press’s Open Access publishing pro-
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Cover design: Michelle Black Compromised Personhood in Afro-Chinese Translations

Cover illustration: Still from Notes Towards a Model
Opera (2015), courtesy of the William Kentridge Studio Jay Ke-Schutte
 Luminos is the Open Access monograph publishing program
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Angloscene
The publisher and the University of California Press Foundation
gratefully acknowledge the generous support of the
Philip E. Lilienthal Imprint in Asian Studies, established
by a major gift from Sally Lilienthal.
 Angloscene
Compromised Personhood in Afro-Chinese Translations

Jay Ke-Schutte

UNIVERSIT Y OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

University of California Press
Oakland, California

© 2023 by Jay Ke-Schutte

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND license.

To view a copy of the license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses.

Suggested citation: Ke-Schutte, J. Angloscene: Compromised Personhood in

Afro-Chinese Translations. Oakland: University of California Press, 2023.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/luminos.146

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Ke-Schutte, Jay, 1980– author.

Title: Angloscene : compromised personhood in Afro-Chinese translations /
  Jay Ke-Schutte.
Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2023] |
  Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2022025037 (print) | LCCN 2022025038 (ebook) |
  ISBN 9780520389816 (paperback) | ISBN 9780520389823 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: African students—China—Social conditions—21st century. |
  College students—China—Social conditions—21st century. | Students,
 Foreign—Social aspects—China—21st century.
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32 31 30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To my departed friend Yalong (Allen) Chen 陈亚龙, who saw the value of this work
before anyone else, but who left us too soon to see its completion. We miss you.
 C onte nts

Acknowledgments ix
List of Illustrations xi
List of Acronyms and Abbreviations xii

Introduction 1

Part I. PERSONHOOD
1. Chronotopes of the Angloscene 29
2. The Purple Cow Paradox 52
3. Who Can Be a Racist? Or, How to Do Things with Personhood 78

Part II. COMPROMISE

4. How Paper Tigers Kill 109
5. Ubuntu/Guanxi and the Pragmatics of Translation 130
6. Liberal-Racisms and Invisible Orders 146

Notes 167
Bibliography 173
General Index 187
 Ack nowle d gme n ts

I would first like to thank Xiao Schutte-Ke, my partner and mediator, without
whom this would have been a very different book. I would also like to express my
gratitude to my former teachers, Constantine Nakassis, Julie Chu, and William
Mazzarella, whose respective engagements with this research prompted my
analysis in many of the directions presented in this book. At the University of
California Press, I would like to thank my editors Reed Malcolm, LeKeisha Hughes,
Francisco Reinking, and Christopher Pitts who were exemplary in their profes-
sionalism while handling this project. Gratitude is also due to Asif Agha, Dilip
Menon, Darryl Li, and Ryan Jobson for their insightful suggestions, and to the
two anonymous reviewers whose feedback pushed the final writing of many sec-
tions in important ways. Michael Silverstein, Susan Gal, Kristina Wirtz, Charlene
Makley, and Judith Irvine have all, at different times, read, commented on, and
discussed the formulation of my ideas at class and at the annual Michicagoan
graduate student conference.
I want to acknowledge and thank Routledge Press and positions: asia critique
for granting permissions to make use of previously published materials, which are
cited in relevant chapters. I additionally want to thank the members of the Uni-
versity of Chicago Social Theory and Semiotics workshops; the CA/AC network;
Afrikaners Against Racism Network; Graduate Students United (UChicago); Wits
Institute for Social and Economic Research (WISER); Wits Anthropology Semi-
nar; #RhodesMustFall; #FeesMustFall; the Society for Linguistic Anthropology
(SLA); Media For Justice; Southwestern Minzu University Department of Anthro-
pology; Peking University Department of Foreign Languages; the University
of Chicago Beijing Center New Generation China Scholarship; the University of
Pennsylvania Semiotics Workshop; the Colorado State University Departments
ix
x    Acknowledgments

of Anthropology and Communication Studies; as well as the University of Chicago

Gender and Sexuality Studies Working Group. These institutions and groups gen-
erously provided forums in which many of the ideas in this book were tested.
To my informants in Beijing, I owe an enormous debt for your time and patient
indulgence of my interview methods and questions. I also want to acknowledge
members of my writing group at Colorado State University—Adrienne Cohen,
John Pippen, and Jessica Luna—for brief but highly generative exchanges. Thank
you also to the Stefan Landsberger Collection and International Institute of Social
History, Amsterdam, for maintaining their excellent archive, materials from
which appear in this book and are indicated accordingly. The permissions for
the cover image of this book were generously granted by the studio of William
Kentridge, and graciously arranged by Katherine Baloyi of the Marian Good-
man Gallery. Finally, I want to thank a list of individuals who—in one form or
another—provided indispensable friendship, mentoring, inspiration, and peer
support: Sneha Annavarapu, Joshua Babcock, Robert Blunt, Corneel Booysen,
Andrew Carruthers, Sharad Chari, Alex Chen, Yalong Chen, Lindelwa Dalamba,
Greg Dickinson, Drekpa Sherab, Bernard Dubbelt, Wade Goodwin, Grigory
Gorbun, Andrew Graan, Ha Guangtian, Elina Hartikainen, Kristin Hickman,
Julia Hornberger, Ana Huang, Mingwei Huang, Huatse Gyal, Daniel Hutchinson,
Yuan Ji, Moemedi Kepadisa, Ujin Kim, Lai Sumin, Erik Levin, Li Anshan, Li
Jin, Liang Yongjia, George Paul Meiu, Dilip Menon, Kelly Mulvaney, Mawethu
Ncaca, Kristina Nielsen, James O’Mara, Jessica Peng, Jessica Pouchet, Suvi Rautio,
Mary Robertson, Sanggay Tashi, Geshe Sangpo, Gillian Schutte, Gerhard Schutte,
Stefan Schutte, Derek Sheridan, Swami Iswaramayananda, Swami Karunananda,
Raffaella Taylor-Seymour, Marius Vermaak, Joshua Walker, Wang Bo, Hylton
White, Hai (Allen) Xiao, Dali Yang, Zeng Yukun, Zhuang Shuting.
Much of this book was written during a long period of extreme emotional
distress and personal difficulty following decades of extensive familial violence,
neglect, and abuse. In the academic context, these conditions were compounded
by unnecessary and unwarranted systemic as well as interpersonal cruelty by
administrators, teachers, and peers across the universities where I trained. Much
has to change in a context that should nurture ideas rather than destroy the bodies
that produce them. The individuals on this list, with small acts of kindness dur-
ing important times, helped in ways that they will never realize. For this I will be
eternally grateful. Any errors or omissions in this book are my own.
 Li st of I llustration s

1. Revolutionary Friendship Is as Deep as the Ocean  6

2. Bus route in Beijing  113
3. Three receptional dimensions of translation  117
4. Semantically relative associations of hei  121
5. Yao Ming studying English  125
6. Cowboy-themed ad for English and standardized test prep instruction  125
7. Racial arbitrariness  164
8. Infrastructural racism  164
9. Mirroring pragmatic stratifications of English and whiteness  165
10. Mirroring relativist ideologies of race and language  166

xi
 Acronyms and Abbreviation s

BRICS Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa

CCTB Central Compilation and Translation Bureau (Zhongyang Bianyi Ju)
CFL Chinese as a Foreign Language
CI Confucius Institute
CPS Central Party School (Zhonggong Zhongyang Dangxiao)
EFL English as a Foreign Language
FOCAC Forum on China–Africa Cooperation
GRE Graduate Record Examination
Hanban Office of Chinese Language Council International (Guojia Hanyu
Guoji Tuiguang Lingdao Xiaozu Bangongshi)
HSK Hanyu Shuiping Kaoshi (Standard Test of Chinese Proficiency)
RP Received Pronunciation

xii
 Introduction

In February of 2018, the Chinese national broadcaster, CCTV, televised the annual
Spring Gala concert. One segment of the show would go on to make unprece-
dented waves in the Euro-American media, which rarely, if ever, mentions one
of the largest televised events in the world. The BBC described the segment
as follows:
The controversial sketch was part of the four-hour CCTV New Year Gala—also
known as the Spring Festival Gala. .  .  . By some estimates, the show is the most
watched entertainment program on earth. The skit begins with a routine by a group
of African dancers in “tribal” attire and people dressed up as zebras, giraffes, lions
and antelopes. This is followed by a comedy skit where a young black woman asks
a Chinese man to pose as her husband when meeting her mother. While the young
woman is played by a black actor, her mother appears to be an Asian actor in black-
face make-up, donning a traditional outfit complete with huge fake buttocks. She
walks on stage carrying a fruit plate on her head and is accompanied by what is
thought to be . . . a black actor in a monkey suit, carrying a basket on his back.1

To contextualize this description, it is useful to understand that the Spring Gala

concert is watched, actively or passively, in almost every Chinese home, form-
ing a kind of backdrop to one of the most important national holidays in China,
the Spring Festival. In the days following the broadcast, excerpts from the Gala
concert are replayed on television, accompanying extended family gatherings that
play out over days of family visits and shared meals, with few Chinese actively
paying attention to the rebroadcasts. This was certainly the case in my in-laws’
home near Wuhan, where the casual holiday atmosphere had stretched out over a
number of days—a lull between the travel arrangements that bookend the festival
period. Like large festivals that entail family gatherings in the rest of the world,
the Spring Festival sets in motion annual mass migrations across and beyond
the Chinese nation-state. These movements form a counterpoint to the mass-
media calibration of national and nationalist affect that the Spring Gala concert
1
2    Introduction

undertakes through mass-mediated spectacle. For many outside viewers, the con-
tent of this media event might appear to have the character of an ethno-racial
pantomime. At times, it has produced various portrayals and stereotypes of ethnic
minorities that have been debated as offensive within China. For this reason, the
Spring Gala event is consistently received ambiguously, but seldom generates an
uproar around its portrayals of black African people. One reason is that black
Africans are not official “ethnic minorities” (shaoshu minzu) in China, and are
almost never featured in the event’s proceedings.
In this sense, the February 2018 broadcast should have stood out for its inclu-
sion of Africa and Africans, an inclusion that also should have prompted epis-
temic questions around whether the inclusion of Africans suggested shifts in
China’s own ethno-racial epistemologies of alterity and territory. For instance: Are
Africans now Chinese ethnic minorities? How would such a framing reor-
der China’s spatialization on the one hand, and Han ethno-nationalism on the
other? These are some questions that could have been posed within and beyond
China. However, these pertinent inquiries were occluded by another: Why was the
Chinese state broadcaster CCTV engaging in such obvious racism? This question
and its entailed criticisms emerged from two theaters—western media audiences
and cosmopolitan, middle- and upper-class liberal Chinese viewers. In the lat-
ter case, commentary was often voiced in English—“this is racism”—or mediated
through the Chinese gloss, zhongzuqishi.2
Both groups identified two elements of the show as most troubling: first, the
donning of blackface on the part of a Chinese actress playing the mother of a black
actress; and second, the co-presence of animals in the scene, particularly the part
played by a monkey, who appeared to be a henchman or familiar of the mother in
blackface. The former was denounced not only as racist, but fundamentally unnec-
essary given that a Chinese-speaking black actress could have played the mother’s
part. The representation of the monkey drew criticism for depicting Africans’
closeness to nature, seemingly evoking an older bio-racial trope of racial colonial-
ism (Opondo 2015). The accusations thus turned on treating the acts of donning
blackface and juxtaposing black bodies with animals as racist in themselves, rather
than asking what kinds of Chinese subjectivities and receptions were being trans-
figured in doing so. Racist acts not only made racists out of their perpetrators, but
additionally attributed agency to black skin as the catalyst for racism. This idea,
that the existence of black persons in volatile settings causes racism to happen, has
been trenchantly critiqued by Karen and Barbara Fields (2012).
[blackness + animality] + Chinese blackface = racism. The speed of these asso-
ciations elides important questions: Can Chinese actors enact equivalent racisms
compared to their white counterparts elsewhere? Are Chinese subjects able to
equally inhabit whiteness to the degree that they are able to reenact Euro-American
racio-colonial violence? The blanket ascription of racism on the part of the west-
ern media and its presumed audience seemed to reveal a familiar sleight of hand
 Introduction    3

playing out beneath the trapdoors of a far-from-decolonized global modernity,

albeit in an out-of-the-way place.
This book begins its investigation within the educational encounter between
Africa and China with an ethnographic analysis of African and Chinese stu-
dents’ language- and race-mediated interactions in the universities within
Beijing’s higher education district, Haidian. What I will show, however, is that
these interactions have ramifications far beyond this bounded space-time. By
the time of publication, readers will have experienced a global epidemic that
unfolded in a counterpoint of volatile political assertions and social reorder-
ings—these were demonstrated to be both intersectional and transnational. The
mediations of race and language, and indeed the status of personhood, have not
only been shown to be interconnected concerns in a political landscape that
extends well beyond monolingual settler-colonial states. The very language of
universalism and relativism, with its archetypes of rational personhood, have
been compromised (D. Li 2019; Jobson 2020). Writing from the precipice of
a political and intellectual crisis in the social sciences, my own intervention
is an ethnographically situated one. I focus on the intersectional relationship
between whiteness’s vectors of English, cosmopolitanism, and unmarkedness
in the shadow of “third world historicity.” I will demonstrate how this rela-
tionship mediates the interactions between African educational migrants and
Chinese actors, and will argue that this mediation is enabled through a semiotic
nexus I term the Angloscene. In undertaking this task, I depict how seemingly
familiar colonial tropes become reconstituted in novel but ultimately limiting
ways in Sino-African encounters. As such, Angloscene affords an opportunity to
reapproach the analytics of intersectionality and postcolonial translation from a
context once expected to have cathartically invoked “the Third World [starting
over] a new history of man” (Fanon 1963, 238). The arguments I make through-
out the course of the following chapters address two primary concerns. The first
is an analysis of how current Sino-African encounters contest or recontextual-
ize, perpetuate or fetishize the persistence of Anglocentrism, cosmopolitanism,
and whiteness as historically imbricated manifestations of western hegemony.3
The second is a demonstration of the ways in which an ethnographic study of
encounters in actual micro-interactions can restage the stakes of postcolonial
translation by revealing the interactional emergence of ideological concerns
with power, historical stratification, and their relationship to discourse that have
plagued various genealogies of postcolonial, deconstructionist, and critical race
theorists.4 Thus, this manuscript grounds its methodological approach in the
study of interactions—considered as dialectically contingent on, and constitu-
tive of, the historical and material conditions of their contextualization. What
follows undertakes a critical semiotics of postcolonial translation at an impor-
tant breakdown point of both western liberal postracialism and its identitarian
radical antagonists—the Afro-Chinese encounter.
4    Introduction

F R OM HA I D IA N T O J O HA N N E SBU R G A N D BAC K

Wudaokou, a university neighborhood in Haidian district, is a place many Chinese

students in Beijing refer to as “the center of the universe.” Beginning around 2010,
the nightclubs, restaurants, and coffee shops saw an increasing presence of Afri-
can students exploring Wudaokou’s cosmopolitan possibilities. To many of them,
China’s significant soft power investments in their respective countries seemed
like the fulfillment of dreams of educational mobility—where an education in
China emerged as an alternative horizon to the exclusions of the Euro-American
academy—an exclusion that (for many African students) persistently favored
an elite class of “globalization people.” China, they were told, was the future—
the new center of an alternative globalization. Many believed it until they had to
start tutoring English to their Chinese classmates and the children of middle- and
upper-class Beijingers who themselves aspired to either attend, or send their chil-
dren to, Oxbridge and the Ivy Leagues.
In 2008, before beginning my graduate studies in the United States and China,
I was working as a part-time English as a Second Language (ESL) lecturer, teach-
ing a course called English for Medical Purposes at the University of the Witwa-
tersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. This was my home city, and the home city
of a few of my future informants in Beijing as well. My class consisted of a group of
doctors and medical students from Senegal, Rwanda, Angola, and Mozambique,
as well as one each from Pakistan and Cuba. A number of universities in South
Africa still offer bridging courses like these as a way of bringing qualified pro-
fessionals into the state medical infrastructure. On a Friday in June of that year,
Peter, one of my students from Senegal, was forced to withdraw from my course
after being attacked and severely injured during his commute through the city. He
was followed after taking a taxi to campus and then stabbed by a group of South
African assailants who heard his foreign accent while negotiating a taxi fare. This
was at the tail end of one of the first waves of xenophobic violence in the 2000s—a
still-persistent political tension in South Africa. At the time, a number of opportu-
nities to study in China had emerged for increasing numbers of educated African
students in search of better learning and professional opportunities. Taking a few
Confucius Institute (CI) Chinese courses in their universities facilitated academi-
cally talented African students’ relatively easy passage into Chinese university pro-
grams. This option was increasingly on the minds of many (non–South African)
students like Peter. I left Johannesburg in 2009, but met him and other classmates
for a coffee at one of Wits University’s cafeterias, and asked how he was doing.
“I am okay. I think I will go to China for study soon,” he said. Guessing my next
question, he continued: “It will be really difficult, but . . . ”
Peter didn’t need to complete his sentence, not with so many non–South Afri-
can Africans being killed on the streets of Johannesburg with little consequence.
Almost anywhere would have been better for an “other-African” educational
 Introduction    5

migrant in South Africa. Indeed, talented but neglected students like Peter—if
they survived an ordeal such as his—were increasingly becoming disillusioned
by a stifling world order. One that offered remarkably few opportunities to a con-
tinent with a growing population of talented and resourceful young people who
find themselves crushed between selective global austerities and short-sighted
local gatekeeping.
Five years after this encounter, I found myself beginning an ethnographic
project on the streets of northwestern Beijing, in pursuit of a graduate degree
in anthropology. Making friends with and moving among the massive range of
African students enrolled in seventeen of Haidian’s universities, I encountered
many older graduate students like Peter: educational migrants attempting to
study in China for as long as possible while waiting out a variety of “difficult situ-
ations” in their home countries. While many were longing for a better tomorrow,
some had learned that the memorization of one particular phrase became neces-
sary in order to account for their presence in the Chinese capital—especially in
conversations with working-class Chinese, who could often be simultaneously
discriminatory toward and jealous of African students attending “their” univer-
sities. This phrase was disanshijie datuanjie: “third-world solidarity.” When stra-
tegically used in the right context, it could even evoke a grudging smile from the
most xenophobic street vendor: Bang ni de disan xiongdi ba! (“Please help your
third-world brother!”)
Third world and third worldism mean different things in Euro-American and
Afro-Chinese contexts. I know this, because my own use of this term in American
and European academic conversations, workshops, and conferences encountered
significant obstacles, a result of significant historical biases in US, British, and
European higher education. After my return from China, it became immediately
apparent that most of my Euro-American colleagues had internalized “third world”
as a derogatory word. Most of them remain ignorant of the term’s origin first in
Maoist China, and then later in the Global South, following the 1954 Bandung con-
ference. The fact of a shared history of third worldism in China and much of the
Global South (Frazier 2014; Okihiro 2016)—a constellation of meanings that is not
derogatory, but politically empowering—is fundamentally ignored in American
and European intellectual audiences to whom many Global South students must
address themselves. Outside of ethnic or Africana studies, the Euro-American
social sciences rarely teach that the third world—as a conceptual category—was
initially invoked as a horizontal call to political unity among decolonizing nations,
before it became appropriated as a vertical and derogatory term for underdevel-
opment in area studies and the development-oriented social sciences. This shift
from horizontal to vertical meanings of third worldness owes much to the writ-
ing and institutional labor of American intellectuals like Walter Rostow, Melville
Herskovits, and Wilbur Schramm, all of whom devoted their careers to produc-
ing conceptual alternatives in development, area, and communication studies that
6    Introduction

Figure 1. Revolutionary Friendship Is as Deep as the Ocean, Stefan Landsberger Collection,

International Institute of Social History (IISH), Amsterdam.

could counter the appeal of communism in China and other newly decoloniz-
ing countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.5 My use of “third world” in the
account that follows recognizes this older, horizontal genealogy of third worldism
and attempts to contextualize its reemergence as aspirational history and social
fact in contemporary Sino-African encounters (Ke-Schutte 2019). In doing so, I
will argue that the reemergence of third-worldist awareness, made explicit in the
invocation of disanshijie datuanjie (“third-world solidarity”), is symptomatic of
the persistence of another horizon of value that chimerically compromises the cul-
tivation of decolonized personhood: the Angloscene.
Here, some key questions emerge: Is a return to the revolutionary forever of
Afro-Asian internationalism a more acceptable reality than negotiating a world
typified by a naturalized anti-blackness—a racial-capitalist infrastructure medi-
ated through the politically correct prose of a persistent, global Anglocentrism?
Are many of Beijing’s African students projecting utopian pasts onto histories that
never came to fruition? Or at least, histories that are so remote from the lives of
eighteen-year-old Kenyan, Angolan, or Zimbabwean Africans as to be considered
medievalist futurism: a kind of Pan-Africanist Star Wars. Consider the following
image, posted on the dorm room wall of Fidel Mapfumo, a Zimbabwean exchange
student in Beijing.
This particular poster was pasted on the wall next to his bunk bed in his univer-
sity residence. I found out, through the course of my fieldwork, that it had, in fact,
 Introduction    7

been given to him (after being downloaded from chineseposters.net) by an older

roommate (Ke-Schutte 2019). The characters on the image read Geming youyi
shen ru hai (“Revolutionary friendship is as deep as the ocean”). It was designed
by well-known propaganda artist Guo Hongwo, and depicts a variety of African
travelers—men and women—who have presumably come to China, posing with
Chinese workers in front of Chinese-made modern farm equipment. When I asked
a nineteen-year-old Fidel about the image, he noted: “[It] reminds me of the good
old days.” The frequent sharing of such media objects suggests a pragmatic aware-
ness of a history that should or would have been. As sign vehicles, such media
objects appear to tap into a contemporary “structure of feeling” (Williams 1965)
that might be interpretable as a signpost to more explicit reimaginings of third-
world solidarities that once may have animated Afro-Asian relationships—where
these relationships were based on actual historical alignments to an anti-colonial
proletarianization of the non-western world.
How do African and Chinese subjects’ historically inspired invocations of
anti-imperialism, as well as aspirations to unmarked cosmopolitan modernity,
come to compromise the very voicing of history and aspiration as horizons in
the fashioning of emancipatory postsocialist and postcolonial personhood? Why
do the unmarked aspirations and historical invocations of postcolonial subjects
in China constantly seem to fail? Or, alternatively, how do such aspirations and
invocations generate contradictory results for the very persons attempting to
enact their own emancipatory self-definition? In trying to understand these ini-
tial compromises and contradictions, I encountered a “point of breakdown” or
“friction” at the edge of a substantial social problem: a counterintuitive contradic-
tion where “social facts” emerge (Durkheim [1897] 1979; Tsing 2005). In my case,
this problem emerged as a constitutive relationship between a neutral language
and an unmarked cosmopolitanism—where the celebration of English’s linguistic
neutrality and cosmopolitanism’s racial unmarkedness became the contradictory
conditions of possibility for articulating both histories of third-world solidarity, as
well as the precarious future of a genuinely postcolonial personhood as emergent
in Sino-African educational encounters. A familiar compromising logic underpins
this articulation: after all, isn’t English just a language, and whiteness just a race?
Initially, the obstacle to exploring this social problem appeared to be one that
had been defined, at considerable length, by generations of critical race theorists
and anti-colonial thinkers in an array of disciplinary contexts: The forces of global
twenty-first-century racial capitalism, Euro-American cultural hegemony, and
transnational intersectional oppression had clearly persisted, despite the pur-
ported victories of cultural relativism, global anti-racism, and liberalism as inter-
nalized, transnational political values since the end of the Second World War. In
fact, these “irrational” forces appear to have been integrated into the very political
economies of value that sustain the infrastructures of “rational” actors.6 In light of
such contradictions, it remains surprising how often Euro-American intellectuals
8    Introduction

who are concerned with decolonization frequently fail to discuss the broader intel-
lectual theaters from which global anti-imperialist arguments once emerged.
As a former graduate student and educator in the American higher-education
context, I witnessed and was frequently surprised by a pervasive Eurocentric com-
monsense in teaching the relevance of Marxist and leftist intellectual genealogies
in the American social sciences. This was surprisingly widespread among many
instructors and students in top research universities: what was frequently being
taught as “the Marxist Perspective” owed its prominence to the Frankfurt school’s
coincidental relocation to California. As a student initially trained in the Global
South, I was outraged by an omission of facts.
The fact of third worldism’s southern global front threatening an encompass-
ment of US and European postwar hegemony. The facts of Asian, African, and
Latin American Marxisms emerging as the primary conceptual modes through
which to bring about postwar global decolonization, which still seems uncompel-
ling among many professors and students alike. Rather, funny PowerPoint slides
of Theodor Adorno enjoying the California sunshine and the tragedy of Walter
Benjamin’s suicide while fleeing Nazi Germany in an attempt to join him are pre-
ferred. These narratives keep smart, aspiring educational elites captivated as they
are able to relate to the whimsically tragic cycle of such intellectual protagonists:
clever, privileged men engaged in brave, intellectual pursuits, caught in traumatic
historical misfortune. At the time of writing, none of the graduate or under-
graduate students I encountered were presented with any information about the
theoretical imperatives of third worldism, the Bandung Conference, the various
Pan-African congresses, or the nonalignment movement that created a political
urgency for engaging socialist thought beyond Europe. Nor did they know about
the shift in global political polarities that these events represented, which contrib-
uted significantly to the establishment of Marxism as a methodological perspec-
tive in American social sciences training.
The stratifying contours of biopolitics, empire, multitudes, expulsions, cruel
optimism, cultural capital, and intersectionality as key terms, which many con-
temporary Euro-American intellectuals have gone to great pains to delineate in
their contemporary writings, were already entailed in the writings and thoughts
of many non-European thinkers: early Chinese Marxist-feminist He Zhen
(or He-Yin Zhen); pragmatist sociologist and innovator of critical race theory,
W. E. B. Du Bois; political thinker and statesman, Mao Zedong; as well as revolu-
tionary and decolonial theorist, Frantz Fanon.7 All revealed the empirical dimen-
sions of what these keywords would later depict. Fundamentally developing
their own respective genealogies, they made their political and intellectual proj-
ects intelligible through their transnationally aligned yet contextually particular
recastings of Karl Marx’s ideas in relation to the colonial and decolonizing worlds
they were writing in. How did these genealogies become so compromised in the
elite intellectual theaters of the Global North?
 Introduction    9

Indeed, compromise has a long history in third-word revolutionary thought.

Here, we can define compromise in the sense of making a participatory presence
at the cost of truncated citation or distorted translation, like signing an unequal
contract, or making an unfair deal, whether the signing subject is aware of the
structural mechanism that engenders the compromise or not—Audre Lord’s
([1984] 2007) master’s tools and Lauren Berlant’s (2011) cruel optimism are two
profound examples of compromise in this abstract sense. At a political scale,
one is able to discern these dynamics of compromise in Afro-Chinese histories
of nonalignment. Scaling back its explicit support for Pan-Africanist initiatives,
China’s deals with Nixon and the United States shifted the dynamics of the Cold
War (Segal 1992). In South Africa, Nelson Mandela and the African National
Congress’s (ANC) relatively moderate demands guaranteed ascendency over
other, more politically radical movements. This followed from political sanc-
tions that were imposed on the apartheid government when the South African
Defense Force’s disruption of Pan-Africanist and other socialist movements in
the Global South became unnecessary to NATO states (Onslow 2009). This came
at the tail end of decades of assassinations and political subterfuge that all but
obliterated the legacies of Nkrumah, Senghor, Sékou Touré, Machel, and Hani,
to name a few.
The sequential western media coverage of the Tiananmen protests in 1989
and Mandela’s release from prison in 1990—after the fall of the Berlin Wall—
rhetorically bolstered America and the liberal west’s claims to world leadership
and its contingent moral authority to guide the world into a Star Trek-esque united
federation: a postnational order at the dawn of a new millennium (Evans 2016).
A transnational supply chain of compartmentalized labor, unchecked extraction,
and free-flowing capital would support of a horizon of aspiration and consump-
tion that promised unconstrained and unmarked cosmopolitan mobility for the
right kind of global citizen (Ke-Schutte 2019). As Arjun Appadurai has suggested,
we can understand this ideological shift at end of the Cold War as the awaken-
ing of a global imaginaire—what he terms a “constructed landscape of collec-
tive aspirations” (1996, 31). This was certainly the romantic narration within the
educated Anglospheres of the Global North. However, as some have noted, many
“out-of-the-way” places did not, and still do not, experience the process of global-
ization and the formations of its ideal personhoods in this way at all. As Achille
Mbembe has demonstrated in his work, Africa and Africans become frequent
political conscripts for maintaining the indispensable nightmarish underbelly of
this imaginaire (Mbembe 2001, 2003).
In Afro-Chinese encounters, I suggest that the relationship between globaliza-
tion’s utopian imaginaire and its dystopian underbelly is very much still relevant,
yet has been rendered significantly more elusive with the rise of a simultaneously
neo- and (il)liberal China (Vukovich 2019). The countervailing social forces of
China’s aspirationally liberal and ambitiously nationalist “middle classes” are
10    Introduction

contributing significant labor to the transformation and maintenance of this

global “work of the imagination” (Appadurai 1996).
Aligning with an urgent need for intellectual decolonization in anthropological
genealogies (Allen and Jobson 2016, Jobson 2020), I will argue that contemporary
educational encounters between Chinese and Africans reveal contradictions in the
construction of such global imaginaires: that their landscape of collective cosmo-
politan aspiration not only fails subjects who are disproportionately stratified in
the hills and valleys of “modernity,” but that the very act of aspiration toward these
imaginaires generates the ideological gravity that stratifies the aspirational subject
in relation to it. Additionally, I will show that the rhetorical unmarkedness of the
“work of the imagination” ultimately masks-while-recruiting its racio-linguistic
and intersectional horizon: a white space-time with English subtitles that ideo-
logically and discursively stratifies all non-heteronormative, non-white subjects in
ultimately unequal ways, even within a non-western encounter.

E N G L I SH A N D W H I T E N E S S

The ethnography that follows will show that the experience and recruitment of Eng-
lish and whiteness in interactions among African students and their Chinese inter-
locutors is not one of discreet subtypes of language and race. Instead, English and
whiteness are mutually entailed in a larger ideological process that compels recourse
to a simultaneously third worldist and cosmopolitan double-consciousness.
What pragmatist sociologist and early critical race theorist W. E. B. Du Bois (1903,
1–9) once termed “double consciousness” can certainly be understood as reflective
of the ways in which marginal subjects—within the broad social context of white
monopoly capitalism and colonialism—have a greater interactional burden than
less-marginal members of a society. Du Bois’s argument not only persists within
the protracted global moment, but becomes equally visible within smaller-scale
interactions in out-of-the-way places—both in terms of the limited range of par-
ticipant roles that black subjects are able to adopt (no matter where they go), as
well as the degree to which they must always adopt more than one of these lim-
ited roles in every interaction. As demonstrated in the subsequent chapters, this
experience is acutely traumatic for the majority of African students in Beijing, as
blackness—in the racio-political sense—is not an initially foregrounded vector of
identity in the way it is for black Americans who must negotiate the Anglo-centric
vagaries of white settler-colonial space-time in order to merely become intelligible
public persons. In what follows, the interactions between, and reflections of, most
black African students in Beijing revealed contours and experiences of transna-
tional racialization in ways that are uncannily reminiscent of what Du Bois once
called the Color Line: a historically and mass-mediated political horizon of value
that (still) functions as a commensurator of global racial capital. Most of my infor-
mants, though coming from different national and linguistic backgrounds, shared
 Introduction    11

a coming-to-awareness of their blackness mostly as a result of the continental

racializations (Africa = black people) they were recruited into when coming from
their home countries into an “African” student community in Beijing, engender-
ing a kind of Pan-Africanism by default—though some may have described it as
more of a hostage situation. Among black African students I interviewed, the vast
majority of whom described their experiences of racialization, most perceived
the often ugly manifestations of the Color Line as a trade-off toward becoming
educational migrants in pursuit of cosmopolitan futures—a horizon that, like the
Color Line, demarcates a point separating earth and sky, but which can neither be
mapped nor reached.
What I present is an ethnographic study of language and education reception
in the context of African and Chinese mass mobilities—thus, an inquiry into the
imbricated politics of language and education discourse from the perspectives of
those receiving and translating these in a transnational setting. The material that
follows demonstrates the strengths of long-term ethnographic participant obser-
vation undertaken from a South-South perspective. Building on seven years of eth-
nographic and historical engagement among African students and their Chinese
interlocutors, as a South African researcher, student, and classmate in the
Chinese university system, I was able to gain insights that might be counterin-
tuitive to both my Euro-American and Chinese colleagues. Following the move-
ments of informants between Africa, China, and the United States, I came to see a
contrapuntal relationship between the experiences of African university students
traveling to China and the cosmopolitan aspirations of their Chinese peers and
teachers. This relationship between expectation and experience became visible in
ways that would have been impossible when following the imperatives of con-
ventional proposal-based, object-centered, or single sited ethnography. Through
supplementing this approach with archival work conducted on four continents,
I was also able to explore how an ethnographic counterpoint of mobility entails
both a “third-world” history of global class consciousness and decolonization
down to the present, as well as a postsocialist, postcolonial embrace of “cosmopoli-
tan desire” informing contemporary educational aspirations in urban China and
the African diaspora (Chakrabarty 2005; Snow 1989; Rofel 2007; Okihiro 2016;
P. Liu 2015). My arguments emerge out of this dialectic of encounter and its his-
torical-material conditions. It is also for this reason that I will frequently refer to
the experiences of African students more broadly. While every African student in
Beijing comes from a country with its distinct history of sovereignty, many or most
are compelled to identify with the subject position of being an African student, as
continental scale exchanges are the political terms of engagement underpinning
their educational endeavors. It is not surprising, then, that some kind of explicit
Pan-Africanism or less formal inter-African climate of association emerges among
students from a continent whose destinies have at least as much in common as
they do apart.
12    Introduction

My intuition at the outset of the research was that Sino-African encounters

presented an opportunity to recontextualize translation outside of its usual “west-
and-its-others” ethnographic space-time—given the contrapuntal mobilities and
historicities converging through these African and Chinese educational endeav-
ors. This certainly proved to be the case, but in simultaneously contradictory and
constraining ways. In mapping these contradictions and constraints, I provide a
detailed analysis of the productive tensions emerging between them: The persis-
tence of English as a discursive unit of ideological commensuration in Sino-South
encounters since the Bandung Asia-Africa conference in 1954. The prominence
of whiteness and English language-ness as a kind of ideological gravity animat-
ing African and Chinese cosmopolitan aspirations. The crises of personhood
and value generated by the participation in a Chinese social setting where signs
of English and whiteness become the only available forms of cultural capital to
actors who have been historical others to these discourses. And the precarious and
costly translations that African and Chinese educational migrants must undertake
in their affective commitments to mass mobility: a state emerging in response to
physically, racially, and linguistically constrained encounters with a “globalism”
that promises precisely the opposite. Toward uncovering such contradictions, I
drew on analyses of informants’ interactions—with each other and their environ-
ment. In distilling such analyses, I relied methodologically on anthropological
theories of meta-pragmatics and aesthetics; language and mediation; and mobility
and cosmopolitan aspiration. However, neither the analysis nor the writing could
have been possible without a protracted period of participation and observation
that enabled an awareness of the citation, circulation, and invocation of media
discourse as key components of Afro-Chinese interactions.

I S E N G L I SH R E A L LY N E I T H E R H E R E N O R T H E R E ?

At the time of my research, there were around ten thousand African students
in Beijing pursuing Chinese higher education, many of them hedging their bets
between China as the future superpower and China as a detour to the fulfillment
of a deferred cosmopolitan aspiration. This moment, for many, perhaps begins
with the conclusion of the first Forum on China–Africa Cooperation (FOCAC)
meeting between China and various African nations in 2010, as well as a series
of other key agreements following this event (Li et al. 2012). In these agreements,
China guaranteed African governments educational access and development
in exchange for natural resources. As my African student informants arrived in
Beijing, however, they came to discover that many of their Chinese classmates not
only placed their faith in foreign Euro-American institutions, but that Chinese
students were, in fact, able to attend Oxbridge and the Ivy Leagues in vast num-
bers. At this realization, many continue to wonder as one frustrated informant did:
“Why do I have to come here, while the Chinese can go there?”
 Introduction    13

For African and Chinese students in China, “coming here,” “going there,” and
“going far” are possibilities that an ability to speak English either facilitates or fore-
closes. If we are to understand English as a means of interdiscursive and interper-
sonal teleportation, some questions arise: What makes English—ideologically and
discursively—more than “a language”? What allows English to transcend its prop-
osition as merely an arbitrary lingua franca? What makes it the means to affect
destination, arrival, and an unmarked horizon of aspiration? Why can some travel
further than others? Why, even when English fails them, are so many African and
Chinese students still compelled to commit to it?
To be sure, my ideological engagement with language and race emerges out
of Silversteinian linguistic anthropology—a genealogy that, as with the work of
W. E. B. Du Bois, extends and politically contextualizes the project of pragma-
tist semiotics. From this perspective, no language exists in a vacuum nor has a
materiality that is innocent of its destructive political potential in its cultural con-
text. Sticks and stones can break your bones and words can certainly kill you—
particularly in the juridical sense. The case with English, in this light, should be
of particular concern to the analyst of ideology, intersectionality, and inequality.
First, the space-time that English encompasses at this point in history is consider-
able, given the technological means that have allowed for its amplified mediation,
including nuclear imperialism, the internet, Anglo-medicalization, and American
information technology and software monopolies. Second, English has also existed
in Africa and China—since the end of World War II—as the language in relation
to which all other languages are measured and standardized. As such, English is
a volatile vehicle for its Chinese and African occupants, indexing a curious con-
tradiction between imperialist nightmares and liberal dreams: a theme poignantly
explored in the extremely popular Chinese film American Dreams in China
(dir. Peter Chan). In the American academy—among my graduate school peers,
professors, and students at top-tier universities—English is, of course, just a lan-
guage. But international students—struggling frantically to keep up with the pop-
ular culture references and shibboleths of their American peers—must maintain
the performative pretense of English’s “arbitrariness,” lest they are admonished:
“Subaltern, please shut up!”
These concerns also arise in contemporary Beijing, where most African stu-
dents attend classes in English, with many also teaching English to their Ivy
League–aspiring Chinese classmates after hours. Within this skewed political
economy of language, African subjects find themselves having to undertake dou-
ble translational labor. They must help Chinese students to translate their Chinese
dreams into Ivy League aspirations, and yet must simultaneously find a way to
translate future African subjects of Chinese education into an aspirational horizon
that is as yet unintelligible. Upon witnessing these dynamics, two related ques-
tions emerged during the early phases of my research: First, why is the ideal Afri-
can subject of a Chinese education such an elusive enigma? Second, why must
14    Introduction

African students help their Chinese peers become ideal subjects of an English,
cosmopolitan education when African students themselves are still marginalized
by this very “global” English educational complex? Later, I came to realize that
there was, in fact, no enigmatic ideal subject of Sino-African education, nor did
African students have any choice but to help their Chinese classmates. This was
because the promise of an equal encounter in the absence of white colonial bod-
ies was always compromised by ideological and pragmatic conditions that strati-
fied Chinese and African subjects in relation to a spectral horizon of whiteness,
English, and cosmopolitan mobility.
This tension between a folk semiotics of arbitrariness and sociopolitical realities
of stratification suggests that interactions for differently situated actors are indeed
less open-ended for some than they are for others. This was apparent to sociolo-
gist Erving Goffman (1983) and later theorists of interaction. This principle is fur-
ther demonstrated in the ways that the only imaginable future for the marginalized
modern and decolonizing subject is still only thinkable in relation to an unmarked
aspiration that defaults toward whiteness as encompassing horizon of value—
despite the “porosity and enmeshment of interactions” or the “collisions of actants”
(Lempert 2016; Latour 2005). Interactions, I will demonstrate, neither allow for the
unfinalizability of personhood to be equally inhabited by all subjects of an inter-
action (Agha 2007b; Butler 1997), nor are the imbricated processes of language
enregisterment and “performative” stratification of race, gender, sexuality, and class
tenable as purely arbitrary propositions.8 A revised interactionist perspective dem-
onstrates that power is not simply a function of who has it. Rather, it reveals under
what conditions power becomes available or recruitable to differentially stratified
subjects, often regardless of their volition—as a robust, methodological extension
of the process Louis Althusser (1971) once dubbed “interpellation.”
Demonstrating such interactional dynamics is methodologically complex. It
entails a reckoning with the complexities of spatiotemporal and historical imbrica-
tions in the empirically delineable real time of micro-interactions. On the one hand,
this necessitates a postcolonial revision of ethnographies of language and inter-
action where history does not simply emerge in the interactional here-and-now
(Spivak [1988] 2010). On the other, such a methodological revision must also
situate interactional insights within dialectical materialist arguments that con-
textualize contemporary Sino-African encounters within a transnational history
of third-world solidarity and nonalignment (Chakrabarty 2005; Okihiro 2016;
D. Li 2019). The stakes of such a historical-interactionist recasting are important
since third worldism and nonalignment were originary transnational aspirations
to a genuinely global, socialist internationalism between decolonizing nations in
the wake of overt European colonial and subsequent neocolonial projects. These
historical moments of transnationalism were ultimately sabotaged and sub-
sumed by the postwar nation-state as proxy for developmentalism and later post–
Cold War neoliberalism: a succession of connected events and associations that
 Introduction    15

ultimately led to the nation-state’s failure to commensurate equity among imperi-

alist, colonial, and decolonizing nations that were never equal (Chakrabarty 2005).

P R O B L E M S W I T H “M O R E C OM P L E X I T Y ”

“How can we not know that in the names Machel and Neto, Sankara and Nujoma,
there is already, by the historic force of ideological proclivity, the name Lumumba
inscribed in the very utterance of those other names?” asks Grant Farred in his
recent essay, “Not the Moment After, but the Moment Of ” (2009, 583).9 Here,
Farred explicitly draws on Fanon’s commentary on the dialectical nature of both
history and anti-imperialist revolution: “For no one knows the name of the next
Lumumba. There is in Africa a certain tendency represented by certain men. It
is this tendency, dangerous for imperialism, which is at issue” (Fanon 1964, 191).
In his meditation on a socialist internationalist history that connects Patrice
Lumumba’s Congolese revolution to “the long ten days” of Lenin and Trotsky’s
October Revolution, Farred points to the ways in which historical and material
conditions constitute and are constituted by the still-revolutionary present: “[T]he
power of the revolution, as much as or more than anything, occupied the twentieth
century and ours, if only to a less obvious degree, even if the socialist experiment
did not survive for one hundred years” (2009, 582). There is an obvious refer-
ence to the wordplay of several historians (Hobsbawm 1962, 1975, 1987; Braudel
1972; Arrighi 1994), where “long” or “short” as adjectives satirically challenge their
ontological-time-indexing nouns. In doing so, Farred follows a number of influ-
ential dialectical materialists in attempting to disrupt linear, event-based histories
that would otherwise ontologize time as isolated from social historical experience.
Farred, like many critical theorists writing in this tradition, draws attention to
the asymmetrical scale of history-making and its constant, politically precarious
maintenance in the historicizing present.
In alignment with Farred’s argument, I propose that a critical analysis of inter-
actions methodologically enriches a traditional historicist approach to excavat-
ing the postcolonial historical present. This is because historicizing the present is
ultimately contingent on interactional events connecting here-and-now interac-
tions across time: where such interactional events not only emerge as historical
and history-entailing space-times in themselves. Such interactional events are also
contrapuntally discursive events; that is, they mutually entail related events that
occur both in parallel and across time. Consider the metaphor of a scene in a play
that has its own space-time, but also must cite simultaneous, future, or past scenes
in the same play, as well as the material realms the audience occupies beyond
the theatrical event. In a similar way, interactions—though seemingly fleeting—
become socially and politically portable through the same dramaturgical entail-
ments of language and meta-linguistic technologies (see Agha 2007a; Goffman
1959). As with the theatrical scene, the traceability and memorable character of a
16    Introduction

sociopolitical scene of interaction arises from its speech-based dimension that

coordinates and weaves together adjacent or nonlinear interactional events.
The further portability of such scenes is additionally contingent on their mass-
mediation via their intersubjective transmission both trans-temporally (by actors
communicating with or through one another across history) and contrapuntally
(among subjects in the present). This is explicitly demonstrated in the fact of your
reading this account in this book.
Such a revision of interactionism as method requires an attentiveness to the
recruitment of history into emergent, intersubjective ideological constructions
like those animating African-Chinese interactions in contemporary Beijing. There
are certain objects of critique that the traditional resources of critical theory—the
physical archive in its most literal understanding—find challenging to analyze: liv-
ing discourse in, of, and through social interactions being an important case. To be
sure, traditional historical discourse objects are themselves usually formed through
the very archival modalities—Weberian, Rankean, and so on—that treat them as
vital and originary.10 Often, such historical objects are presented as relativistic
or “more complex” accounts of ideological phenomena. Modernization theory,
which—in China-Africa studies at least—still looms large, is one such counter-
history that relies on semantic relativism in its treatment of historical objects in
order to undermine postcolonial critiques. Its masterwork—an ur-text and meta-
narrative of modernity theory’s Cold War–era “take off ” developmentalism—is
Walter Rostow’s canonical The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist
Manifesto (1960). The afterlives of this meta-text—where colonialism is an event
isolated in historical space-time, and hermetically sealed off from an economi-
cally pragmatic, developmentalist present—are as much a feature in key texts of
China-Africa studies (Brautigam 2009; French 2014) as they are in contemporary
treatments of English’s “arbitrary” presence in East Asia, on the part of a number
of “global English” scholars (Pennycook 2007; Pan 2015).
In Global Englishes and Transcultural Flows (2007), Alastair Pennycook voices
what has become a somewhat canonic position on the globalization of English:
“[English] cannot be usefully understood in modernist states-centric models of
imperialism or world Englishes, or in terms of traditional, segregationist models
of language. Thus, while drawing on the useful pluralization strategy of world
Englishes, I prefer to locate these Englishes within a more complex vision of
globalization” (5).11
The “more complex” globalization that so much of this kind of work proposes
is seemingly bored with narratives of colonialism that would suggest a continu-
ity of capitalist-imperialism from the rise of industrial colonial empires through
to Cold War geopolitics. This boredom, however, has a notable and beneficial
impact on the thriving global ESL industry. Like many stakeholders invested in
this “more complex” narrative of the globalization of English, Pennycook aims to
“understand the role of English both critically—in terms of new forms of power,
 Introduction    17

control and destruction—and in its complexity—in terms of new forms of resis-

tance, change, appropriation and identity” (5). Without acknowledging the deficit
between power and resistance, many like Pennycook propose that “we need to
move beyond arguments about homogeneity or heterogeneity, or imperialism and
nation states, and instead focus on trans-local and transcultural flows” (5–6).12
The interactions, histories, and contextualizations described in this book all
challenge two assumptions that are latent in the global Englishes as well as the
developmentalist positions. The first is the assumption of a scholarly we that is
equally situated so as to give up on passé projects of decolonization so we can
focus on what is “more complex” in the circulation of English. The second is the
assumption that “new forms of power, control and destruction” as well as “new
forms of resistance, change, appropriation, and identity” are somehow antithetical
to theories of decolonization, and are even intelligible beyond them.
In the first instance, non-western (and often non-white) scholars are frequently
and unproblematically included—by default—within the ambit of this scholarly
“we.” Here, the double translational burden of their work—particularly in disci-
plines like anthropology, literary studies, and sociolinguistics—is once again being
erased. Bilingual, non-western critics inevitably find themselves trying to account
for the local in a situated disciplinary poetics that is everything but, while having
to account for the far-from-decolonized global they almost certainly encounter
daily. In the second instance, global Englishes and western developmentalist advo-
cates relegate decolonization to a “past event” within a historical epistemology
that would treat space and time as linear, flat, ultimately arbitrary semiotic forma-
tions that obstruct a common-sense “present” where “real change” can be enacted.
From this understanding of history (for the privileged analyst of global English),
linguistic “globalization”—captured by concepts like “superdiversity” (Vertovec
2007) and “linguistic superdiversity” (Jacquemet 2005; Blommaert 2010; Arnaut
et al. 2016)—can be represented in endless, ultimately equally tenable modes.
Modes within which the differential of power and resistance is erased, and subal-
tern subjects are burdened with agency that they do not have. From this relativistic
treatment of English’s still historicizing present, Anglo-imperialism is dismissed
in what is naïvely imagined to be a provincialization of colonial legacies through
invoking “more complex” engagements—as if decolonization were a simpler ana-
lytical matter. And yet, the only intellectual provincialization achieved by such a
move is the marginalization of colonial and postcolonial language critiques—sus-
taining the analytically neutral proposition that English has become unmoored
from its colonial and imperial history.
In the globalization of English, an important debate precedes Pennycook’s:
that between Chinua Achebe (1965) and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (1986). Achebe’s “The
African Writer and the English Language” was published first as a highly influen-
tial essay that was (at the time) very optimistic about the possibilities of tooling a
colonial language toward creative expression on the part of decolonizing writers,
18    Introduction

so as to produce works of art in the English language that could be African—a

reasonable expectation in a climate of decolonizing African nations seeking equal
participation in a world of interacting nations. Here, Achebe notes: “Those of us
who have inherited the English language may not be in a position to appreciate
the value of the inheritance. Or we may go on resenting it, because it came as part
of a package deal that included many other items of doubtful value, especially the
atrocities of racial arrogance and prejudice which may yet set the world on fire. But
let us not, in rejecting the evil, throw out the good with it” (1965, 28).
A retrospective reading of Achebe’s position may prompt the impatient reader
to brand him a shameless Uncle Tom for speaking of “the good” of colonialism.
This would be reductive, since the good that Achebe appeared to be referring to
was not in fact colonialism, but the observation of an affordance for (at the time)
a strategic assimilation in the wake of several African revolutions and new sover-
eignties: “So my answer to the question, ‘Can an African ever learn English well
enough to be able to use it effectively in creative writing?’ is certainly, ‘Yes.’ If on
the other hand you ask, ‘Can he ever learn to use it like a native speaker?’ I should
say, ‘I hope not.’ It is neither necessary nor desirable for him to be able to do so.
The price a world language must be prepared to pay is submission to many differ-
ent kinds of use” (29).
In his observation of the waning white or European body as inhabitant of the
English language, Achebe was not alone in his optimism in 1965, as both African
nationalism and African socialism were still on the ascent across Africa. There
was a wave of decolonization sweeping the continent and several potential allies in
the non-western world were positively disposed toward emerging African states.
Dynamic leaders like Kwame Nkrumah and Ahmed Sékou Touré emerged as
prominent voices advocating a Pan-Africanism that aimed to demonstrate pro-
ductive dialogue between socialist and democratic reform. In the hubris of decolo-
nization, the third world—in an optimistic coming-of-age that was announced at
the Bandung Conference in 1955—seemed set not only to provincialize Europe
but to set an example for it. This hubris was short-lived. After a string of coups
and economic expropriations in Africa and Latin America, dreams of third-world
solidarity and Pan-Africanism seemed to give way to nightmares in which African
futures lived-on only in rusted infrastructures that evoked optimistic pasts. The
context from which Ngũgĩ would later challenge Achebe was one in which English
was no longer an appropriable register through which to facilitate an unburdened,
third-world cosmopolitanism among diverse intellectuals who could engage on
an equal footing. The picture had changed drastically after 1976. In the space-time
of NATO’s ascendancy, and following the end of the Chinese Cultural Revolution
with the death of Mao Zedong, Ngũgĩ argued that English (and other languages
of colonization) had come to compromise—rather than liberate—the African
writing subject: “How did we as African writers come to be so feeble toward the
claims of our languages on us and so aggressive in our claims on other languages,
 Introduction    19

particularly the languages of colonization? In my view, language was the most

important vehicle through which that power fascinated and held the soul prisoner.
Language was the means of the spiritual subjugation” (Ngũgĩ [1986] 1994, 286).
For Ngũgĩ, there is nothing arbitrary in the capacity of languages to stratify,
liberate, or inveigle their speakers, nor are languages equally situated to do so.
To be sure, this position is also supported by a number of linguistic anthropolo-
gists. Context matters, and in this regard the contexts in which Ngũgĩ and Achebe
posited their respective dystopian and utopian arguments differed fundamentally.
These two thinkers have been type-cast as standing on opposite sides of a debate
about language and decolonization despite the fact that their arguments in these
canonic documents are separated by more than twenty years. A dialectic emerges
between them that draws attention to the third and perhaps most encompassing
assumption informing Pennycook’s argument: the scale of the global as an analytic
of commensuration.
Both Ngũgĩ and Achebe remind us that decolonization continues to obstruct
the outlook of globalization as an all-commensurating horizon of postmodern per-
sonhood—that decolonization still mediates similarly dialectical “global” futures
(Mazzarella 2004; Ferguson 1999; Piot 2010). To be sure, Achebe and Ngũgĩ are
making very different arguments about the possibilities of languages of command
being recruited to projects of decolonization. Decolonization—historical and pres-
ent—persistently troubles the possibilities of jumping scale to the global—while
for Pennycook a “more complex” globalization of English retrospectively occludes
the colonial. These arguments are far from equivalent. They reveal that arguments
for globalization or decolonization—and indeed arguments of any kind—depend
on commensurating scale.
This understanding resonates to some degree with linguistic anthropologists
Summerson Carr and Michael Lempert’s (2016) recent discussion of the “pragmat-
ics of scale” as an indispensable concern in virtually all linguistically mediated social
interaction. Scaling, as a special kind of commensurative semiosis, is defined as a
broad social practice that can be studied across an array of contexts where sub-
jects must make the scale of something—always in spatial and temporal terms—
intelligible to someone, in some way. Obvious examples include doctors explain-
­­ing diseases to nonmedical personnel through shared analogies; scientists explaining
ontological observations to laypeople through mutually available metaphors; or
religious ritual specialists conveying complex precepts using accessible parables
or poetic juxtapositions. Many forms of scaling, however, do not emerge in an
open-ended sense, but rather in dialectical interactions where the play of struc-
ture and moment-to-moment maintenance elides neither “structuralist” nor
“dialectical” concerns in the way Lempert himself describes (Carr and Lempert
2016). Drawing on postcolonial theory and an older pragmatist semiotics—
particularly in relation to the ideas of Frantz Fanon and Erving Goffman—it is
this less open-ended kind of interaction I will be concerned with. Here, I will
20    Introduction

argue that the interplay between structure and agency, as well as the moment-
to-moment of interactions and their histories, are not simply bypassed through
the naïve postmodern accusation of structuralism. Rather, I propose that consid-
erations of structure should be taken as fragile and precarious, yet indispensable
propositions—particularly when they are voiced by our informants—and as such
should be understood as entailing significant social labor and the recruitment of
an array of stratified subject positions to maintain. Once we adopt such a stance,
many of the analytical archetypes for discussing various permutations of political
stratification can be productively synthesized: “homo sacer,” “the precariat,” “the
abject,” and “the subaltern” among them (Agamben 1998; Standing 2011; Butler
1990; Spivak [1988] 2010).

SPAC E - T I M E ( S ) O F M Y R E SE A R C H

In many ways the scholarly biases in contemporary anthropology—a far-

from-decolonized discipline—mirror these political dynamics of ordering and
marginalization observed among African and Chinese informants in Beijing:
assumptions of equality that ultimately stratify, and assumptions of historical lin-
earity that convert colonialism into a series of passé events that become obstacles
to new possibilities of personhood—possibilities that are ultimately deferred in
all too familiar ways. The ethnographic texture of these dynamics, as presented
here, emerged out of a number of methodological phases during the last eight
years, in the development, implementation, and recasting of this project. My pre-
liminary research in archives in the United Kingdom, South Africa, China, and
the United States was important in contextualizing contemporary encounters in
Beijing, which became my primary research site. During shorter phases of field-
work, I was either conducting follow-up interviews in China, or pursuing archival
research in Southern Africa and the United Kingdom (during summers and in
transit between China and the United States). The bulk of my research, however,
was conducted as a student in Beijing. In this capacity, I took classes, attended
social gatherings, and lived in the same conditions and neighborhoods as most
of my informants during my time in China—sometimes on- and sometimes
off-campus as was the case for many African and Chinese students I attended
classes and social events with. This participant observation was supplemented by
archival and historical work that I undertook at a few research centers in Beijing
during my fieldwork.
Beijing, my primary field site, remains an important educational metropole
from the perspective of both Chinese and African learners, although for differ-
ent reasons. For African students, the process of arriving in Beijing is heavily
mediated through Confucius Institutes (CIs), which have a strong presence on
the African continent through their support within African educational systems—
from elementary school through university and vocational schools. In this regard,
 Introduction    21

CIs not only provide Chinese-language education but often play an important
brokering role in facilitating students’ passage into Chinese universities both
through scholarships and the establishment of interuniversity networks between
Chinese and African institutions. The Chinese government ministry that over-
sees CIs throughout the world—the Hanban (or Guojia Hanyu Guoji Tuiguang
Lingdao Xiaozu Bangongshi)—is also located in Beijing. For Chinese students
from all over China, Beijing becomes an educational center by virtue of the fact
that the city has the highest concentration of top-tier Chinese institutions. Even
within Beijing, governmental and educational administration are spatially con-
centrated, with government districts located within the city’s inner two rings, and
an entire educational district, Haidian, mostly within its fourth ring.
For these reasons, Haidian is the nexus of both Chinese and African educa-
tional cosmopolitanism in China, and the place where I lived and sourced the
majority of my informants during my research in the Chinese capital. While being
enrolled as a Chinese philosophy student at one university, I was able to align
myself to what the majority of my African and Chinese classmates and informants
spent their days doing—participating in reading groups, engaging in sporting
activities, hanging out, and sitting in on classes across more than seventeen major
campuses and research institutes in and beyond Haidian. Given the close proxim-
ity of campuses, students from all over Africa were able to form considerably large
communities of common interest groups. These were fairly diverse, ranging from
Pan-Africanist to national, linguistic, and tribalist alignments. A variety of social
and political activities facilitated much of the interaction among these sometimes
overlapping, sometimes discreet communities of African students. Given the con-
centrated region within which my informants were living and learning, as well as
their concerns with anonymity, I have provided pseudonyms for them and their
affiliated universities, but have kept the national origin of students and their cho-
sen gender designations consistent. The pseudonyms were usually created with
the informant or were chosen to mirror—in the case of Marx Moji and Mao
Mapfumo—actual given middle names that indexed intertwined political histories
and kinship alignments. Given the sheer volume of subjects that had socialist mid-
dle names or nicknames, there is no risk of revealing their identities as they appear
here. In some cases, there were place names, organizations, and actual dates of
interviews and focus groups that may have placed an informant at risk—since I
would be a rather conspicuous foreigner on CCTV footage in coffee shops and
other locations. I changed these accordingly. Furthermore, making a connection
between a person or organization mentioned and actual informants and institu-
tions will be unlikely, given the number of informants I spoke to (more than one
hundred), formally and informally, over a period of seven years, and the number
of student-driven initiatives afoot in Beijing.
While all the universities in Haidian are Chinese-language universities, the
dominant language among African students, as well as the primary language
22    Introduction

used between Africans and their Chinese peers and teachers, was English. This
was also recognized by the Chinese institutions, all of whom offered classes in
English while requiring students to pass a Chinese proficiency test by the end of
their studies. Most African students only took English classes and their compul-
sory Chinese lessons; exceptions included either highly talented Chinese-language
learners or long-term visitors in China. This situation and the escalating numbers
of international students in Chinese universities have created a greater demand for
English-language classes, a demand that places many Chinese-educated faculty at
a disadvantage, as they have to teach their field in a foreign language within their
own country. This is an obstacle that also negatively impacts African and other
international students who complain about receiving an “economy class educa-
tion,” without its emancipatory association. There is a historical context that lends
some nuance to this widespread complaint. Many within the foreign student com-
munity are acutely aware that the Haidian district universities have played host
to African and other international students since the days of Maoist China—pre-
cisely as a gesture of socialist emancipation through third-world, internationalist,
and communist solidarity. This followed the Maoist centralization of Chinese edu-
cation, focusing their educational development initiatives—and their subsequent
regulation—in one district: Haidian.
During my research, I came to be recruited to various spheres of social inter-
action through identities I could adopt in relation to different informants. As an
Afrikaner South African, I had to learn to perform—when necessary—a species
of cosmopolitan “English” subjecthood, which varies depending on my audience
but is nonetheless facilitated by an expectation that I can carry off this perfor-
mance in an American or European setting. In Beijing, and within this diverse
milieu of Chinese, African, and South African students, I found myself enlisted
in a wider range of roles depending on my interactions with various Chinese and
African actors in Beijing. For most Chinese students, I passed as a generic white
(American) exchange student from a US university. For other Africans, I was a
white South African of a certain kind: a recognizable category to African students
from most of the continent. And for South African students, I was a random
Afrikaner in Beijing. This latter category, in particular, puzzled elite, black South
African students, many of whom held stereotypes of Afrikaners as fairly prosaic,
barely literate, country bumpkins—in short, the antithesis of themselves and the
emerging cosmopolitan class in South Africa.
To most of them, an Afrikaner—especially one interested in the lives of
African students—seemed somewhat out of place and worthy of initial suspicion.
In overcoming this obstacle, I was fortunate that I had already known a handful
of Zimbabwean informants who had attended university in South Africa before
coming to China via Confucius Institutes in their home country. Following my
later university enrollment, which I undertook as part of my fieldwork, I attended
classes and shared meals with these students, since—initially—the black South
 Introduction    23

African community in Beijing was difficult to forge relationships with. Through my

Zimbabwean informants and classmates’ more obvious openness to Pan-African
conversations, I came to know increasing numbers of African and Chinese stu-
dents while taking classes in a few different universities in Haidian district where
the random auditing of classes across campuses is a fairly common activity among
both international and Chinese students. Through these more encompassing inter-
actions, I came to observe a political economy of cosmopolitan aspiration where
African students were coming to Chinese universities and teaching English as
means of survival, while Chinese students were frantically acquiring English skills
to try and study in educational destinations in the United States and Britain. It
was this observation that prompted me to consider the relationship between lan-
guage, race, and mobility in a far from equal relationship between Chinese and
African interlocutors—both operating in an interactional space-time that contin-
ues to valorize a cosmopolitan aesthetics of Anglocentric, unmarked whiteness.

R OA DM A P

Having laid out the implications of the arguments and engagements that will make
up the body of the manuscript, I will briefly sketch a roadmap of the content chap-
ters, which are arranged into two parts.
Part I explores personhood as a fundamental discursive battleground in
Sino-African postsocialist and postcolonial translations. Chapter 1 defines
what I mean by the Angloscene and outlines its pragmatic dimensions. I do
so by demonstrating stratification and conditions of value that imbricate lan-
guage and education reception among contemporary African students visiting
Beijing. In this chapter, I reveal some of the constraints that African students
experience in their pursuit of an unmarked cosmopolitanism in contempo-
rary Beijing. In support, I provide a detailed analysis of important contours of
these constraints: the persistence of English as the unit of commensuration in
Sino-South encounters where signs of English and whiteness become the only
available forms of cultural capital for actors who have been historical others
to this semiotic field. In showing how language is not disarticulable from its
surrounding indexicalities (M. Silverstein 1976) and material historical condi-
tions (Marx 1972)—like the signs of race and cosmopolitan mobility—I hope
to draw attention to the limits of cosmopolitan aspiration, when its units of
commensuration, like “neutral” English, become compromised by the ideo-
logical vectors of whiteness and stratified mobility. Drawing on the ideas of
the Russian formalist thinker, Mikhail Bakhtin, I propose an analytic through
which to interpret an articulated relationship between English and its indexi-
cally associated signs of race and mobility. I term this the Angloscene. Doing
so, I suggest, draws attention to the regime of evaluation or arbitration within
which Sino-African postcolonial “translation” unfolds.
24    Introduction

Analyzing the gendered and sexual relationships between, and among, men and
women in Chinese and African student communities, chapters 2 and 3 reveal the
ways in which the Angloscene is sustained “performatively.” How the discursive
silencing of subalterns, the micro-political contradictions of identity politics, and
compromised units of translation—what Audre Lorde ([1984] 2007) referred to as
“the master’s tools”—persist as marginalizing concerns in contemporary Beijing,
and also how they persist precisely through a cruel optimism toward the eman-
cipatory horizons of the Angloscene (Berlant 2011). Making use of analytical and
methodological approaches in postcolonial Marxist and black feminist theory as
well as linguistic anthropology, these chapters reveal, respectively, how this strati-
fication through aspiration can be simultaneously understood as racially intersec-
tional (Crenshaw 1991, 1989) and linguistically enregistered (Agha 2005). As such,
Afro-Chinese educational encounters reflect not only a productive confluence of
these critical and semiotic analytics, but also an important recontextualization of
their respective arguments beyond the bounded national-linguistic settings within
which these processes are conventionally identified.
In part II, I explore the contradictory compromises that the pursuit of a Sino-
African postcolonial personhood entails. In chapter 4, my concern is with the
Angloscene as a zone of translation and site for the alienating calibration of the
affective fields of sensual social life—the translation of (an)aesthetic orders of
social stratification (Buck-Morss 1992). Here Sino-African aspirational mobili-
ties represent one such affective field. I will suggest how the tension between
fashioning unprecedented futures and imagining utopian pasts—entailed in the
intersubjective maintenance of the Angloscene—remains unresolved at the level
of sensual, intersocial, and nonconscious domains of encounter. Exploring the
recruitment of “nature” tropes and their associated compromised personhoods in
the mediation of racialized and racializing alterities in Afro-Chinese encounters, I
give an account of dangerous mediation and translational attunement. As opposed
to the “culture,” “habitus,” or “milieu” within which intersubjective, durable forma-
tions of practice are grounded and given meaning, my aim is to account for the
in-translation aspects of personhood and their simultaneously sensual and semi-
otic building blocks—and then how such translational affordances are extracted
for the construction of compromised futurities.
As a counterpoint, chapter 5 meditates on the indispensable pragmatics of trans-
lation that are intelligible and referable discursive phenomena in the world as well
as political and cultural realities to African and Chinese actors that are unavoid-
ably imbricated in a mutually transformative encounter. To this end, I explore
the indispensability of translation as social practice not only in the particular
instance of Afro-Chinese interactions, but in the broader context of non-western
encounters beyond the settler-colonial encounter. Demonstrating a pragmatics of
postcolonial translation, I analyze the reflexive, intersubjective mediation of
Southern African and Chinese culture concepts, Ubuntu and guanxi as my pri-
 Introduction    25

mary example for discussing potential avenues for negotiated Afro-Chinese

identities even in a context where the conditions for the making of personhood
may initially appear compromised.
Laying out what I call the liberal-racism complex, chapter 6 concludes with a
number of key concerns: Within what regime of evaluation or arbitration does a
Sino-African translation unfold? What are the mechanisms through which the cul-
tural capital of English persists as not only the common denominator of all other
global languages but the standard measure of cultural value regulating Chinese
and African interactions? How is the arbitrariness of English or whiteness tenable,
when both signs not only become primary mediators between people who have
been constituted as their historical others (non-white, non-English-speakers), but
also in a context where their hegemonic influence is assumed to be absent—as
black or Chinese subjects of a Chinese education? Grappling with these, I under-
take a novel form of conclusion—an anticipatory theoretical engagement with
current and adjacent literatures around critical race perspectives and their rela-
tionship to postcolonial theory and anthropology, exploring their respective limits
and impasses in the contexts of Afro-Chinese encounters and beyond. As opposed
to an occluded recapitulation of the introduction, this chapter represents a novel
theorization of translation as ethnographic metaphor, synthesizing a path between
pragmatist semiotics and the deconstructive dialectics of postcolonial theory.
 Part I

Personhood
 1

Chronotopes of the Angloscene

What cultural, historical, and other representational materials are available for
synthesizing a future African subject of China-Africa educational encounters?1
Postcolonial theorist Frantz Fanon once noted that the postcolonial subject’s night-
mares have a time and a place—a socius of the colonial encounter that haunts and
recontextualizes the future of the colonized eternally within that shape-shifting
nightmare (Fanon [1952] 2008, 84–85). This chapter—exploring the cosmopoli-
tan aspirations of African students in Beijing—recasts Fanon’s observation and
explores how dreams of efficacious personhood, like nightmares of compromised
subjectivity, imbricate the same spatiotemporal tension between aspirational hori-
zons and their compromised conditions of mediation. At issue are the semiotic
infrastructures that constitute affordances and “props” for the emergence and
recruitment of both aspirational and available figures of personhood under condi-
tions of twenty-first-century transnationalism.
Personhood—as analytical proposition—has become diffuse, stratified, and
provincialized in many contemporary anthropologies of the Anthropocene
(Haraway 2016; Tsing 2015; Latour 2005). Much of this literature inadvertently pre-
sumes dualisms between human vis-à-vis nonhuman, actant vis-à-vis network,
and individual agency vis-à-vis social structure. Though much of this literature
has often been understood as doing precisely the opposite, the contradictions
of presupposing the object of negation—in this case the dualisms at issue—
nonetheless protracts the discursive life of a given semantic tension. This is per-
haps largely due to the ways in which elements that make up personhood’s semiotic
infrastructure—like language, media, and conditions of mobility—have been
treated as discreet semantic problems requiring an endless divergence of meth-
ods as well as the compartmentalization of political engagements. As such, several
disciplinary accounts of twentieth- and twenty-first-century social life—particu-
larly those involving mobile subjects like migrants, global citizens, or refugees—
often show little overlap between communicative practices, media landscapes, and
29
30    Chapter 1

conditions of mobility as integrated phenomena that impact contrapuntally, rather

than unitarily, on their subjects’ reception and legibility of being.2
This book is by no means solving that problem, but represents an attempt to situ-
ate personhood as neither an individuated social unit nor an overarching social, or
even human, concept. Aligning with pragmatist and critical theoretical genealogies
in contemporary anthropologies of personhood (Carr 2011; Comaroff 1999; Munn
1986), I understand personhood as the event, eventual, and eventuating horizon of
reflexive social and intersubjective life. In this understanding, personhood entails
time and place—historical and futurist; individual and collective; intimate and
public; aspirational and traumatic. To demonstrate personhood’s contingency on
spatiotemporal contextualization necessitates an exploration of personhood as
emergent and emerging—yet always relied upon as prior or above—within both
durable social institutions as well as fleeting social interactions. Pursuing this
imperative, I explore the contingency between personhood and space-time by
reconciling three ethnographic dimensions of interaction—media propinquity,
language, and conditions of mobility. What I term the Angloscene emerges at the
confluence of these ethnographic dimensions, in face-to-face social interactions
that must simultaneously presume upon available space-times of personhood, even
while personhood is being remade through these interactions.

G E T T I N G O F F T H E O C C I D E N TA L S C HO O L BU S

“What is that?” asked Eniola Eco, my classmate and a Nigerian international rela-
tions student at Da Hua University in Beijing. We were looking across a crowded
intersection, having just come out of class for an off-campus lunch at a cut noodle
(dao xiao mian) shop right around the corner. I followed Eniola’s gaze to the other
side of the road, but seeing nothing of particular interest, I replied, “What’s up?”
“The bus,” he answered. “Where have you ever seen one of those?” I understood
at that moment that he was pointing toward an American-style yellow school bus,
which did seem out of place in Beijing. I suggested that we walk across the road and
take a look. As we did so, an enormous “ABCD English School” sign—emblazoned
on the side of the bus—came into view. “That’s ridiculous,” he exclaimed, gestic-
ulating with his open hands at the rainbow-colored papyrus font subtitling the
photo of a blonde-haired, blue-eyed child spread across the side of the vehicle.
“I used to work for those guys. They told me they were going bankrupt and let me
go without paying me two months’ salary. I guess I know where the money went.”
Eniola’s example is far from unique and reflects how many African students in
Beijing face the somewhat paradoxical situation of being subjects of an alternative
educational globalization—Sino-South rather than Euro-American—yet have to
depend on the signs of English cultural capital to supplement university scholar-
ships that often fall short of their financial expectations as newly “cosmopolitan-
ized” international students.3
 Chronotopes of the Angloscene     31

A number of western-based scholars have demonstrated how China is rapidly

adopting an escalating horizon of expectation, aspiration, and desire.4 The forms
that this adoption might take have been vividly described in ethnographies of
conspicuous consumption, the commodification of desire, the curbing of urban
migrancy, and the branding of lifestyle, respectively. However, the English subti-
tles that accompany the reformulation of Chinese postsocialist modernity through
many of these adoptions are less emphasized. Such adoptions include everything
from the appropriations of English language as an auxiliary lingua franca for
Chinese engagements with virtually all outsiders to English’s textual rhetoric in a
wide array of artistic and protest mediums. No doubt, China scholars will—and in
some cases do—hold the opinion that the presence of signs of English and English-
ness in China are superficial trappings with little ideological content—provincial
even—in the context of a simultaneously “rising” and “deeply ancient” Sinosphere.5
Such a view betrays an unfortunate recruitment of Sino-exceptionalism that
has become a feature of western China studies as well as several anthropologies
of China that contextualize themselves within its intellectual tradition (an orien-
tation formerly understood as Sinology). This Sino-exceptionalism can further
be observed in a discursive double movement between Sino-exceptionalism and
what Chinese anthropologist Mingming Wang (2014) has criticized as “Sinified”
and “internal” Orientalisms in the context of the anthropology of China:
Western anthropologists who study China have “Sinified” Orientalism. In the
anthropology of China, the concept of “internal Orientalism” has become popular.
Anthropologists who focus on studying the interrelationship between ethnic groups
and the Han in China have begun investigating how popular discourses shape—
e.g., feminize—the image of ethnic groups with romantic technologies of domina-
tion. They have taken important notes of certain “social facts” of representation,
and argued for the critique of “internal othering.” This kind of research is surely
not trivial, but it does have certain obvious shortcomings. It, for instance, fails to
acknowledge that Chinese “internal Orientalism” has always been derived from the
conflation of the internal and external. (16)
Here, Sino-exceptionalism—as the dialectical shadow of Wang’s broader discussion
of Occidentalism—presupposes a bounded, inscrutable space-time within which an
ideological Chineseness will easily and unproblematically encompass outside or for-
eign semiotic formations that enter it. The efficacy of Sino-exceptionalism within the
matrix of western Sinology and area studies more generally depends on the selective
canonization and recruitment of Chinese scholarship that perpetuates this excep-
tionalism. Such ethnographic materials then, as Wang suggests, adopt—while mas-
querading as evidence for—the western Orientalist gaze by both projecting it onto
and confirming it within the Chinese academic context. Among many other prob-
lems, this discursive double movement depends on a “dilution” model of cultural/
semiotic interaction, as well as the maintenance of a world consisting of hermetically
sealed, exceptional space-times, that remain inscrutable until rendered translatable
32    Chapter 1

within the “universal” archive of Sinology and area studies—something that cannot
happen without the consent and ratification of “local” scholars seeking recognition
in the elite journals of the academic Anglosphere.
In embracing China as a space of historical as well as contemporary contigu-
ity and dynamic interaction with the Global South, what follows opposes Sino-
exceptionalism and aligns with Wang’s critique of the construction of China
as a bounded territory and disciplinary exception. Wang suggests that this
boundedness and exceptionalism is complicit in perpetuating rigid Occidental/
Oriental divides that become impasses to accounts of historical and cultural inter-
action that fall outside of Eurocentric east-west binarisms: of which China-Africa
encounters represent but one example. Thinking China in terms of its non-western
others, however, requires taking seriously the mutual dependency on shared (or
overlapping) discourses and broader contexts that might seem to undermine the
very proposition of a genuinely postcolonial, non-western, condition of person-
hood promised by a Sino-South encounter.

T R A N SL AT I N G B EYON D P OL I T IC A L MON OL I N G UA L I SM

In the previous vignette, Eniola—like many other African educational migrants in

Beijing—is compelled to teach English (in many cases illegally) in order to sup-
port a newly acquired, self-reportedly “cosmopolitan” lifestyle in China. This is
a pattern for many African students studying in the Chinese capital. Thus, both
the exploitation he described earlier as well as the political economy of language
at play is far from unique among the increasing numbers of African students in
Beijing and other major academic centers. In the first instance, teaching English
to supplement studying Chinese in China has become a paradoxical feature of
Sino-South educational globalization. In the second, having the capacity to
speak English is often the only form of social currency that black African stu-
dents in China have, as it becomes the means to both attain income—teaching
in the English as a Foreign Language (EFL) market—as well as build friendships
with cosmopolitan Chinese teachers, students, and other foreigners. Here, Eng-
lish is prevalent even in Chinese university settings, where increasing numbers
of classes are being taught to African students who have been a more common
presence on Chinese campuses since the first ministerial conference of the Forum
on China Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) in 2000 (Bodomo 2012; King 2013). Even
Francophone and Lusophone interviewees claimed that their English improved
far more dramatically than their Chinese after becoming university students in
Beijing. According to another informant—a French-speaking Malagasy econom-
ics major named Rousseau Bakoly—committing to English more than Chinese
reaps benefits because “knowing English and some Chinese offers more oppor-
tunities for friendship than being really good at Chinese.” According to him, hav-
ing good English and some Chinese had the benefit of improving one’s romantic
 Chronotopes of the Angloscene     33

prospects, as “many foreign girls only speak English [other than their native
tongue], and many Chinese girls want to practice their English.”
Beyond the common-sense assertion of Anglo-American soft power hege-
mony, we must ask: How does English persist as a currency mediating Sino-South
encounters where the imbricated signs of English language-ness, cosmopoli-
tanism, and whiteness become the favored forms of social capital among actors
who have been historical others to the Anglosphere’s racio-linguistic worlds? In
exploring this question, we must reconsider literatures that have underlined the
limits and pragmatics of postcolonial translation (Spivak 1993; Bhabha 1994, 1995;
Bassnett and Trivedi 1999) particularly when the so-called neutrality of English
becomes compromised by the ideological vectors of whiteness and cosmopolitan
desire. In this genealogy of postcolonial theory, translation can be understood as
an analogical shorthand for getting at the interested and unequal contingencies of
postsocialist and postcolonial encounters that imbricate a double temporal con-
sciousness. Because of the unequal situatedness of postcolonial subjects in relation
to the historical and material afterlife of colonialism, translation—in this meta-
phorical sense—is not only a capacity that arises out of having to inhabit double-,
or indeed multiple kinds of, consciousness. It arises from the constant burden of
both postcolonial and still-colonized subjects to have to reconcile temporalities
of history, language, and subjectivity to their still colonial audience.
Monolingualism, as a feature of the imagined audience of translation, (as in
Benedict Anderson’s [1983] literary public) places the burden of a disjunctive, lived
counterpoint on the multilingual, usually colonized, translator. Ironically, however,
it turns out to be the monolingual voyeur who then judges the translator’s work,
work that becomes simultaneously exploited and negated to present the smooth
surfaces of a politically monolingual world. This is a point that has been compel-
lingly raised by Daniel Vukovich in his Illiberal China (2019). Hence, the metaphor
of translation does not fetishize language once we understand that the use of lan-
guage is already at issue in making the very arguments for translation—the reflex-
ivity that is immanent to translation is the reflexivity that is immanent in language
itself. No forms of representation or reception—especially those reflexively about
representation and reception (like this sentence)—can unfold without mediation.
The point that any abstract formulation depends on fetishistic, sensorially per-
ceivable materializations—like sign-able, audible, or entextualized language—to
talk about abstractions or fetishes, was already explicit in Karl Marx’s (1972) own
insistence on immanent critique. Instead, the metaphor of translation—in postco-
lonial theory—draws attention not only to the double burden of translating and
translational personhood on the part of the colonized, but also the double burden
of time travel—or living in a counterpoint between unequal social histories—that
remains a feature of the persistent historical precarity of postcolonial subjectivity.
To think that postcolonial concerns are absent in the context of contempo-
rary Afro-Chinese interactions would be both intellectually naïve and historically
34    Chapter 1

ignorant. At the same time, to take China as a simplistic proxy for a historical
trend set in motion by Euro-American colonialism would also be to reduce colo-
nialism to a game of leveraging power and extracting resources, without asking
what conditions of value and imagined subjectivity drive these historical-material
and discursive processes: be they explicit power grabs or the more insidious effects
of endless accumulation. As English-teaching fuels African students’ attempts at
attaining cosmopolitan dreams in China, Chinese development bank personnel
and government officials overseeing Global South investments in Africa, Asia, and
Latin America are increasingly recruited out of the law and business schools of
Oxbridge and the Ivy Leagues. Just as archetypes of cosmopolitan personhood
are less hospitable to black bodies as a result of decades of American soft power,
Beijing’s attempts to place Chinese soft power on an equal footing frequently fail
due to English and Mandarin Chinese occupying radically different international
positions of influence. China, unlike its Anglosphere counterparts, must often
work through English translation when engaging other non-western interlocu-
tors. In light of this situation, and in relation to what will follow, the perspective
that languages and the conditions of possibility for any translation are populated
by the people who maintain them will become evident to the reader if it is not so
already. Yet most of us seldom have this immediate intuition due to the fact that
language, history, conditions of mass-mediation, as well as our available forms
of personhood are always experienced as prior to or above us (Inoue 2006; Agha
2007a; Carr 2011).
To analytically demonstrate the contingencies of personhood and space-
time in the contemporary dialectics of postcolonial translation, it is impera-
tive to give an account of the ways in which certain kinds of marginal
subjects—non-white, second-language English speakers—are unequally
burdened by having to undertake multiple and transtemporal participant
roles. The designers of the China Exploratorium must not only motivate
China’s relevance in the world, but must do so for a default English-literate
audience. The pragmatic effects of historically plural subjectivity and its
unequally distributed burden should not be undermined by positing the
“facticity” of linear historical experience: as in a historical chain-of-being
argument where China can unproblematically supplant Euro-American colo-
nialism while conveniently eliding its own prior emplacement as civilization-
ally inferior to “the modern west.”6 This is especially the case in situations
where different sets of interlocutors become stratified in relation to mediums
of participation and their imbricated, transnational framing: for instance,
Chinese and African subjects mediating their mutual encounters through
English, and in relation to divergent and unequal space-times of racialized
historical colonialism as well as the fantastic utopic imaginary of unmarked
cosmopolitan futurity.
 Chronotopes of the Angloscene     35

CHRONOTOPE AND ANGLOSCENE

It is this articulated relationship between English and its associated signs of race,
cosmopolitanism, and mobility that I wish to term the Angloscene. In unpacking
the dimensions of the Angloscene, I find Mikhail Bakhtin’s (1981) concept of the
chronotope to be useful. In his essay Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in
the Novel, he emphasized language’s capacity to evoke space-time via the reading
subject’s ability to embody different times and places from those that they inhab-
ited at the moment of reading. For Bakhtin, a genre of language (or mutually intel-
ligible sign system) could act as an intimate teleportation device that allows the
reader to access remote fictional or historical worlds. In defining chronotopes, he
was attempting to articulate the immersive or teleportational propensity of lan-
guage-based worlds, existing as entextualized space-times within novels and other
text artifacts. Importantly for Bakhtin, the embodied intimacy of the chronotope
was also of a publicly shareable and accessible kind, given the fact that chronotopes
were intelligible to the very publics they addressed, while being formed and main-
tained by these self-same publics. This publicly shareable and socially maintained
dimension of chronotopic affinities and affordances is often overlooked in literary
studies that deploy the chronotope merely as a means of foregrounding the novel
and other entextualizable forms of art as social and political artifacts. However,
we can go much further. Bakhtin’s more neglected concept, heteroglossia, enables
an enriched understanding of how chronotopes emerge in institutionalized social
settings—like the publishing houses, circles of literary criticism, national broad-
casters, and state-regulated curriculums of his day. I encountered two such set-
tings during my own fieldwork: the Hanban headquarters as well as the Central
Party School, both of which are in Beijing.
In the case of the Hanban, I was able to visit on my own thanks to the gen-
erous introduction and facilitation through a Chinese professor and friend—as
well as a former Hanban official—who arranged for me to meet and interview
another Hanban official, Hong, who was in charge of curriculum development for
Confucius Institute materials. I met Hong Laoshi (Teacher Hong) at the Hanban
headquarters in Beijing, accompanied by a Chinese graduate student intern who
was meant to facilitate my passage through the massive building. Upon arrival,
I was taken directly to Hong Laoshi’s office and tea was brought in. It was esta­
blished that I was a South African graduate student without ties to the United States.
Having undertaken this disambiguation ritual a few times, I indicated that my
concerns were Afro-China oriented, but coming from an Afro-centric perspec-
tive. She emphasized that the Hanban and its CIs prioritized Sino-African and
inter-Asian cultural and educational exchange. We talked about whether language
education could ever be undertaken without ideological and cultural exchange and
agreed that this was impossible. I then asked why she thought that some people
36    Chapter 1

believed this—thinking of an example in my home country where the head

of a China studies department rumored to be in an adversarial relationship with its
Confucius Institute was adamant that there was no conflict given that their depart-
ment worked on political and economic matters, and the CI worked on linguistic
and cultural matters. Responding to the question, Hong Laoshi stated carefully:
“I think that would be an incorrect perception.” Our meeting concluded once
Hong Laoshi had asked me how CIs were received in South Africa, to which I
answered honestly: “Quite differently from the US.”
I then was taken to a different area where I was shown an archive of materials
that CIs were distributing to their centers around the world. There was a collec-
tion of language textbooks translated into over a dozen different languages, placed
on shelves under a large banner in English and Chinese which read: “Culture /
wenhua.” I was then led to another exhibit space, the China Exploratorium, which
has been somewhat succinctly described by Jennifer Hubbert in the following
way: “The first stop on the Chinese Bridge program’s tour of Beijing was a trip to
Hanban headquarters. . . . In the ‘Exploratorium’ section, an instructional space
that resembled US children’s museums by offering opportunities for hands-on
manipulation of artifacts and computerized lessons on history, students could don
Beijing opera costumes, manipulate beads on a massive abacus, make paper and
print a book, and view ink-brush paintings, all either common symbols of tradi-
tional Chinese culture or recognized examples of historically advanced techno-
logical accomplishments” (2019, 85).
As Hubbert suggests, the space was a multisensory exhibit featuring objects,
textures, images, and imaginaries of various regions in China. Up until that point,
I had not traveled much in China, nor did I have a reference point for the scale
of CI activities in different places. Though China is undoubtedly vast and diverse,
and CI transnational activities could hardly be accounted for in a single exhibit,
both the “culture” room and the Exploratorium are expected to function like chro-
notopes within which material culture and language can be synthesized under the
rubric of a singular state project. In this way, the Hanban shares many similarities
with the selective archive of a multinational university, the Goethe Institute cur-
riculum, or the South Korean national museum.
The chronotopic functioning of such institutions is contingent upon their
maintenance through language and participation in the institution on the part
of a vast number of stakeholders. Hong Laoshi and I are not equal participants
in the maintenance of the Hanban participation framework, but the salience of
the institution very much depends on our chronotopic calibration through this
interaction and many more like it. The feature of language that enables this calibra-
tion, Bakhtin reminds us, is heteroglossia, which can be understood as the feature
of communication that permits mutual intelligibility: the element of unoriginal-
ity and familiarity that underpins every seemingly “new” or “novel” message. The
fact that language is already shared, and that all expressive potentials are imma-
nent in it, mean that the poet relies on the unoriginality of language to make their
 Chronotopes of the Angloscene     37

original permutations intelligible. What makes a poetic contribution original then

is a combination of unoriginality and the unfolding and nonpermanent universe
within which chronotopes cycle through unfolding into flesh and evaporating into
oblivion. It is institutionalized intersubjective labor that enables the heteroglossic
maintenance of always historical chronotopes against the erasures of “becoming.”7
This relationship between heteroglossia and chronotopic formation was
potently foregrounded in a different context, the Central Party School (CPS). The
CPS is the premier educational center for elite cadres of the Communist Party
of China and serves as a significant intellectual archive and training ground for
members of its Central Committee. The CPS, in collaboration with the Central
Compilation and Translation Bureau (CCTB), oversee canonical interpretations
of Marxist and Hegelian thought, as well as their ideological calibration with Xi
Jinping thought, Dengism, and Maoist reform. As a member of an interdisciplin-
ary and international delegation of mostly American and Chinese social science
PhD candidates from US universities, I found myself fortunate enough to enter the
CPS campus and meet with some of the faculty and translators from both institu-
tions. Having been screened in advance of the visit, we relinquished our phones,
passports, and recording devices before entering a minimally furnished but beauti-
ful seminar room: lacquered wooden surfaces, porcelain cups with old propaganda
slogans, and two prominently placed sets of calligraphy on the walls of the seminar
room. The professor casually remarked that these were the penmanship of Deng
Xiaoping and Mao Zedong. Fragrant Longjing tea was served and we settled in for
a long discourse that sutured Hegelian and Xi Jinping thought, reconciling con-
tinuous revolutions all the way down to the present—“we are on track with our
party’s socialist vision” and “[despite many challenges] things are [and have been]
getting better.” Such seamless suturing and reconciliation is profoundly dependent
on the interdiscursive recruitment of the chronotopic potentials of the props in the
room and the dramatic staging of the visit. This chronotopic interplay of co-texts
permit transhistorical materializations in the present that further presume upon a
familiar contextualizing language: modes of speaking and co-textual signification
that articulate (in the sense of “gluing”) aesthetic and linguistic registers of socialist
internationalism for the right kind of receptive listener. Notably, it is not the objects
of language that evoke transhistorical or transgeographical breaching of space-time,
but rather their embodiments and resonances with already familiar incorporations.
What I call the Angloscene extends this principle of trans-spatiotemporal incor-
poration, recognizing that chronotopes depend on, while also being depended
on, as sites for the production and maintenance of personhood. As such, chro-
notopes can never be political vacuums. The capacity to produce and depend
on them can favor some, while compromising others. This prompts us to under-
stand the Angloscene as itself a meta- or macro-chronotope: a broader or encom-
passing ideological space-time that constrains the indexicalities (context-defining
propensities) of chronotopes emerging within or in relation to it. In this sense,
the Angloscene can be understood as recruiting chronotopic capacities, including
38    Chapter 1

the desires of subjects, in the service of generating nexuses of alienation and

dependency that entail, and are entailed by, the ideological interplay of English,
cosmopolitan mobility, and white space-time. The Angloscene is thus a material
and ideological affordance for generating certain conditions of personhood, while
itself depending on persons for its maintenance.
In understanding the Angloscene through the lens of the chronotope, I hope to
suggest the ways in which “English-language-ness” and “cosmopolitan desire”—
as contrapuntally converging space-times (simultaneously distinct and mutually
convergent)—come to pragmatically entail an ideological landscape that forms
the context in relation to which Chinese and African students must generate or
discover their affordances for mutual personhood.
To be sure, my use of Angloscene does gesture phonetically toward the popu-
lar iterations of “-cene” that have come to problematize historicity and contem-
poraneity within a recent species-oriented paradigmatic shift in Euro-American
anthropology. However, I favor “-scene” as a suffix that immanently understands
interactions and mediation as constitutive of personhood. The difference between
-cene and -scene is one of spatialized, bounded time that is more or less indifferent
to people and personhood; versus a more dynamic interplay between the reflexive
capacities of personhood and the mutual contingencies of space-time. For there
is no personhood without space-time and no space-time without reflexive per-
sonhood. In sociologist Erving Goffman’s dramaturgical theory of interaction, for
instance, we may understand scenes as recruiting personhood and personhood
as depending on scenes (1959). Similarly, for Frantz Fanon—a trans-Atlantic con-
temporary of Goffman’s—postcolonial personhood and the space-time of colonial
trauma are mutually constitutive within the colonial socius (Fanon [1952] 2008,
84–85). What is at stake for myself and these thinkers is not a vulgar human-
centrism. In the work of Goffman and Fanon, as well as generations of Durkheimian
interlocutors from Marcel Mauss (1985) to Jean and John Comaroff (1999), it
emerges fairly emphatically that personhood is not reducible to categories like
human and posthuman. Of course, this insight has been a mainstream common
sense in legal and juridical settings where institutions like corporations have been
afforded the status of persons. Situating this move in an older sociological lan-
guage, I suggest that a scenic view of personhood suspends the concept of the
human as a settled formation; and instead posits that nature and posthumanity
are unthinkable propositions without the reflexive capacities that can be identified
within the interstices of personhood and space-time. The scenic view I am pro-
posing is one where personhood is simultaneously unsettled as a stable semantic
formation, while recognizing personhood’s pragmatic efficacy as a project that
semantic, ethical, phenomenological, and materialist endeavors as social commit-
ments depend upon. Among African students in China, for instance, the ideal
African person that must emerge out of Chinese education is not entirely known.
This semantic gap, however, does not paralyze African subjects in their attempts
 Chronotopes of the Angloscene     39

to make personhood in a new context—even if it requires them to pragmatically

repurpose or reuse a combination of older and available props to make new per-
sons while citing older scenes. Deconstruction and translational nihilism are not
options for subjects who must motivate a pragmatic, intelligible personhood even
if it comes at the cost of significant historical and contemporary compromises.
Rather, Anglocentric icons of value and their cosmopolitan co-texts appear to
be both the signs through which to achieve some degree of financial and social
mobility, as well as the conditions constraining African cultural capital in a
Chinese social landscape. The way in which these signs and co-texts of English-
ness hang together as evocative of a broadly cosmopolitan personhood are sug-
gestive of a space-time populated by interacting types of persons where these very
signs and co-texts have meaning, value, and efficacy. In Afro-Chinese Beijing,
the Angloscene emerges as a chronotope of intersubjective personhood that sus-
tains the meanings, values, efficacies of English signs and their co-texts. Here, the
Angloscene is not a synonym for English lingua franca as just another form of
cultural capital. Rather, it contests the understanding of English as a bounded,
arbitrary manifestation of shifting historical power relations indifferent to the
ideological particularities of language and its contexts—where the Angloscene is
the condition of possibility for English to be understood as more than langue
and parole (Saussure 2011). As a nexus between ideology, personhood, and lan-
guage, the Angloscene affords English a materiality, spatiotemporality, and social
domain, allowing English to not only transcend its taxonomy as a language among
languages, but also its range as the disinterested communicative interface among
non-western others. It is through the broader domain of the Angloscene that
English is able to entail its space-time and particular affordances of subjectiv-
ity. In all these senses, the Angloscene emerges as a less benign iteration of what
anthropologist Nancy Munn might have once termed an intersubjective space-
time (1986). Similarly, however, space-time and personhood are mutually contin-
gent conditions for the valuation and enactment of cultural capital in the case of
the Angloscene.

N O E N G L I SH , N O WO R R I E S

In the context of Afro-Chinese encounters in Beijing, the Angloscene’s spatiotem-

poral and intersubjective propensities are particularly pronounced. In addition
to allowing Rousseau, Eniola, and many like them to overcome social isolation
and access short-term economic opportunities in China, many African students
suggested that mastery of English enabled academic access, allowing my infor-
mants to take “better courses” from “international scholars” at their Beijing uni-
versities. Many complained, however, that the Chinese language classes offered
at their universities—at many top-tier institutions in Beijing—were inadequate
because of large student numbers and a lack of conversation practice in class (often
40    Chapter 1

numbering over thirty students). After sitting in on a few classes with Rousseau, and
watching a somewhat harassed-looking female Chinese teacher trying to motivate
over seventy African and other foreign students to repeat phrases from a conversa-
tion book, I came to understand his apprehension. His teacher, Liu Laoshi, shared
apprehensions of her own. She too felt that the mass-education she was providing
for the foreign students was ineffective. In an interview, she stated that the “class-
room environment [provided] no opportunity for feedback . . . you can’t surpass
the affective threshold.” In using the terms “feedback” and “affective threshold,”
Liu Laoshi demonstrated a background in teaching English as a Foreign Lan-
guage (EFL). This is unsurprising since many Chinese teachers who specialize in
Chinese Foreign Language (CFL) education also teach English as a Foreign Lan-
guage, as EFL has been the primary model for CFL training. English grammar
and other language terms also make up the default reflexive register for teaching
Chinese language points to foreign students of Chinese, which means that every
student learning Chinese and every teacher teaching it must work through English
as a default pedagogical language. Liu Laoshi would later take a teaching position
at a private language education company teaching Chinese to smaller groups of
mostly white expat students in the east of Beijing, describing her move as hav-
ing “been promoted.” In retrospect, there was certainly a stark contrast between
her new four-person conversation classes, and the lecture hall of her former uni-
versity job—the intimate, well-equipped “first-world” classroom at the top of a
corporate building versus the cold, dusty “third-world dungeon” where she was
getting a chorus of students to yell out a cacophony of Chinese tones augmented
by the concrete and plastic surfaces of the overcrowded, neon-lit space. As I came
to discover, however, it was not only the Chinese classes at Rousseau’s and Eniola’s
universities that presented obstacles to a first-world educational imaginary.
Over three years of ethnographic research as a student, mentor, and colleague
among African students and Chinese educational personnel, I came to under-
stand that “better courses” by “international scholars”—at institutions like Dahua
University—presented their own contradictions. At this elite university, I sat in on
an international relations class (offered in English). The class consisted of around
thirty students, the majority of whom were Chinese, with around a third of the
class being made up of foreigners—most coming from South Korea and African
countries. Eniola was attending this class and attempted to ask the instructor a
number of questions about the professor’s PowerPoint presentation. After two
questions, the instructor—a Chinese male in his late forties—gave Eniola a non-
plussed look. He then responded by indulgently replaying the PowerPoint slides
that might somehow prompt revelation, much to the exasperated sighs of the rest
of the class. After this happened a second time, however, the professor promised
to send Eniola and the rest of the class the lecture notes. Eniola stopped asking
questions at this point, but approached the professor at the end of the lecture,
worried about whether he understood the class, much of which appeared to be
 Chronotopes of the Angloscene     41

explained in Chinese as a supplement to the reading of the English presentation.

The teacher, who appeared to be in a hurry, tried to put Eniola at ease by saying in
both English and Chinese, “Don’t worry, meiguanxi,” before heading back to his
office. In many instances like this, Chinese professors who are not comfortable
with English are put in a position where they have to augment their credentials
as international scholars to maintain academic positions that are extremely pre-
carious—driven not only by a demand for international education, which they
must supply, but also by the unthinkability of an international education without
English . . . even when virtually no English is being conveyed or understood. To
be sure, many instructors are able to conduct research and read in English, but are
uncomfortable fielding questions and verbally engaging students that speak a vari-
ety of different “Englishes” with accents and registers that are difficult to contextu-
alize. I noted that this was a problem even for Chinese lecturers who had attained
academic English fluency in British and American settings, where anything that
deviated from an acquired standard became unintelligible.
Nonetheless, in these interactions, students, teachers, and professors come to
rely on English as lending legitimacy to the “international” education that their
universities offer, as well as their future cosmopolitan aspirations. Here, the
delicate work of promoting an international education rests not only on the mobi-
lization of English as a unit of commensuration, but also on the signs of cosmo-
politan aspiration that accrue around English in Sino-African encounters like
this. This necessitates an interplay between explicit processes of entextualization
and contextualization, where the contextualization of English—what is done with
it—simultaneously supersedes and supercharges its entextualization—what is
said with it (M. Silverstein 2014). For Mikhail Bakhtin, this simultaneity rests on
a curious semiotic phenomenon: the meanings that accrue around signs—always
understood to be intersubjective and dialogical—appear to simultaneously recruit
and constitute past meanings, “taking on flesh” that appears to be both emergent in
the here-and-now, and familiar in the sense of drawing on a shared past. Bakhtin’s
formalist theory of language further posits that because of this propensity, tex-
tual objects, like novels, are just one kind of linguistic artifact that in themselves
form a very small part of a semiotic landscape that is contingent on the reception
and production practices of a public totality of language speakers. Language, for
Bakhtin, becomes a political site of social production and revolution because of its
imbricated semiotic co-texts and contexts—or co(n)texts (1981).
Our contemporary moment explicates these political and public contingencies
of language: where the simultaneous co-texts of social- or mass-media contiguity
and their associated live-stream of discourse and commentary come to both inter-
twine and amplify public intimacies of social movements like migration, mobility,
and expulsion. The co-textual and the contextual portability of the language that
connects conditions of mobility and mass-mediation to histories and futures pop-
ulated by aspirational and traumatized persons, in this way, is very much at issue
42    Chapter 1

in understanding global contradictions between public knowledge about alien-

ating forms of social movement, on the one hand, and concrete political action
based on that knowledge, on the other.
In this vein, English’s relationship to its co(n)texts imbricates ideological forces
that appear to both liberate and constrain Chinese and African interlocutors
in their contemporary encounters. The co(n)texts of English, in this case, may
include cosmopolitanism, international education, as well as imagined white bod-
ies that constitute English’s ideal inhabitants. These signs, I suggest, hang together
in such a way that their ideological relationships both constitute and are consti-
tuted in the interactional here-and-now of Sino-African encounters. But what
makes such signs “hang together” in this way? Bakhtin suggests that the condi-
tion of possibility for such constitutive and constituting relations between signs to
emerge—understood as a socially ubiquitous phenomenon—is an intersubjective
capacity to construct and depend on semiotic nexuses of spatiotemporal rela-
tions in our meaningful engagements with the material universe. In other words,
constitutive and constituting meanings of signs are contingent on a simultaneous
semiotic construction of space-time—a kind of ideological gravity for signs to
have reinforcing meanings to subjects that depend on them. Through this inter-
play between signs and their associated personhoods, written and spoken forms
of English, as well as nonverbal communicative acts (such as flipping through
PowerPoint slides), can be mobilized in a given context to evoke an “international
standard” as opposed to the, at times farcical, attempt at mass education purely in
Chinese. This is a fraught endeavor that many aspirational cosmopolitan Chinese
and African actors remain committed to, regardless of constant failure. Rousseau,
Eniola, and their teachers—for better or worse—are in this endeavor together.
They are precariously dependent on and are constrained by their commitment
to the Angloscene. How does one then understand the seeming contradiction of
coming to depend on English and its signs of social currency as a supplement to
Chinese soft power in the form of scholarships and aid that initially bring African
students to China?

HO R I Z O N S O F A N G L O - A M E R IC A N M A LWA R E

The apparent durability of the Angloscene and its associated, necessarily racial-
ized, “cosmopolitanism” explicates a number of the contradictions inherent in
recent criticisms of Chinese soft power as they emanate from academic and media
contexts in the western Anglosphere (Sahlins 2015). Among African students
attending elite Chinese universities, third-world cosmopolitanism—indexing
a collective historical “third-world solidarity” struggle—is meant to encompass a
broader encounter and aspiration toward an alternative, non-Anglo-global common
of the kind that a number of African anti-colonial and postcolonial thinkers
have called for (Fanon [1952] 2008, 1963; Baldwin 1963; Biko 1978; Mbembe
 Chronotopes of the Angloscene     43

2001). At present, the escalating educational migrancy from Africa to China is

unprecedented not because of the encounter of African students with the Chinese
education system. This has a far older history (Hevi 1963; Snow 1989). Rather,
the escalation appears to have generated an unease—arising predominantly in the
west—about a perceived counterpoint between China’s augmented prominence
in global and soft power economies and a rapidly emerging, Chinese-educated
African elite public. Disassociating themselves—often dismissively—from their
“trader” counterparts in southern China, I have observed how many African stu-
dents in Beijing attempt to perform or translate their position as members of a
China-based, globally oriented Pan-African elite public sphere.
In this light, however, it must be understood that the particular kind of
Pan-Africanism one encounters in China arises in the context of vast numbers
of African students not only attending classes together but also rooming together
in university dorms, often finding themselves in African university communities
numbering in the thousands on some campuses. As a result of being segregated
from Chinese and often other western students (a common placement policy on
Chinese campuses), African students form intercampus networks facilitated by
the close proximity between universities in Beijing. This process is further ampli-
fied through convenient Chinese social media networking interfaces like WeChat
(Weixin), which I will briefly discuss later. As such, a climate of expansive—even
at times volatile—Afrocentrism, -culturalism, or -nationalism frequently sub-
sumes any interest in Chinese language and educational immersion. Although
many students seeking an immersive experience do exist, they often find that the
endeavor is a lonely one, requiring a commitment to compartmentalizing their
social and solitary identities. In expressing this social dimension, many infor-
mants feel intense pressure to exude an English-inflected cosmopolitanism to
their Chinese and non-Anglophone African peers, while using Chinese or other
African languages among themselves to internally put down or generate complex
plays of one-upmanship. Linguistic hierarchies enter into a polyphonic relation-
ship with other semiotic vectors, like media genres, political and entertainment
icons, nationalism, gender hierarchy, personal histories, and various forms of
racism. What regulates, arbitrates, or renders these vectors as translatable is an
inter-relationship between discourses of race, language, and mobility. The Anglo-
scene emerges immanently—even while it appears to exist prior to, above, or with-
out—at the nexus of this inter-relationship: as a space-time of commensuration
where a diffuse notion of aspirational mobility becomes the end goal of not only
African, but also Chinese educational labor in China. From this standpoint,
Chinese and African student life as well as outlook—especially in contexts like
Beijing—become impossible to disentangle in moments of interaction where mul-
tiple horizons of “cosmopolitanism” appear to converge at once.
While aligning with practice-based (Bourdieu [1986] 2011) and performative
(Butler 1999) theories of personhood, the Angloscene strongly emphasizes that
44    Chapter 1

the maintenance and historical recruitment of personhood cannot unfold with-

out spatiotemporal contingencies and the pliability of semiotic infrastructures.
Such maintenance and recruitment certainly depends on the discursively limited
availability of signs—in the case of performativity—and on the limiting contin-
gency of hegemonic forms of cultural capital—in the case of practice. However,
I want to get away from the idea that signs and forms of capital in themselves
cause people and chronotopes. This is not what Bourdieu (1977) or Butler (1999)
have argued. The imaginary provocation of signs-cause-people as a counter to
an equally imaginary orthodoxy of people-cause-signs is an unfortunate unidi-
rectional folk intuition that goes against reflexive formulations of these thinkers.
This is an unfortunate symptom of an emerging intellectual subculture, within
which much contemporary academic writing depends on professionally elegant
but intellectually truncated expression. Writing against a unidirectional relation-
ship between signs and personhood, I put it to the reader that: on the one hand,
signs and forms of cultural capital can only be efficacious within accommodat-
ing affordances of space-time and horizons of personhood, while on the other,
these very spatiotemporal accommodations and horizons of personhood cannot
be dialectically mediated without the signs and forms of cultural capital they also
afford. For instance, African imaginaries of Chineseness, and Chinese imaginar-
ies of African-ness are difficult to conceptualize outside of imported imaginaries
of orientalism and primitivism that must be recruited from outside the Sino-
African encounter so as to be reconstituted within it. And yet, the fact of a
Sino-African encounter—and the need for intelligible horizons personhood to
populate its past, present, and future—is inescapable.
An important example of this compromised contingency emerges in David
Borenstein’s recent short documentary on foreigner-renting in China, which
appeared in the New York Times.8 It reflected how, in order to add value to prop-
erty prices in the increasingly prevalent context of ghost cities, Chinese real estate
moguls have begun recruiting foreign bodies, which through their copresence
are meant to make a property or building seem “more desirable.” What is tell-
ing in the documentary—and was also confirmed by a Zimbabwean informant
who was once hired as a drummer by one of these companies—is how black bod-
ies, while still suggestive of foreignness, nonetheless signify a “less expensive”
foreignness than their white counterparts. Here, signs of whiteness and English-
ness are fundamentally intertwined, given the now well-documented example
of African students pursuing English teaching jobs, where many are overlooked
in favor of whiter applicants regardless of their lack of English-speaking ability.
These are often white foreigners, who are not English first-language speakers, but
come from countries like Russia, Spain, and Germany. Thus, from the perspec-
tive of many African learners, Chinese cosmopolitanism’s horizon of expectation
emerges increasingly in English subtitles with white characteristics. Of course, this
 Chronotopes of the Angloscene     45

observation doesn’t detract from, and is certainly experienced in counterpoint

with, the daily reality of student life in Beijing.
As African students arrive in the Chinese metropole, to an environment that
requires a facility with Chinese that vastly transcends their one or two years of
textbook training in their home countries, the only legible categories are the occa-
sional “English” signs of value that protrude like stepping stones on a seemingly
fathomless sea of (initially) illegible characters, interactions, and objects. However
precarious their footholds might be, they appear like an oasis compared to the
often brutal negotiation of infrastructure, bureaucracy, and social media—all pre-
dominantly in Chinese, with (in most cases) very little preparation before coming
to China. It quickly becomes apparent that these luminous signs of the Angloscene
are connected to a vast education industry in China. One thinks here of institutions
like New Oriental (Xindongfang) and increasingly prevalent lookalikes, indexing
a privileged world of English-language abilities and American universities as the
aspirational end-goal of Chinese educational labor. This domain of consumption
is evidenced by the relentless emergence of all manner of arcades (online and on
every block) that foreground the images of entrepreneurs and celebrities like Yao
Ming—in his role as the exemplary subject of English learning—and Kai-Fu Lee,
one of a number of figures who have increasingly come to embody American edu-
cational aspiration. These individuals, once rendered into archetypes of aspiration
through a multifaceted media assemblage, come to merge with popular represen-
tations of Steve Jobs and George Clooney, for example, as the iconic distillations of
a situated horizon of expectation and personhood. But, how do such associations
emerge, and how do African students engage them in China?
Perhaps a clue arises in the ways that emanations of the Angloscene come to
predominate in any meaningful interaction between Chinese and African cosmo-
politans—where such interactions must be regulated and made legible in English,
in relation to the ideological ontology the Anglosphere encomapsses. Rather than
through the mere centrality of spoken English in Chinese-African student encoun-
ters, or the artifacts of cultural capital that index the Anglosphere’s particular flavor
of “Europe,” the Angloscene is a space-time that orders and gives ideological grav-
ity to such tokens within its orbit of typification. This ordering and typification can
be demonstrated through the ways in which African students engage, or perhaps
participate in, the maintenance of the Angloscene through their linguistically and
technologically mediated practices of spatiotemporal evocation. Paradoxically, the
appropriations of chronotopes of the Angloscene—cosmopolitan performances,
ways of speaking, and strategic recruitments of an international (white) gaze
through combining signs of English and unmarked cosmopolitanism—appear to
generate obstacles to African students’ self-making labor, while simultaneously
becoming prostheses that must be depended upon to, as some informants phrased
it: “translate China” or at least make themselves legible within it.
46    Chapter 1

J U S T I N B I E B E R’ S U N D E R PA N T S

“I don’t get it!” exclaimed Lerato Thulo, a South African accountancy major at
Beijing’s Daji University. We were having a coffee together at the Sculpting In
Time chain in Haidian’s EC mall. It’s the kind of space that a variety of migrants
in Beijing flock to, where their buying power can supplant the “problematic
worlds” their accents and appearances might otherwise index. She was following a
WeChat feed on her phone where someone had posted an article that condemned
China’s human rights record in light of a recent execution of a South African expa-
triate found guilty of drug trafficking. The group chat, which I also had access to,
was the Azanian Students in China (ASIC) WeChat group. As we both read the
discussion thread, we realized, all of a sudden, that a censor had deleted the stu-
dent’s post after a few minutes. This sparked a debate about censorship among the
students, some seeing this as a “violation of free speech,” while others regarded
it as “an appropriate measure” that “perhaps should be implemented in South
Africa.” Interestingly, this last comment was referencing a discussion a few days
prior about the problematic role the media in South Africa played with regard
to African and race politics in general. As we read the comments and laughed at
some of the more animated flourishes, Lerato continued, “Why do [the Chinese]
have to take shit from America anyway? They make everything, but they have
some white guy wearing CK underpants meant for Chinese customers.” She was
referring here to Justin Bieber’s partially nude image in one of Calvin Klein’s 2014
advertising campaigns, which we had made fun of earlier for taking up almost
forty square meters of a shop window in the mall.
Here, the interaction between two South Africans engaging the media
contexts of familiar debates in our home country combined with the familiar,
all-commensurating texture of the transglobal mall and its universally cosmo-
politan coffee shop evokes another space-time that momentarily displaces that
of Beijing. Through our communication-in-context, otherwise “neutral” signs
become reconstituted through their recruitment in the interaction. The dulcet
tones of “Blue in Green” from Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue album, the familiar
flavors of coffee and cheesecake, the mutual legibility of the tones of our respec-
tive South African accents, even the image of Justin Bieber all coalesce to allow
us, for a moment, to forget the ten grammar points and forty new characters
we had to learn for the following day’s quiz, or possibly the inevitable hassle
of yet another visa renewal at the Entry and Exit Bureau the following week.
No tokens of the Angloscene have an essential character that allows them to be
translated as such. They come to work in this way through an interaction, and
through their received and reconstituted arrangements during the unfolding of
intersocial space-time. It is this process of contextualization that allows the expe-
rience of a concatenation of total sensory worlds all to be relied upon to tempo-
rarily anesthetize—through sensory distraction—the experience of Beijing. The
 Chronotopes of the Angloscene     47

associations together—generating an intersocial chronotope between Lerato and

myself—affording the Sculpting In Time cafe a synesthetic time machine–like
propensity. Through occasional meetings in such spaces, and the recombination
of many of these indexicalities, otherwise mundane coffee shops can be trans-
formed into space-times of recuperation for many beleaguered international or
aspirationally cosmopolitan subjects seeking recourse from various hostilities
or discomforts experienced in classrooms, offices, and even factories. In many
cases, they become anesthetically dependable infrastructure.
But what manner of dependency does this distraction and anesthesia engen-
der exactly? The intelligibility of the signs in question and their personal asso-
ciations, accumulated through our respective spatiotemporal trajectories up until
that moment, relies precisely upon their ubiquity—their postcolonial heteroglos-
sia (Bakhtin 1981). Our very register of mutual interaction is a default first lan-
guage—the ever-present commonality among postcolonial multilinguals without
mother tongues. This spatiotemporal displacement and reconstruction, as a form
of anesthesia, makes explicit the Angloscene’s entailed compromise. In reduc-
ing intensity, it potentially paralyzes awareness. It is here, where the Angloscene
emerges, where the nexus of our respective, potentially very different receptions
of “common” yet plural spatiotemporal experiences down to the present converge
to evoke our partially shared chronotopes of the Angloscene. It is a pluralistic
index of our contrapuntal colonial and postcolonial alignments emergent in our
interaction and shared experience. For this reason, the mall and all the potentially
chronotopic props it contains can never be a nonspace to an African student in
Beijing, even if it is a space of temporary forgetting (Augé 1995). However, emerg-
ing from this anesthetic dimension of the Angloscene, as I will now show, can be
somewhat jarring.
As we were leaving the mall, Lerato and I saw more than twenty young Chinese
men and women wearing suits and carrying brochures for Wall Street English, an
English education company with branches throughout the world. The brochures
were offering GRE and TOEFL preparation in addition to regular English classes.
Lerato looked at one of the leaflets being distributed and addressed a young female
sales representative in relatively fluent Chinese: “Yīnwèi wǒ shuō Yīngwén fēicháng
liúlì, suǒyǐ nǐ juédé wǒ néng qù Měiguó ma?”—“Do you think that, just because
I can speak English, I will be able to go to the US [to study]?” This was followed
by a rhetorical interrogative: “Huh?” Whether, due to her pronunciation, addi-
tional phonemes, somewhat accusatory approach, or possibly even a mixture of
confusion and embarrassment on the part of her interlocutor, the Chinese sales
representative stared at the South African awkwardly and didn’t say anything. At
that point Lerato, looking somewhat incensed since reading the pamphlet, turned
to me and dismissively stated: “See, even if you speak Chinese to them, they don’t
want to understand.” The exchange was concluded with an exasperated click of the
tongue on the part of Lerato—“Xh!“ (kǁʰ)—accompanied by a “waving-off ” gesture.9
48    Chapter 1

In a subsequent interview, it emerged that Lerato’s frustration stemmed—on the

one hand—from what she saw as a misguided commitment to western education on
the part of her Chinese interlocutors: “English isn’t enough to get you into Oxford,
otherwise, why am I here?” On the other, it stemmed from what she perceived
as being negated as a “low-quality [black] foreigner” when, from her perspective,
she had already mastered a skill—in this case, English—which “[all Chinese] see
as a golden ticket,” but which hasn’t helped her at all. For Lerato, and many other
African students in China, it is quite obvious that, while they are embracing the
possibility of an alternative Sino-African globalization, their Chinese peers seem
to be moving in a different direction by chasing the branded emblems of Harvard,
Yale, or Stanford emblazoned on every institution that promises a shortcut to global
educational excellence. In leaving an Anglocentric world, particularly in the case
of Anglophone African students, they come to encounter one that embraces not
only the language, but also the cultural capital of a world within which blackness
and African-ness continue to be liabilities (Mbembe 2001; Bodomo 2020). It is here
where the commitment to a shared alignment with the Angloscene paradoxically
fails to ease discomfort, yet continues to render paralysis.

E N G L I SH A S A L I F E R A F T

Toward the latter part of my fieldwork, I received a message that would suggest the
existential limits of the Angloscene. Via an anonymous China-Africa student net-
work, I received the following email from a contact traveling around eastern China:
I thought I would share a little news with you. Currently, I am writing to you
from Hangzhou, where I have just arrived by speed train following a “crisis
call” from another African student there. He is a gay Senegalese who is unable to go
home to renew his visa because he [fears imprisonment] on the basis of his sexuality.
The Chinese LGBTQ community has arranged short-term solutions for him but can
do very little following recent amendments to Chinese immigration law. Because
of these sudden changes in policy, it is virtually impossible for Africans from any
country to renew their visas without going back to their home countries. They are
forbidden from renewing anywhere else. As a result, he faces Chinese prison if he
overstays his visa, and because of his citizenship, he can go to very few other places in
the world for longer than two weeks. He is now awaiting a French consular official’s
evaluation of his case to see if he qualifies for refugee status in France . . . we will
know his fate in a few days.

Soon after receiving this, I was introduced to Damien, the subject of this exchange,
and we secretly met a few months later near the West Lake in Hangzhou. After a
long discussion where he described the ways in which China and a Chinese edu-
cation were the conditions of possibility for the exploration of his sexuality, and
following an elaboration on some of the details in the correspondence, he finally
told me what he was doing in Hangzhou. “You have to understand,” he explained
 Chronotopes of the Angloscene     49

in a heavy Francophone accent, “English saved my life.” Teaching English illegally,

it turned out, had kept him afloat for almost a year, but the period for renewing
his Chinese visa had arrived and, at the time of writing, a new set of visa laws for
Africans were instituted barring those in mainland China from renewing their
visas anywhere other than in their home countries. For Damien to return home
would mean arrest upon arrival because of the fact that his parents, who were
government officials, had already reported him to the authorities there. English
teaching had indeed saved his life, but only temporarily. The space-time of the
Angloscene he was clinging to was a lifeboat with a hole in it, and it was sink-
ing fast. When, after a few months, the date arrived for his French refugee visa
interview, I contacted him to ask how things had gone. He did not qualify for
refugee status and was distraught. Soon afterward he was unreachable and up until
now I have still heard nothing from him. Whatever the outcome, his commitment
to the Angloscene—having “saved his life” by fleetingly keeping him temporarily
afloat—ultimately compromised him.

S T EV E B I KO I N B E I J I N G

From the broader perspective of China’s educational investments, Lerato’s

paradox and Damien’s dilemma seem to mirror a number of recent debates on
Chinese soft power. On the one hand, Sino-African dialogue continues to esca-
late on political, economic, and educational fronts, evidenced by current FOCAC
and BRICS initiatives, and accompanied by a considerable escalation in Chinese-
sponsored educational endeavors in both Africa and China (Alden 2007;
Brautigam 2009; Bodomo 2012; Li et al. 2012; Chan et al. 2013; King 2013). On the other,
all of these initiatives—despite being overwhelmingly China-driven—continue
to be made legible and evaluated within an interconnected landscape of predomi-
nantly English-language-based media, aesthetic, political, ethical, and economic
discourse and its associated signs of cultural capital.10 Despite a sustained Anglo/
western hegemony in social, political, and educational settings worldwide, there
has been much nervous hand-wringing over Chinese influence in the media and
disciplinary theaters of the Anglosphere, at times followed by “corrective actions,”
notably in the US academy (Sahlins 2013; Crovitz 2014) and more recently in
Sweden (Zhang 2015). What these controversies clearly demonstrated was the lim-
ited media landscapes, associated languages, and aesthetic values within which
debates over “global” educational initiatives are able to unfold. These politically
monolingual media and rhetorical theaters of evaluation—unfolding predomi-
nantly within the media Anglosphere, where “lessons were taught [to Beijing]”
and “academic freedoms protected [from China’s inveigling influence]”—emerge
as a clear explication of the ways in which not only English but its associated sen-
sory and media worlds at times foreclose rather than merely “frame” the context of
educational and political interaction (Crovitz 2014; Zhang 2015).
50    Chapter 1

For these reasons, media representations of the Chinese educational-political

matrix have been less than transparent and far from even-handed, precisely due to
the ways in which “China,” as an oppositional term to “the west,” becomes mono-
lithically fetishized in the western media lens (Vukovich 2019). However, in the
case of Lerato and others, it is increasingly apparent for those standing outside
of western media Orientalisms, that the perceived dualism between the alterities of
yellow peril-ism and the commensurations of unmarked cosmopolitanism globa­
lism are ultimately contextualized via the same English subtitles. Many African
students in China have already realized that the superficial rhetoric of this dualism
in the Anglo media sphere that elides the less easily demarcated friction between
a western media-based horizon of value that, on the one hand, presupposes an
iconic equivalence between all participants in a “neutral” value system, while on the
other, entails the very asymmetrical alterities this presupposition continues to
generate. This is especially true for those encountering the cruel optimism of try-
ing to cultivate an alternative. In defining cruel optimism, critical theorist Lauren
Berlant has noted:
A relation of cruel optimism exists when something you desire is actually an obstacle
to your flourishing. It might involve food, or a kind of love; it might be a fantasy of
the good life, or a political project. It might rest on something simpler, too, like a
new habit that promises to induce in you an improved way of being. These kinds
of optimistic relation are not inherently cruel. They become cruel only when the
object that draws your attachment actively impedes the aim that brought you to it
initially. (2011, 1)

Berlant’s framing resonates profoundly for African students like Lerato and
Damien, where the expectation that the west is appearing less capable of set-
ting the terms of everyone’s representation in the wake of an increasingly legible
theater of interactions (between China and Africa, for instance), gives way to a
frustration at a persistent hegemony of a western sphere of aspiration. This fur-
ther engenders perhaps an emergent sense that the implied pluralization of this
asymmetry—through an imminent multilingualism—is not so much “arriving
too slowly” as not really arriving at all. However, many of their Chinese counter-
parts—cramming for TOEFLs and GREs—are following the same initial intuition
as Damien. Here, recourse to the Angloscene represents something more akin to
a life raft than a stepping stone, or at least something to help one survive a swim
to shore (which itself is yet to emerge on the horizon). If it is manifestations of
power we are after, it is surely in this situated rather than arbitrary theater of post-
colonial translation—the absent presence of Anglo-whiteness in Chinese projec-
tions of soft power—where it might be excavated with perhaps fewer overtones
of yellow peril. For African students in Beijing, what appears to be at stake is an
intelligibility that transcends marginality by any available means. This has many
parallels with activist and thinker Steve Biko’s call for the appropriation of Black
Consciousness as a conduit for achieving a “full expression of self ” (1978).
 Chronotopes of the Angloscene     51

As an education activist and icon of anti-imperialist struggle, Biko’s legacy—

through its citation in and beyond contemporary student struggles back on the
continent—animates endeavors of many Africans studying in China. This is clear
in the ways he is often quoted in student social media groups to index solidarity
or even misalignment with student struggles that are not far from the everyday
consciousness of many, particularly Southern African, students living in Beijing.
Rather than being a flat-footed racial essentialist, and quickly written-off as such
by many superficial readings of his work in western academe, it is worth noting
that Biko never made any claims about the intrinsic differences between white or
black races in promoting an educational decolonization. Instead, he encouraged
young Africans to appropriate the alien, racialized categories of difference within
which colonized subjects found themselves to be emplaced. His utopic vision of
a nonracial nation-state following revolution is consistent with an argument that
underlined the situated and discourse-driven nature of the very categories of race
and racism. For Biko, racism—like the Angloscene—emerged out of intersubjec-
tively translated signs of difference and sameness (or alterity and iconicity), where
sameness and difference were far from arbitrary possibilities. Racism thus requires
a space-time to perpetuate its stratifying force where the chronotopic capacities of
signs were exploited within a racist ideology to continually reinforce the mean-
ings of blackness in relation to whiteness, and not in relation to the “arbitrary”
signifier of race. For this reason, Biko encouraged young Africans—constrained
by conditions of apartheid and its colonial precursors—to appropriate, rather than
provincialize racialized signs that were doing racist work. His was a move that
assumed the immanent categories of a hegemonic context (blackness and white-
ness as opposed to “race”) and sought to overturn them from within, or at least
reveal the internal contradictions of their appropriation. This is a strategy that
itself emerged from the limited possibilities of expression with which previously
colonized subjects had to make do. For African students in Beijing, their cosmo-
politan dreams must unfold in the absence of previous success stories of Africans
who “made it” in China or through Chinese education. At the same time, their
Chinese interlocutors are themselves in pursuit of a horizon of aspiration located
in an elusive, but certainly English-speaking, metropole. For Chinese and African
subjects imbricated in this economy of desire, such contradictions indicate the
limits of cosmopolitan commensuration in provincializing the perpetual present
of a still far from decolonized world. The chronotopic propensities of the Anglo-
scene disrupt projects of decolonization in precisely the ways Fanon once sug-
gested, where without an idea of what “having-been-translated” might look like,
a “being-in-translation” must unfold within the limited confines of other worlds,
in others’ words.
 2

The Purple Cow Paradox

A group of fifteen or so Chinese women, ranging in age from about sixteen to

thirty-five, are standing in a line along Da Jie Road in the Haidian district. They
are offering both document counterfeiting and daycare services for other migrant
families, who are mostly working in service industry jobs and are unable to take
care of their children at work. From early morning until early evening, these
women walk up and down the road with babies in their arms, advertising their
services to passers-by. As dusk arrives in a cloud of urban mist, a complex mixture
of smoke from the streetside lamb kebab grills (yangrou chuanr) mingles with the
smog from the afternoon traffic and a white fog of pollution that has drifted into
the city from the south. At this moment, when the sun is either engulfed by these
layers of human substance or given a beautifully muted orange hue, the women
with other people’s infants return to their makeshift residences and workshops to
complete the orders they received that day, or to prepare for a second occupation.
As they do so, many distribute name cards advertising services for romantic or
erotic companionship, offered either by themselves or others.
All of them are Chinese migrants from a rural village in northeastern China.
They are all without hukou, residence permits that allow Chinese citizens to “own”
property or live legally within a designated place—in this case Beijing. Not having
a local hukou is a common situation for the swelling population of migrants in
urban centers throughout the country (Carillo Garcia 2004; Jacka 2015). As a result,
many non-Beijing working-class residents find themselves increasingly vulnerable
to exploitation from employers, property owners, and low-tier government offi-
cials. If one of the women in question were to be arrested for engaging in the illegal
activities mentioned earlier—counterfeiting or prostitution—she would either be
jailed or sent home to her province, having lost any profit she’d gained in the city
through fines or bribes. The babies these women carry for others are an arrest-
prevention “insurance” measure, given that police officers in Beijing are reluctant
to arrest anyone carrying the infant of another person, because of the complexity
52
 The Purple Cow Paradox     53

involved in finding the child’s mother. The Haidian police are fully aware of this
and the women also know that the police are aware of their activities. This uneasy
tension between their precarious position and their reliance on it appears to be
the cumulative result of the simultaneously unenforced yet exploitable illegality
of practices like prostitution and non-hukou labor migrancy. As a result of these
precarities—not only of employment status, but also of living conditions and con-
strained mobility—the erotic services offered by some of the counterfeiters may
be the only opportunity to have a place to sleep for the night: whether arranged by
a customer, pimp, or “provider-lover” (Hunter 2010). Such “opportunities” make
explicit not only the fundamental differences in access to capacities for mobility
compared to elite, aspirationally cosmopolitan Chinese subjects, they also reveal
how rural Chinese women must inhabit urban space, and often sustain their own
mobility in a zone of liminal, yet functional, illegality compared to the large num-
bers of rural men who undertake contract labor in large Chinese urban centers.
Trotsky Tsvangirai, a Zimbabwean student at Da Hua University, became such
a provider-lover to one urban migrant, Meimei. He came to know her through
decoding one of the name cards she regularly dropped on the street in front of
his university. Through the use of his Pleco Chinese-language app on his iPhone,
he translated the services offered on her name card and called the number. Fol-
lowing the exchange, much of which (by his own admission) he was unable to
follow, they met one evening in the back of a massage parlor “behind a secret door
that looked like a cupboard,” as he explained in one interview. After a number of
visits as a regular customer—partially funded through Trotsky’s English-teaching
pocket money and following his improved Chinese-language abilities—Meimei
came to spend additional evenings in his dorm room and received dining hall
lunches with a counterfeit student card in exchange for a companion-like living
arrangement. This relationship resembles what Mark Hunter (2010) has referred
to as “provider love,” which is differentiated from prostitution as the impersonal
exchange of an erotic commodity. In a more transnational setting, Jennifer Cole
(2010) has explored these themes in the context of Malagasy-French sexual econo-
mies. Meimei and Trotsky’s relationship, though irreducible to a paper caricature
of the sexual and erotic dynamics at play in their interactions, can certainly be
approached in the ways Cole’s and Hunter’s work suggests. In terms of my own
limited access, I came to know a lot about their relationship and was even intro-
duced to Meimei because of the fact that Trotsky and I often played music together
in his dorm room—we were both guitarists and fans of Zimbabwean Chimurenga
music—where Trotsky was something of a Zimbabwean hipster.
Meimei and his relationship can be understood as a meeting of two migrancies—
hers from rural Sichuan and his from Zimbabwe—where both of them regard
Beijing as a space of cosmopolitan, urban opportunity despite the possible
threat of terminal immobility or simply “getting stuck,” which might result from
the discovery of their interaction—the looming precarities of imprisonment
54    Chapter 2

or deportation. However, the difference between them is that the futurity of

Meimei’s migrancy is simultaneously certain and chronic, in the sense that
working-class sex workers like Meimei—with no educational background or
hukou—face considerable intersectional obstacles. Here, constraining economic
conditions in rural China bring larger numbers of hukou-less and exploitable
migrants into Beijing (Gaetano 2004; K. Yang 2008). Trotsky’s future position,
by contrast, is both uncertain and temporary, since—as suggested in chapter 1—
the result of his educational mobility generates the expectation that he is to be
transformed. Of course, this kind of mobility has its limits: In the first instance, it
does not give him the capacity to perform the same kind of mobile personhood
as the city’s growing white expat population. In the second, if he were caught with
Meimei, his possibilities of travel—not only to and within China—would poten-
tially become curtailed.
Eventually, Meimei and Trotsky’s arrangement came to an end when the groups
of women began to disappear from the university entrances in Haidian. One day,
Meimei simply stopped coming to his dorm. At the time of writing, the group out-
side of Trotsky’s university had diminished from around thirty to just one or two
advertising their counterfeit services once or twice a week.

I N T E R SE C T IO NA L I T I E S

Many contemporary arguments concerning ideological stratification of gender

and sexuality have treated language, mobility, and race as discreet “intersectional”
domains. Bridging these domains, however, remains elusive as can be seen in
much canonical work within each of these realms.1 This perhaps results from eth-
nographic difficulties in identifying or empirically grounding an overlap between
ever-changing semiotic and linguistic practices; the unfolding hierarchies of race,
class, sexuality, and gender; as well as the always emergent intersection between
identity and value distinctions as integrated social phenomena within a political
economy of mobility. Seeing how Trotsky and Meimei’s relationship is explic-
itly situated at a nexus point between these vectors—rather than involving each
discreetly—remains an obstacle to critically theorizing intersectionality beyond
Eurocentric settler colonial contexts, even if a persistently implicit stratifying
relationship between language, race, and mobility remains evidentially intelligi-
ble. Perhaps this is an “epistemic” problem as Michel Foucault ([1966] 2002) has
suggested, but how are epistemes sustained both in the micro-interactional pres-
ent while being contingent upon historical micro-interactions?2 This analytical
contradiction remanifests when the analyst considers the effects of intersectional
stratification as not only palpable in English-speaking, elite disciplinary theaters
interested in marginal people; but that they are, in fact, experienced by the very
marginal people being talked about. In what follows I will show how the attempted
realization of aspirational archetypes of cosmopolitan personhood among two
 The Purple Cow Paradox     55

groups of elite women—one Chinese and the other black African—generates

further compromised conditions for these already marginal, intersectionally vul-
nerable subjects.
In doing so, I hope to demonstrate how linguistic anthropological framings of
spatiotemporally contingent personhood—particularly those expounding on the
ideas of Mikhail Bakhtin—have profound methodological affinities with analyses
of micro-interactional poetics and their politics in the humanistic social sciences.3
Additionally, I will demonstrate how some of these affinities are foregrounded in
a few different contexts and modes of interaction within Beijing’s Afro-Chinese
Angloscene: how an intersectional relationship emerges between mobility, lan-
guage, and race in this context. Finally, I suggest that critical engagement with
intersectionality—in precisely such settings—allows for analytical opportunities
to map the contours of white space-time as a horizon of stratification that persists
and mutates precisely within the “equal opportunity” logics of globalization.

I N T E R SE C T IO NA L M O B I L I T I E S

In the summer of 2014, Palesa Ntsoaki and I arrived at her residence after one of
her classes at Pingguo University. Palesa was a black female MBA student from
Botswana who shared an on-campus apartment with two other women—also
MBA graduate students in her program. One was from Sweden, the other from
Indonesia. International student residences are usually separate from Chinese
residences in Chinese universities. Before we sat down for our interview in her
cramped but cozy apartment, Palesa offered to brew a pot of rooibos tea—a popu-
lar beverage in its place of origin, Southern Africa. As Palesa poured two steaming
cups of tea, I returned to the topic of a conversation we were having on the way to
her apartment and asked about her next step in getting a job in Beijing. She sighed,
took a sip from her mug of tea, and said in a prim English accent—acquired while
attending a private girls’ high school in South Africa—“I am going to be the best
Purple Cow I can be.”
The Purple Cow in question was drawn from a book by Seth Godin, an American
marketing guru. Titled Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remark-
able (2009) this text has become a prominent discourse object among one group
of aspirational African elites in Beijing. For many in this community, it mediates
attempts to generate students’ own icons of achievable cosmopolitan futurity via
Beijing. This is attempted in the absence of present role models of African excel-
lence that stand as ideal and attainable futures facilitated through a commitment
to Chinese education. The Purple Cow is also the inspiration for the appropriated
nickname that this small group of African students use cynically among them-
selves and forms a part of a tension this chapter explores: for the majority of the
female members of this in-group, the very raceless, genderless cosmopolitanism
that the Purple Cow epitomizes comes to compromise, stratify, and ultimately
56    Chapter 2

reinforce the asymmetries that these students aim to provincialize through

their commitment to an all-commensurating “cosmopolitan” horizon of aspiration.
As many like Palesa attempted to embrace the Purple Cow in pursuit of their
educational goals in Beijing, their female Chinese student peers were attempt-
ing similar (neo)liberal projects through their own literary genealogies. Caihong
Qiao (“Rainbow Bridge”) is one of many small Chinese feminist organizations
in Beijing and is co-run by Vivian Xu—the organization’s American-educated
founder. Rainbow Bridge forms part of a network of similar LGBTQ organiza-
tions in China, which at the time of writing continued to organize annual inten-
sive courses (or boot camps) in feminist theory. These boot camps and seminars
are promoted with a view to recruiting elite Chinese students with profeminist
politics into American institutions like Harvard, Princeton, and Yale. For many
of them, and for this group in particular, Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In: Women,
Work, and the Will to Lead (2013) has become an important discourse object—in
English and Chinese—around which to promote an elite public sphere of feminist
Chinese who embrace the “equal opportunity” promise of free-market capitalism
as a path to personal empowerment and gender equality.
In the activities of the Purple Cow and Rainbow Bridge communities in
Beijing, a contradiction emerges—one that arises in the cruel optimism of
aspiring to Godin’s and Sandberg’s respective promises of universal personal
transformation. This contradiction gave impetus to the formation of Chinese
and African cosmopolitan spheres, as well as consolidating their compromised
relationship to the Angloscene. Compromise and contradiction in matters
of social transformation and revolutionary politics have been an enduring
concern for critical feminist scholars. Audre Lorde ([1984] 2007) and Judith
Butler (1999) have in their respective projects converged on the problem of
the master’s tools’ Hegelian affordances: their retooling for liberation inevitably
recapitulates the dynamics of oppression. In her early framing of intersection-
ality, Kimberlé Crenshaw (1991) identified the ways in which universal imple-
mentation of legal reforms frequently discriminated against the very marginal
subjects such reforms were meant to assist or to protect. In what follows, I will
explore a common analytical thread between the very different empirical con-
texts within which these incredible thinkers identified the political stakes of
compromise and contradiction. This common thread lies in some of the para-
doxes of language generally, and, more particularly, within a domain of lan-
guage and social interaction called enregisterment.4
In the same way in which the “newness” of a commodity obscures the primor-
dial and cultural relations of respective natural forces and chains of organized
human activity that produced it, the contemporary meanings, circulations, and
associations of “words,” signs, and languages obscure the social labor of history
that has engendered the semiotic and value systems they mediate. Just as the work
of assigning economic value for objects has little relationship to their intrinsic or
 The Purple Cow Paradox     57

use value (Marx 1972), so too the attributions of meanings to language signs (at
various scales) unfold and transform through time, having no intrinsic mean-
ings in themselves (de Saussure 2011). In fact, the very attempt to fix, standardize,
or regulate meaning and value in both cases necessitates constant tinkering and
semiotic transformations precisely so as to stabilize the mutual endeavor of value
maintenance. This is because the constantly changing material conditions of history
and space-time that encompass such stabilizing acts necessarily render the fixing of
meaning and value an unstable enterprise that entails persistent curation and the
establishment of elaborate institutions tasked with such complex divisions of social
labor (Manning 2001; Lee 2018). No singular economic model can stand the test of
time. Similarly, no grammatical system can endure without adaptation and change.
Neither operate in the vacuum of a “special theory” of controlled value. Rather, both
must operate in the more general realm of interaction-based meaning-making.
These paradoxical dynamics of meaning and value were foregrounded within the
interactions of Chinese and African students in Beijing—where commitments to
the “equal opportunity” language and associated theories of personal value transfor-
mation of Purple Cow and Lean In ultimately came to remake a familiar stratified
hierarchy that these respective projects were meant to undo. In unpacking the ways
in which language and value seem to be fundamental to the persistent dynamics of
intersectional stratifications in any combination of race, mobility, gender, sexuality,
and class, I have found Asif Agha’s explorations of enregisterment (2003) and mass-
mediated chronotopes (2007a, 2007b) extremely valuable.

HOW T O B E C OM E R E M A R KA B L E

In 2014 I had attended a number of Purple Cow events with Palesa in Beijing.
These were arranged by Purple Cow members who wanted to host “seminars” spe-
cifically meant to feature and discuss the implications of Seth Godin’s book for
African students in China. As a student about to graduate in China, Palesa was
looking for a job in Beijing, where she had been living for nine years as the daugh-
ter of a diplomat. At the time, this process was proving difficult. This, I naïvely
thought, seemed surprising given her political buy-in. Her parents had consider-
able government connections; what’s more, she had acquired complete Chinese
colloquial and technical fluency after completing both a bachelor’s and master’s
degree at top Beijing-based institutions. This was a remarkable and difficult
achievement among African students in China. The majority of African students
in Beijing don’t see any reason to become fluent in Chinese since most of them
graduate after taking their main subjects in English—meeting the baseline lan-
guage requirement for graduation from a Chinese university.
Some, like Palesa, have also had to build relationships with Chinese patrons
who have sustained their residence or endorsed their continued studies in
Beijing. Such “elite” students have all benefitted from Chinese and government
58    Chapter 2

support from their home countries, as well as political and economic relationships
that are often reinforced through kinship ties to ministers, diplomats, or heads of
state. For example, a considerable number of Zimbabwean students whose parents
have close ties with the ruling ZANU-PF party attend and have scholarships to
the same university where President Robert Mugabe’s wife attained her degree in
Chinese studies.
Large numbers of elite African students in China (many in Beijing) represent
an important outcome of Chinese soft power and Sino-African educational and
governmental cooperation. As such, many new arrivals have become persons
of interest to an earlier wave of African elites who have situated themselves as
Sino-African brokers trying to motivate the market value of both a Chinese-
educated African subject, as well as a climate of south-to-east exchange where
Sino-African relations cut out western middlemen. Miriam Bakgatla is one
of these first-wave brokers. She styles herself as an entrepreneur, talent scout,
and Sino-African expert, and is one of the few long-term members of Beijing’s
Sino-African community—a position acquired through both business and polit-
ical acumen (as someone who worked for the government of an African coun-
try and came from a political family background). Through her organization,
Azanian Achievers China (AAC), she generated opportunities and organized
projects—like the Purple Cow initiative—that attempted to promote China-
Africa relationships and broker opportunities for African students as well as
Chinese business and government personnel. Through this process, she has
become a formidable gatekeeper for her young African male and female appren-
tices—a guardian of their interests through events and workshops meant to
“promote and mobilize African talent in China.” At one event, she opened our
discussion with a quote from Seth Godin’s text: “If a product’s future is unlikely
to be remarkable—if you can’t imagine a future in which people are once again
fascinated by your product—it’s time to realize that the game has changed.
Instead of investing in a dying product, take profits and reinvest them in build-
ing something new” (2009, 27).
Suggesting that African students in China are like this product and, in particu-
lar, should “embrace [their] inner Purple Cow,” Miriam emphasized a mode of
conduct where her apprentices should carry themselves as “self-made,” and cre-
ate narratives of professional excellence, where one has achieved “success through
one’s own endeavors.” In one-to-one interactions with many Purple Cow mem-
bers, Miriam also often emphasized that remarkability was measured according
to an “international standard” where “the game has changed.” How the game has
changed, however, was less important than Miriam’s overall message: “In market-
ing your Purple Cow . . . every second and every contact counts.” Later on, when I
was able to interview Miriam, she explained further: “We have to make the most of
our opportunities as African students in China by finding a way of profiting from
our very unique, but not yet marketable brand . . . the Chinese underestimate us
 The Purple Cow Paradox     59

because we are blacks, but we don’t see them as colonizing us since we are here
to take their country one little piece at a time.” Voiced in a dialectic of black con-
sciousness (Biko 2002, 48–53) and neoliberal “common sense,” this was a position
she and other Purple Cows maintained as a matter of course.
Seth Godin’s Purple Cow concept becomes a conduit for this self-expression,
framing an ideal subjecthood that attains personal or financial realization by under-
standing a universal set of laws governing human interactions; in essence, it is a
how-to guide for making oneself marketable to others, where the reception of others
is more or less taken for granted. Given this co(n)textual a priori, Seth Godin’s text
emphasizes an approach to making what is unique about your brand desirable to
others—a recipe for self-fashioning an all-commensurating person-as-commodity
(M. Silverstein and Urban 1996, 1–20). This particular aspect certainly resonated
with several subjects, who, like Miriam, were trying to tailor philosophies like the
Purple Cow not only to the context of African students’ aspirations in China but to
cosmopolitan translations in a variety of subaltern space-times.5 Miriam’s particu-
lar angle, however, equates the Chinese-educated African subject of excellence with
the Purple Cow as a product that is “truly remarkable.” Of course, translating—and
thus motivating—a “sameness” between the African educational migrant in China
and the efficacious neoliberal subject necessitates an erasure of the possibility that
her product’s future “is unlikely to be remarkable.” It also requires a constant vigi-
lance about the fact that the future of her product depends on others’ imaginative
labor and conditions of felicity (Austin 1975; Appadurai 1996, 2016): “If you can’t
imagine a future in which people are once again fascinated by your product, it’s
time to realize that the game has changed” (Godin 2009, 27).
In arguing for the remarkability of her apprentices’ expertise, Miriam often
demonstrated her knowledge of dominant China-Africa narrations of history, by
equating the Purple Cow with historical giraffes brought as gifts from Africa to
China during the early Ming dynasty. This serves as a popular historical refer-
ence—in the Chinese context—of Admiral Zheng He’s gift to the emperor after
returning from his expedition of Africa during the early fifteenth century (1405–
1433) (Yamashita 2006; Dreyer 2007). When I later asked why she compared the
Purple Cow to the giraffe, she answered: “Because everybody only remembers
the fucking giraffes and none of the other gifts . . . giraffes are remarkable.”
It is worth noting that Miriam’s Purple Cow is an un-actualized potential in the
sense that it is retrospectively anticipated to emerge through the strategies laid
out by Seth Godin’s Purple Cow. As Palesa suggested before, she aims to become
the best Purple Cow she can be, hinting at the ultimate unattainability of the
Purple Cow’s “ideal type”6—where one form of cosmopolitanism sets the hori-
zon for its Afro-Chinese “third world” analog. The relationship between these
two cosmopolitanisms is further complicated by African and Chinese students’
electronic and social propinquity with those beyond Beijing via social media
landscapes in multiple international space-times. This Beijing-and-beyond
60    Chapter 2

connectivity generates a pluralistic but highly stratified cosmopolitan diasporic chro-

notope. Following WeChat, Twitter, and WhatsApp feeds on their newly acquired
smartphones—commonly during a stopover in Hong Kong—African students
and Chinese students try to calibrate these increasingly divergent chronotopes.7
From the perspective of many well-connected Beijing-based African students,
it is also clear that recent mass-mediated decolonial narratives, like #Rhodes-
MustFall, #FeesMustFall, “decolonizing the University,” and “Africa Rising,” heav-
ily inform Miriam’s appeal to an empowered, postcolonial, yet very Anglophone,
elite “Afropolitan” ethnoscape (Appadurai 1996; Mbembe and Nuttall 2008).8 As
suggested so far, this has more than a little to do with English as a former language
of command to many African students (particularly in the context of the internet
age). In this setting, English’s perceived role in brokering an “international” cos-
mopolitanism for their Chinese postsocialist interlocutors counts for somewhat
less. However, a counterpoint between English as a neutral lingua franca and hege-
monic discourse appears to unfold in the space-time of subjects like Palesa and
Miriam adopting the Purple Cow register—where aspirational horizons and their
compromises are immediately entangled in hierarchies of race and mobility that
constitute a supposedly neutral ideal subject. To be sure, this desire for a neutral
means of leveraging more desirable futures out of constrained contemporaneity is
by no means specific to the African students in Beijing.

M O T I VAT I N G L E A N I N

Vivian Xu met me in her apartment close to the Lama Temple in central Beijing.
She had worked in China for a number of years, moving between China and the
United States since childhood. She later studied at one of the most prominent Ivy
League colleges and went on to found the organization Rainbow Bridge. At the time
of our interview, Vivian was a graduate student at another prestigious American
university and was also running an English-language editing business in Beijing
(alongside her Rainbow Bridge activities). This was because she needed to sustain
her income while deciding on a project for her PhD dissertation. In addition to
establishing a lucrative side-profession assisting Chinese students’ undergraduate
applications to prestigious US universities, Vivian was an LGBTQ activist. Working
for Rainbow Bridge was one way of bringing together entrepreneurship and liberal
activism. The workshops or boot camps her organization arranged brought US aca-
demics from top-tier institutions into expensive Beijing hotel conference rooms,
where young Chinese women (mostly high-school students and undergraduates)
paid a considerable fee to participate in seminars that taught a combination of
western feminism and US college application strategies. All of this was taught in an
environment where English-language immersion and the possibility of a reference
letter from a white American professor was part of the workshop’s package deal.
 The Purple Cow Paradox     61

My short-term role at Rainbow Bridge, and other organizations like it, was to
work as teaching assistant, editor, and facilitator, but mostly as a token white face
providing international flavor (or color) to educational activities that fundamen-
tally did not require either my presence or expertise beyond the horizon of cosmo-
politan aspiration that my whiteness indexed. This was apparent to both Vivian and
the other facilitators working for Rainbow Bridge. Vivian would likely agree that
I was useful not because they believed in my competence, but rather because
they believed in others’ belief in it: this mirrors Slavoj Žižek’s (1989) argument
for the persistence of ideology despite actors’ reflexive awareness of the ways in
which they are stratified by it. Vivian later stated in an interview that “the parents
paying for the workshop want to see authentic [white] foreigners.” In this capac-
ity, I helped to organize seminars, grade written work, and provide mentorship
on how to approach US college and university applications. During a boot camp
held by Rainbow Bridge in the summer of 2016, I was able to observe classes
taught by Vivian and an American Ivy League professor (another authentic white
foreigner) who had been invited especially to participate in some of Rainbow
Bridge’s workshops.
During one of Vivian’s classes, titled “How to approach your college admis-
sions essay,” another narrative of marketable remarkability emerged. Drawing on
a book titled 50 Successful Harvard Application Essays: What Worked for Them
Can Help You Get into the College of Your Choice, Vivian emphasized the need to
“make your application stand out,” that a US institution like Harvard “does not
value the typical profile of a nerdy, modest, female, Asian student.” She under-
lined the fact that applications essays “need to make their authors look remark-
able . . . even if you don’t really feel you are.” Vivian’s presentation immediately
provoked a discussion, during which one college student, Ally, put her hand up
and asked Vivian if saying she was a lesbian from China was likely to make her
application stand out in Harvard medical school’s application pool? Ally was also
the leader of a Lean In reading group at her elite university in Beijing and a strong
advocate for Chinese women seeking elite education abroad, particularly in the
United States. To this end, Ally’s parents had invested a considerable fortune in
providing her with an “international” education and long-term immersive classes
in English, which she spoke with a perfect (possibly Californian) American
accent, even though she had never left China. Her occasional interjections in
class, punctuating discussions on feminist revolution or heteronormativity with
phrases like “totally awesome!” or “that shit cray” respectively conjured a sense of
having-already-arrived in a place she was always meant to be. Ally, like the other
workshop participants, was completely enamored with Vivian’s “professional”
presentation, with her and many of her classmates consciously copying Vivian’s
semiformal attire following her introductory seminar, saying, “I want to look as
professional as her.”
62    Chapter 2

Responding to Ally’s question, Vivian hesitated for a moment, then looked

down to her right where I was pretending to prepare the next PowerPoint slide
for the presentation, and continued honestly: “Yes, saying that you are a lesbian
and how that has given you diverse and unique experiences may definitely benefit
your college application.” For the remainder of the seminar, Vivian emphasized
the need for remarkability, citing the archetype of the cowboy as a social-value
icon in American society, where you have to be the “hero of your own narrative.”
When I later asked Ally what she thought of the seminar and what prompted her
question to Vivian, she cited Sheryl Sandberg, saying that “she shows how women
can pursue their rights in China.” I asked if anyone in class could really be any-
thing like Sheryl Sandberg. I was drawing on bell hooks’s critique of the author of
Lean In, which had been taught by their Ivy League professor that morning. Ally
responded without hesitation: “Yes, Sheryl expects all women to be more remark-
able.” Indeed, Lean In does emphasize that the achievement of remarkability
depends on courageous actions of individual women contesting society as mem-
bers of an oppressed class: “We hold ourselves back in ways both big and small,
by lacking self-confidence, by not raising our hands, and by pulling back when we
should be leaning in” (Sandberg 2013, 8).
These descriptions raise important questions regarding both Vivian’s and
Miriam’s charges: Is Sheryl Sanders the cowboy of Ally’s narrative, just like
the Purple Cow becomes the placeholder for Palesa’s cosmopolitan future? To
what degree are Miriam and Vivian able serve as actualized manifestations of,
and conduits for, these respective projects of Purple Cow and Lean In? Draw-
ing on a western philosophical genealogy of thought concerning the relation-
ship between personhood and property, Ilana Gershon (2017) theorizes con-
temporary logics of mobility and the cultivation of subjecthood as having a
contingent relationship within neoliberal logics. She reveals how “branding
a self ” as competitively remarkable—in the ways similarly voiced by Vivian
and Miriam—has become integral to this process. Taking a more historical-
ethnographic approach, Timothy Burke has discussed the social histories of
two hygiene commodities—Lifebuoy and Lux—in Zimbabwe (1996). Simi-
lar to Gershon, Burke explores the ways in which archetypes of personhood
mediate the relationship between persons and an encompassing capitalist
political economy, but situates this process within a longer historical durée.
What the specific examples of Azanian Achievers and Rainbow Bridge more
generally reveal is that such neoliberal logics (old and new) are underpinned
by other far-from-neutral, encompassing cultural currencies. English, white-
ness, and heteronormativity are dense formations of social capital consti-
tuting a web of intersectional vectors that refract neoliberal as well as older
capitalist ideologies of value that underpin the commensurations of person-
hood. As Cedric Robinson (1983) powerfully revealed in his political economy
 The Purple Cow Paradox     63

masterpiece: capitalism precisely operates through the recruitment of catego-

ries of value—like race—that appear to transcend or precede capitalism itself.
This should be apparent to anyone paying attention to the relatively recent
Euro-American trend toward identity branding.

C A N O N IC P O E T IC S

While Vivian’s “success” served as an aspirational beacon for many of Rainbow

Bridge’s participants, her own relationship to the aspirational horizon she rep-
resented for others was more complex. Although Vivian had received a consid-
erable amount of grant money in the United States (for her research project in
Beijing), she had always been involved in entrepreneurial activities, given that
her parents had largely cut her off, as they did not approve of her being a les-
bian. Thus, she was required to be financially independent. After she received
grant money and left to begin fieldwork in Beijing, her white male project advi-
sor discovered that she was running what he called “a side business in the field.”
He reported her to the grant-awarding organization, who revoked her funding.
All this came after humiliating her among faculty members and her peers at her
own university. As a result, Vivian had to intensify her entrepreneurial activities
to compensate for the loss and the labor needed to motivate the efficacious elite,
Anglo-Chinese cosmopolitan personhood she had worked so hard to cultivate.
Yet, the very aspirational horizon she pursued always situated her, and many like
her, as in-between cosmopolitan chronotopes. In one chronotope, she was the
Ivy League–educated educational professional in “truly cosmopolitan” Beijing;
in the other “third-world” chronotope, she was the precarious, cheating Chinese
graduate student who is perpetually “almost-but-not-quite Harvard,” despite hav-
ing checked all the boxes to achieve that status. The way in which Vivian becomes
systemically marginalized in one context while valorized as an aspirational icon
in another extends the geographical and analytical terrain upon which racial-
ized, gendered, and queered intersectionalities might be mapped (Crenshaw 1991;
Butler 1999; Lorde [1984] 2007).
Through her own rigorous and empirically directed research into the stratify-
ing social effects of blanket forms of legislation on the very subjects the US legal
system often aimed to “protect,” Kimberlé Crenshaw demonstrated the ways in
which women of color find themselves doubly stratified in terms of race and
gender in American multicultural contexts. At the same time, she reflected the
ways in which an equal-opportunity assumption of identity politics could ulti-
mately come to compound the racial and gender asymmetries they elide. Vivian’s
case extends Crenshaw’s argument given that Vivian both became the receiver of
almost-unmarked privilege in one national context (China) while becoming pre-
cariously marked in another (the United States), revealing both intersectionality’s
64    Chapter 2

analytical purchase beyond singular, bounded, national polities and also the ways
in which whiteness emerges as a problem beyond the bodies that may normally be
understood to inhabit it.
One critique to the intersectional analysis at play here is the argument that
Vivian’s professor was not intentionally prejudicing her in this instance, but was
rather meeting his obligation to the relevant funding institution. This would be an
excruciatingly wrong-headed observation, fundamentally missing the point of
an interasectional analysis given: (a) that intersectional violence is not about indi-
vidual intentions, but rather persistent structural outcomes; and (b) I encoun-
tered dozens of young non-Chinese social science scholars undertaking explicit
entrepreneurial activities while doing NSF, SSRC, or Fullbright grant-funded
research in China who had never had this experience. Perhaps there is something
wrong with the funding or selection structures of these organizations? In either
case, the professor knew that her work was an extension of her involvement in
LGBTQ organizations, yet reported her “cheating” as purely self-serving entre-
preneurial endeavors.
The fact of Vivian’s queer identity as a marginalizing factor in her own life,
despite promoting the value of its “remarkability” to Ally, underscores the perfor-
mative, yet far from arbitrarily relative, dimensions of intersectionality. In provid-
ing a dialectical frame for conceptualizing the ways in which intersectionalities
emerge performatively, Judith Butler (1999) defines performativity as where “one
who waits for the law, sits before the door of the law, attributes a certain force
to the law for which one waits.” Performativity thus becomes the “anticipation
of an authoritative disclosure of meaning” as “the means by which that author-
ity is attributed and installed.” It is thus through this dialectical temporality that
“anticipation conjures its object” (xiv). Here, performativity’s range is limited by
the degree to which subjects like Vivian can gain their footing in different ideo-
logical contexts of interaction.9 The fact that this horizon of aspiration—which
she promotes to Ally and others—is one that marginalizes Vivian, certainly does
not make her a charlatan. It indicates the limited range of aspirational potentials
available to her and those she mentors, whose only choice is to operate in a per-
formative mode until alternative ideological gaps arise. While Crenshaw pro-
vides a historical and case-based account of how the fact of intersectionality is
visible through its effects, and while Butler provides a compelling argument for
its dialectical emergence performatively, this stratification can also be studied in
real-time interactions.
As Judith Butler shows, observing language performativity requires both
attentiveness to language as fundamental to the emergence of intersectional
stratification as well as an understanding of language as both mediating and
inextricable from that context. Here, linguistic anthropologists’ concern with
a phenomenon called enregisterment opens up analytical terrain for revealing
 The Purple Cow Paradox     65

intersectionality’s interactional manifestations (Gal 1991) as well as performativ-

ity’s dialectical manifestation in mass-mediated ethnographic contexts (Nakassis
2012). In his work, Asif Agha reveals enregisterment as a process emerging
between actors encountering one another within an interactional space-time
or chronotope (2003, 2005, 2007a). He does this through a rigorous synthesis
of Bakhtinian and Goffmanian views on language and co(n)textual phenomena
as providing the semiotic means and categories for social stratification. In his
discussion of voicing (Bakhtin 1981, 1984) and footing (Goffman 1979) as analyt-
ics informing enregisterment, Agha proposes an attentiveness to the figures of
personhood and stereotypes these dual processes animate. In Agha’s work these
appear to be dynamically socially motivated archetypes appearing to simultane-
ously emerge out of—and yet are motivated to presuppose—the space-time of
semiotic interaction. As a starting point, Asif Agha defines registers as “contras-
tive patterns of register use [that] index distinct speaking personae in events
of performance.” Furthermore, “the social existence of registers depends on the
semiotic activities of language users, particularly those characterized . . . as mat-
ters of alignment” (2005, 38).
In the following analysis of an interaction between several members of a
Southern African community of students in Beijing, I try to capture a complex
play of alignment and disalignment that animates multiple intersectional tensions
through the ways in which different voices in a conversation become stratified.
The following interactional text is drawn from an interaction among members of
Purple Cow in 2014. The interaction took place at the corporate headquarters
of an elite Southern African students’ organization in China called the Azanian
Achievers Group in the affluent district of San Li Tun in eastern Beijing. The
participants were: CK, a black male Botswana MA student in China; JP, a white
male English-speaking South African on a short-term study exchange in China;
Gabriel, a younger male Zimbabwean student studying business in China; as well
as Miriam and Palesa. Here, both Miriam and Palesa are the most elite Purple Cow
members participating in the interaction.
The transcription method I use here is informed by Bakhtin’s metaphor of
“voicing” to depict the ways in which language’s diachronic emergence always pre-
supposes a dialogical, intersubjective ideological space-time.10 For Bakhtin, the
primary metaphors of language were aural, tactile, and emergent between moving
parts, much like the experience of listening to contrapuntal voices converging in
real-time—not as linear, stratified melodies, or vertical, synchronic harmonies that
essentialize meanings to the sum of their parts. Drawing inspiration from Bakhtin’s
understanding of language as a musical metaphor (as opposed to the inverse) my
analysis aims to give a sense of contrapuntal alignment and disalignment voiced
between different actors participating in an interaction. In doing so, I will focus
on moments in the course of this contrapuntal voicing, where attentiveness
66    Chapter 2

to a canonic poetics reveals both implicitly enregistered interactional orders

(Goffman 1983) as well as their potential recruitment in service of overturning
initially presumed upon interactional orders among the participants.
In making use of a western musical metaphor, the canon, I identify moments
where actors repeat or anticipate words or phrases uttered by a conversational
protagonist (as a means of emphasizing alignment and disalignment) during this
dynamic encounter. By way of this metaphor, I am trying to capture the staggered
aural effect—mirroring those of choral canons—as a way of emphasizing an affec-
tive alignment to a “head voice” by taking on a subordinate, rather than protago-
nistic role—for instance, the example of the backing singer in American popular
music. Such moments, I suggest, distill or reveal implicit interactional orders that
may contradict those that are explicitly assumed. In the case of the following inter-
action, Miriam and Palesa are recognized as leaders of Azanian Achievers. How-
ever, through the unfolding interaction, the stability of this hierarchy is rendered
somewhat more precarious.
Once everyone had arrived for the session, and the door to the boardroom we
were occupying was closed, I opened with the general question as to how everyone
had initially found adapting the life in China. CK spoke first, emphasizing how
jarring the transition from Gaborone (Botswana) to Beijing was:

1 CK: Now it’s good I’m enjoying it,

2 but at first the language barrier was
3 there.
4 [JP then enters the interaction once CK pauses]
5 JP: Ja, but it’s a bit of a challenge
6 this language thing, eh? When I
7 got here, my initial thought was
8 that, you know, there’d be more
9 people that understand English or
10 basic English, but none of that eh.

Here, CK leads, explicitly contextualizing his initial arrival in China in terms

of a language barrier. His delivery is relaxed at this point in the interaction.
JP, the only white person in the focus group apart from myself, quickly inter-
jects, trying to build rapport with the Azanian Achievers by using “Ja” and
“eh” as South African English shibboleths to signal potential alignments with
South Africans in the room generally, but with myself in particular. He, like
CK, keeps his delivery relaxed, maintaining or perhaps emphasizing a South
African accent, using “Ja” to index agreement with what had just been said,
and “eh” seeking confirmation of his participation. Both CK and JP indi-
cate obstacles and disappointments with their experiences of the absence of
English in China.
 The Purple Cow Paradox     67

Speaking to JP, before the focus group, he appeared to embrace the dis-
course of post-apartheid reconstruction and reconciliation: “It’s a whole new
world, eh, we can all sit around the same table and just talk about China.” JP
was referring to other black people sharing the same corporate setting over-
looking one of the wealthiest parts of Beijing, imagining an equal postracial
interaction unburdened by less-privileged interlocutors who still constitute
an economic, mostly black, majority in his home country. In his conciliatory
hubris, JP further sought to indigenize himself by recruiting me to his aid,
drawing attention to the fact that, like me, he too was “a real dutchman like
Jannie . . . we are from the same tribe”—deliberately using both the diminutive
form of my Afrikaans name, Jannie, and the derogatory ethnic slur, dutch-
man, as both a self-deprecating strategy and a way to suggest both that he was
on equal footing with his other African interlocutors, and that he had “pale
native” solidarity with me.
Picking up on (what he perceived to be) the elite makeup of the group, JP often
invoked the rhetorical phrase “we all want the same thing, right?” both prior to
this meeting and in later interactions with Azanian Achievers whom he hoped
were his peers. Through this, he appeared to suggest that they are equals in the
interaction, in so far as they were all English-speaking, educated “global leaders.”
The reception of JP’s position within the group, however, was another matter alto-
gether. CK responded to JP’s “language gap” observation, attempting to expound
on his own analysis:

1 CK: Yeah, because a lot of people . . .

2 JP: [starts talking over CK]
3 until you get in a
4 CK: [directs himself at
5 Gabriel] People in other
6 cities say “in Beijing
7 JP: cab, you’re like oh shit.
8 [stops talking]
9 Gabriel: [immediately leans in
10 To listen, nodding visibly and
11 intently at CK]

In this exchange, CK begins by addressing himself to JP, who then cuts him off and
starts addressing the group as a whole. CK, however, reasserts himself by speaking
to Gabriel, who is seated next to him. Meanwhile, JP’s imposition has not gone
unnoticed and an alignment with CK begins to form where everyone in the group
turns to direct themselves toward CK. This is picked up on by JP, who tails off
and stops talking. It is more or less at this moment that CK begins to slow down
and enunciate, almost in a burlesque, using a posh British accent. The group
68    Chapter 2

uptake of the switch from a Tswana- to posh English accent—with its measured
phrasing—is marked in what follows:

1 JP: [ . . . Looks offended and

2 keeps quiet]
3 CK: and Shanghai . . . you’ll be
4 okay,” but when you get here
5 no . . . ’cause
6 Gabriel: you’ll be okay . . .
7 CK: from the airport
8 it’s like the first
9 person you see
10 Miriam: doesn’t speak
11 Palesa:  doesn’t speak
12 CK: and it’s difficult.
13 Miriam: English
14 Palesa:  English!

Facilitated by CK’s change of rhythm and emphasis, the black members of group
intensify their alignment by anticipating what he will say next, endorsing him
through a chorus-like voicing of the phrases “you’ll be okay” and “doesn’t speak
English.” The result of this interaction is that JP is effectively excluded from the
participation framework from this point onward. CK as the oldest black male
in the group quickly establishes his seniority through the assistance of Gabriel
(at twenty-five, the youngest person in the focus group). Meanwhile, Miriam and
Palesa participate in the conversation having been demoted to attentive praise
singers of CK’s performance.
Not only should this interaction be taken as an exemplar of a discourse
pattern that pervaded the interactional gender dynamics of elite Anglophone
African students in Beijing, it was also an interactional dynamic within which
Miriam and other black women in this community were acutely aware of. Miriam
and I discussed the problems of patriarchy fairly regularly—as an almost mun-
dane topic of discussion among younger African female students as well as older
women (like Miriam) with a certain English educational status and background.
On one occasion, I asked how she dealt with it as a leader in this community. She
explained that her status as a black woman in China already placed her on the
back foot outside of the African community, and that dealing with “strong” Afri-
can men who ultimately needed her network to survive, was comparatively easier
to manage “because it’s familiar.” When I asked about other younger black women
and the obstacles of patriarchy, she noted that they would have to find their own
way like she did: “It’s not easy, but if you can make yourself indispensable, and
make it so that others need to depend on you, then you’re in with a chance.”
 The Purple Cow Paradox     69

I ventured: “Make yourself the best Purple Cow you can be?”
“That’s it,” Miriam noted with a sagely nod, but then realizing that I was per-
haps not being entirely sincere, added: “I’m not joking.”
Among men in the community, there was a similar degree of awareness, but
significantly different responses to it. While some felt that it was a pervasive
social problem that needed to be addressed and that there should be greater
gender equality among Africans, as I note in the following chapter, there was
also an outright hostility against young women who were critical of patriarchy.
One unusual response emerged in an interview of a former Azanian Achiever—
Zakes Mbuli—who seethed at his frequent exclusion from this group, holding
Miriam accountable for being ostracized: “That woman is a sangoma [‘witch’
or ‘witch doctor’]. She pretends like she wants to help you to your face and
then sends a tokoloshe [‘witch’s familiar’ or ‘demon pet’] to get you later .  .  .
she likes to keep everyone close and under control but doesn’t like it if you
talk too much. I just had enough of the mind games and decided to make my
own guanxi.”
Here, Zakes, who still had many friends in Azanian Achievers, felt that he
had not only been excluded but had to become part of an out-group and no
longer had access to Miriam’s network or resources. Marking her as a san-
goma—an initiated woman or man constituting a supernatural threat through
the wielding of occult power—Zakes suggested that Miriam was able to capri-
ciously enact unseen retribution against her victims and blessings upon her
acolytes. In exiting the patronage network, Zakes imagined himself to be
immune to the intersubjective witchcraft she might otherwise be able to enact
upon him through mutually contingent and dependent social relations, or
guanxi. Thus, from Zakes’s perspective, Miriam transcended the usual bonds
of patriarchy that governed mere mortals, something Miriam did not seem
as convinced of—however, I might have been more naïve than Zakes about
Miriam’s powers.
The tension between the “equal opportunity” aspiration Miriam and Palesa
endorsed before, and gender hierarchy in the conversation cited here, emerges
not simply because the actors’ internalized ideologies of white heteronorma-
tive patriarchy—ultimately obviating actors’ motivation of an equal opportunity
cosmopolitanism mediated through the seemingly neutral register of English.
Rather, I suggest that closer attention must be paid to the social space-time of
unmarked aspiration that subjects like Vivian and Miriam attempt to partially
inhabit and are constantly thwarted by. Doing so necessitates attending to the
intersectional horizons that unmarked English enregisters through their inter-
actions. Here, I suggest reading the limitations of the dream of the Purple Cow
from within a raciolinguistic space and time (Fanon [1952] 2008) that reveals the
failure of its motivation.
70    Chapter 2

DECOLONIZING THE CHRONOTOPE

In his own formulation of Mikhail Bakhtin’s chronotope, Asif Agha discusses

the contingencies between the intersubjective emergence of personhood and the
mass-mediated space-times they depend on. Here, Agha reconfigures the chrono-
tope as a formation “of place-time-and-personhood to which social interactants
orient when they engage each other through discursive signs of any kind” (2007a,
320). In aligning themselves respectively to the text-worlds and reading publics
of Lean In and Purple Cow, Vivian and Miriam’s students forge and participate
in chronotopes that are dialectically both of their own making, and yet must also
transcend them as part of an aspirational space-time that is yet to be achieved. For
Agha, time “is a semiotic isolate,” thus impossible to unmoor from its dynamic
contextualization in articulated assemblages of co(n)text and personhood as dif-
ferent, but none-the-less mass-mediated archetypes—like the interactions in
which the Purple Cow and Sheryl Sandberg presuppose an articulated cosmo-
politan contemporaneity and associated personages. This kind of space-time,
however, must be mediated. As Agha suggests, time “is textually diagrammed
and ideologically grasped in relation to, and through the activities of, locatable
selves”—in this case, Miriam and Vivian’s presence as those who index, but who
do not fully inhabit, the space-times of the text objects they mediate (2007a, 320).
Thus, in the motivation of any icon, and recognition of any sign, a receiver and a
space-time of reception are entailed, even if both appear to be absent. Here, three
points—a legible sign, a spatiotemporal context of reception, and a point of recep-
tion (a subject)—form a mutually contingent triangle of reception. Describing the
chronotope as being “peopled by social types,” Agha aligns himself with Bakhtin’s
view that media reception—print or otherwise—constitutes a socially contingent
subject formation like that of personhood. Of course, such social types can be
chimeric in their construction. In Purple Cow and Rainbow Bridge communities,
implicit social types—like the white English-speaking American cosmopolitan—
can become obscured by the explicit motivation of multicultural nonracial subject
inhabiting the “neutral” register of English as the global language. Such plural, but
far from equal, possibilities can be understood in relation to Bakhtin’s insistence
on the unfinalizability of persons and personhood. This perspective is grounded in
the assumption of an indeterminacy of identity as constituted intersocially rather
than autonomously and individually out of voices that can never be located or
rooted fully in only one body (Bakhtin and Holquist 1993). This is articulately
framed in Bakhtin’s elaboration what he calls the “act of understanding”: “In order
to understand, it is immensely important for the person who understands to be
located outside the object of his or her creative understanding—in time, in space,
in culture. For one cannot even really see one’s own exterior and comprehend it as
a whole, and no mirrors or photographs can help; our real exterior can be seen and
understood only by other people, because they are located outside us in space,
and because they are others” (Bakhtin 2004, 7).
 The Purple Cow Paradox     71

Thus, chronotopes and the persons they diagram into being, and vice-versa,
form mutually dependent dialogically emergent formations. This is the case
because a dialogical outlook points to reception as the emergent site of a sign’s
meaning, value, and material efficacy. This suggests a fundamentally distributed
account of meaning-making, complicating easy readings of flat-footed identity
politics on the one hand, and supposedly radical anti-identity and anti-political
claims on the other. Instead, emerging asymmetries arise multidirectionally—
simultaneously bottom-up, top-down, and perhaps even sideways in the case of
the sign configuration, “third world” in its original sense. However, they are far
from relative or absent formations.
This insight was not lost on Frantz Fanon, another thinker who pointed to a
similar relationship between space-time and personhood. For him, the politi-
cal stakes of these intersectional asymmetries mattered profoundly. In his Black
Skins, White Masks ([1952] 2008) Fanon explicitly notes the role of spatiotemporal
contextualization in providing the weight that grounds signifiers and allows for
a distillation of their resulting essentialisms. In his critique of Octave Mannoni’s
(1950) Prospero and Caliban: The Psychology of Colonization, Fanon provokes the
analyst—of dreams or political economy—to attend to the material conditions
within which the signs of memory and alienation unfold. Decrying Mannoni’s
misinterpretation of the traumatic dreams of Malagasies, Fanon writes: “We must
put the dream in its time, and this time is the period during which 80,000 natives
were killed, i.e., one inhabitant out of fifty; and in its place, and the place is an
island with a population of 4 million among whom no real relationship can be
established, where clashes break out on all sides, where lies and demagoguery are
the sole masters. In some circumstances, we must recall, the socius is more impor-
tant than the individual” (Fanon [1952] 2008, 84–85 emphasis in original).
Fanon’s spatiotemporalized “socius” emerges as a trans-historical chronotope
that persistently materializes the colonial consciousness in the decolonizing pres-
ent. It is not the repetition of history, but the reiteration of it in a dynamic dia-
lectical historicity that continues to animate the intersocial space-time of the still
colonized postcolonial subject. The implication here is that chronotopes are both
not equal and emerge relationally vis-à-vis other chronotopes. To be sure, Lean
In and Purple Cow may, on one level, imbricate very different reading publics or
chronotopes, and here every reader co-constitutes their fractal Lean In or Pur-
ple Cow chronotope within it. On another level, Purple Cow and Lean In also
diagram a cosmopolitan, English-speaking horizon of aspiration to Miriam and
Vivian’s social projects. The seemingly equivalent, and relative, potentialities of all
of these chronotopes, however, are quickly unsettled when it emerges that African
and Chinese subjects are less easily able to inhabit such space-times of person-
hood compared to the white English subjects these chronotopes implicitly pre-
suppose. This becomes particularly apparent when the seeming persistence of a
colonial chronotope burdens postcolonial subjects in ways that white subjects do
72    Chapter 2

not appear to experience beyond narcissistic guilt or denial. In Miriam and Palesa’s
compromised relationship with the Purple Cow, and to a certain extent in the lim-
its of Ally’s projection of Sheryl Sandberg onto Vivian, important challenges to any
claim of language arbitrariness emerges, thus making chronotopic construction
and imagination a consistently politicized domain. In the case of Azanian Achiev-
ers and Rainbow Bridge, this is particularly explicit in the ways their attempts at
legibility unfold within the unmarked (perhaps white), still-Anglocentric space-
time in which the Purple Cow and Sheryl Sandberg are mere tokens.
This space-time thus suggests a contradiction between constraint and libera-
tion, but from and in relation to what? In the following section, I will conclude
with a transhistorical contextualization of the hierarchies of mobility that compli-
cate the emergence of postintersectional personhood. In doing so, I will propose
that the compromised commitment to Purple Cow imbricates a dialectical history
of race and gender relations that are very much part of a legacy of apartheid and
colonial political economy of labor migrancy in the interactional reiteration of a
third-world space-time.

I N T E R SE C T IO NA L ( I M ) M O B I L I T I E S

In viewing the deferment of Vivian and Miriam’s motivated aspirational horizons,

it might appear that the gender-emancipatory possibilities of a cosmopolitan
space-time are being short-circuited by a patriarchal backlash: on the part of the
male members of Purple Cow or the white male professors in liberal American
universities. Instead, I propose that the history being drawn from and the ideolog-
ical context that sustains the elusive aspiration toward the Purple Cow are sugges-
tive of another intersectional tension, one that concerns the postcolonial politics
of (im)mobility.
Anthropologist Julie Chu (2010) has evocatively captured a contemporary ten-
sion between mobility and immobility as equally traumatic conditions in the lives
of Fuzhounese subjects in China, among whom she identifies a complex, inter-
generational mobile imaginary. Not only do contemporary Fuzhounese migrants
value mobility as a capacity that stratifies different mobile or immobile subjects, the
same anxieties also animate and sustain relationships between the living and
the dead. Crucial in mediating these various kinds of mobility are two forms of
currency that appear fairly prominently among her informants. The first is paper
money that looks suspiciously like American dollars, the second is debt converted
into a form of Maussean gift, where the capacity to pay off debt after having been
in debt becomes a mode of sustaining intersocial ties—what will be discussed in
chapter 5 as renqing. Both of these forms of currency ultimately come to com-
mensurate the same “compulsion” toward mobility and index “America” as almost
metaphysical destination: where subjects have always been arriving even if they’ve
never left Fuzhou. Perhaps this dialectical contradiction emerges precisely in
 The Purple Cow Paradox     73

relation to the ideological backdrop that imbricates late capitalist mobilities, mani-
festing in the infrastructural projects Chu’s subjects are witnessing in Fuzhou.
There is a difference between the mobility desire described in the Lean In and
Purple Cow discussions earlier and the compulsion to mobility that emerges
in Chu’s discussion. Here, I do not feel this difference arises purely out of the
(so-called) subjective nature of ethnographic observation and various ethnogra-
phers’ emplacements. Instead, I suggest that the difference reveals an important
distinction between educational and other forms of migrancy—Chinese traders
in Africa or African traders in China, for instance. In my work, as has also been
explored in Lisa Rofel’s (2007) work, desire is animated by the imagined capacity
to transform into a more ideal or cosmopolitan subject. If one travels for educa-
tion, there is a guaranteed transformation that those both abroad and at home
come to count on. In less desire-driven forms of migrancy, one must travel in the
hope of a transformation (of social or economic status) that is far from guaranteed.
In the first case, mobility is a desirable and transformative capacity. In the second,
a compulsion to move—whether desired or achieved—is one’s only option. Nei-
ther subject, however, is necessarily more precarious than the other, and in both
cases, failure to maintain mobility may result in (a perhaps terminal) stasis—as
demonstrated in Damien’s example in the preceding chapter. Describing similar
precarities in the context of white racist uptake of non-white immigrant mobility
in contemporary Australia, Ghassan Hage uses the term “stuckedness” to get at
this failure.
For Hage, stuckedness emerges precisely out of a sense of existential mobility
as a basic human pursuit shared by many of his respective Australian informants:
particularly between white racists and perceived-to-be non-white immigrants:
Existential mobility is this type of imagined/felt movement. .  .  . This differs from
the physical movement of tourists, for instance, whose physical mobility (travel) is
part of their accumulation of existential mobility. In a sense, we can say that people
migrate because they are looking for a space that constitutes a suitable launching
pad for their social and existential self. They are looking for a space and a life where
they feel they are going somewhere as opposed to nowhere, or at least, a space
where the quality of their “going-ness” is better than what it is in the space they
are leaving behind. (Hage 2009, 2)

As non-white elites with a lot to lose, we can also see something like Hage’s exis-
tential mobility at play in motivating actors like Miriam’s and Vivian’s respective
cosmopolitan projects. However, in their case it is the pursuit of existential mobil-
ity that comes to generate the intersectional stratifications that sustain their very
own conditions of stuckedness. Additionally, we can understand icons of person-
hood—like Sheryl Sandberg, cowboys, giraffes, or Purple Cows that orient the
“remarkable selves” under construction here—as generating omissions that (per-
haps fetishistically) occlude the possibilities of inverted, dystopian chronotopes
74    Chapter 2

of stuckedness interrupting the smooth textures of the cosmopolitan lives being

pursued—regardless of their compromises. Such dystopian archetypes might be
spatiotemporally proximate and yet negated. For instance, contemporary migrant
women, like Meimei, whom Vivian and Ally certainly do not want to be. They can
also be historically remote, and yet painfully present—the conditions of indus-
trial colonialism and apartheid that exploited the limited choices of Miriam’s and
Palesa’s mothers and grandmothers up until a few decades ago.

H I STOR IC A L ( I M ) MOB I L I T I E S , C OLON IA L MODE R N I T I E S

Once again, my invocation of history does not suggest a linear, deterministic rela-
tionship between past and present. Instead, what is at play is reiteration rather
than recursion of the dynamics of a colonial-capitalist past in the context of con-
temporary Sino-African Beijing. The demand for labor in industrializing African
urban centers in this region during the nineteenth and early twentieth centu-
ries was predominantly fueled by mining booms in gold, copper, and diamonds,
leading to the development of cities like Johannesburg, which due to its size and
continued prosperity became a quintessential African metropole. In the work of
sociologists and historians Christopher Ballantine (2000), Charles van Onselen
(1982), and Laura Longmore (1966), a number of important features about labor
migrancy and its social transformations around Johannesburg become apparent.
It created a disconnect between men coming to labor in urban areas and women
who were expected to manage rural homesteads that white farmers and the colo-
nial state were increasingly expropriating. In both cases, Black South African men
and women were transformed from land-owning-collectives—mediated through
complex “cattle bridewealth” and kinship-based hierarchical systems—to bare
labor. Black South African subjects were either struggling to maintain household
and kinship relations on shrinking land where neither cattle nor grazing was suffi-
cient to do so, or were selling their domestic, mining, and industrial labor in urban
centers, unable to afford to participate in the kinship-property system. Many
men became inscribed in what van Onselen (1982) calls the prison-mine com-
plex, where African men finding themselves in colonial-commercial centers like
Johannesburg were either interpolated into the industrial labor system—which
was dangerous and exploitative, but ultimately more economically viable than a
shrinking homestead or a white farm—or forced to find alternatives at the margins
of a predominantly male, urban world. The alternatives were certainly criminal
given the ways in which the black African males’ movements and capacities to
live near urban areas were severely curtailed by a set of laws that simultaneously
forced and curtailed their mobility. These were called pass-laws and were a kind
of domestic passport offered to African migrant laborers allowing them to travel
to find work. At the same time pass-laws allowed very limited movement for black
men and women, whereby curfews were placed on those working within white
 The Purple Cow Paradox     75

urban areas. A property could not be owned, and only certain kinds of residences
adjacent to urban areas could be maintained. These adjacent areas were called
“locations” and their existence along with the other pass-law constraints aided
the “compartmentalization” (Fanon [1952] 2008) of white and black chronotopes
within the same urban areas.
The worlds that opened up in the obvious cracks within this overtly constrain-
ing system took on a variety of forms. In van Onselen’s (1982) work, such con-
straints were the condition of possibility for the emergence of an elaborate criminal
class and urban culture in Johannesburg, while for Ballantine (2000), the resulting
condition of labor migrancy resulted in a highly gendered music and media land-
scape that, in its gritty glamorization of urban life, set the tone for cosmopolitan
aspirations of not only black South Africans, but black migrant labor coming from
Zimbabwe and Botswana to work in or around the goldfields of the Witwatersrand.
Such transbordering subjects came to see Johannesburg as a regional nexus point
for their aspirations—a stepping-stone metropolis. For Longmore (1966), Hunter
(2010), and to some extent Ballantine, this “cosmopolitan” urban domain emerged
as an appealing “opportunity” to many African women, many of whom were no
longer content with trying to maintain homesteads, where often they were at the
mercy of fairly repressive in-laws. Add to this the rapidly deteriorating conditions
on the homestead as a result of land expropriation and the power vacuums left
by a mass male exodus to the mines, and one can understand the fairly strong
motivations to leave for cities like Johannesburg. Upon coming to the city, many
found niches—legally or illegally—taking up domestic labor in white residences,
opening taverns that would serve beer and food as well as provide entertainment
for laboring black men, or engage in various forms of compensated male compan-
ionship ranging from “romantic” or “provider-love” (Hunter 2010) to prostitution
(Longmore 1966; Ballantine 2000). Ballantine, in particular, emphasizes the ways
in which black labor migrancy—while providing new theaters for female labor—
ultimately exacerbated or engendered less-equal relationships between black men
and women in Southern Africa. In all these discussions, male roles were reduced to
activities motivating the circulation of colonial-commodity forms—through min-
ing, industrial, and even musical labor. Female roles, by contrast, had to further
conform to the fulfillment of male desire, be it as maintainers of the homesteads
and family affairs, or as the providers of companion labor in the urban centers as
sexually commoditized subjects.

“ W E’ R E S T I L L G E T T I N G F U C K E D”

The resonance between this historical description of colonial labor migrancy in

Southern Africa with female migrants in Beijing is deliberate. In the Chinese
capital, Palesa and other female Purple Cows find themselves under pressure to
conform to similar limiting possibilities between sexual objectification and the
76    Chapter 2

expectation to “return home and take care of the homestead”—preferably with

a comfortable job and a pension. While the next chapter will go into detail as to
how such expectations are contested with equally limiting results, I will suggest
that many female Azanian Achievers who quietly embrace the “equal opportu-
nity” logic of the Purple Cow do not, in fact, express this through public “sexual
freedom,” which is treated skeptically. As Lindiwe, another black South African
informant, put it in an interview: “Freedom from what? We’re still the ones getting
fucked.” Here, Lindiwe was drawing attention to both the persistence of patriarchal
power dynamics as reflected in the focus-group discussion mentioned earlier, as
well as the limited numbers of female African students compared to their male
counterparts in Beijing. This situation leaves female Purple Cow members both
outnumbered and vulnerable to power dynamics that are largely out of their con-
trol, even if their leaders are women (as seen in an earlier interaction). Instead,
many commit to the Purple Cow in two ways. In the case of Palesa, they resist
relationships in Beijing in the service of having a successful career “back home,” or,
in the case of Miriam, represent themselves as “strictly professional” cosmopoli-
tan subjects within Azanian Achievers, choosing to have relationships with men
mostly outside of an African peer community.
Compared to Miriam and Palesa, Vivian and Ally experience vastly different
kinds of limits. Indeed, most of the participants in Rainbow Bridge’s boot camp
found the concept of intersectionality troubling to fathom, claiming that “all
women in China experience equal discrimination,” a perspective once voiced by
Ally and which drew unanimous approval from the other class participants. This
confused their visiting professor, who was trying to teach them bell hooks’s (2013)
critique of Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In—the two opening texts of the workshop.
Indeed, the relatively privileged position of many of the workshop participants
may have precluded any kind of critical engagement with black and ethnic minor-
ity women in China. However, the cracks of Beijing’s migrant underworld require
little excavation to uncover intersectional strata, not unlike those of the industrial-
prison complex that the Africanist historians evocatively described.
In this chapter, the constrained translation of mass icons of “personhood”
revealed intersectional orders emerging in the absence of ideal “Sino-Afropolitan”
cosmopolitan precedents. This contributes an important extension to both discus-
sions of gendered enregisterment as well as theories around race-gender-sexuality
intersectionalities, given the fact that the majority of these prior analyses have
been staged in the context of bounded societies, nations, or language commu-
nities that have shared a long-term proximity. In a Sino-African encounter, the
more spatiotemporally complex, dialectical dimensions of register formation and
intersectional stratification can be observed in an interaction that is less obviously
overdetermined by overt structuring processes like the nation-state and language
standardization policies. To be sure, my analysis suggests that elements of these
structures are still far from absent, however, in less expected modes of ordering.
 The Purple Cow Paradox     77

Furthermore, the intersectional ordering I have identified here is contingent

on an overarching spatiotemporal contextualization of meanings and associated
values that engender their own dependencies—where signs of language, mobility,
and race generate the space-time for the reiteration of “common sense” gender
asymmetries.11 In support of my discussion, I additionally provided an example
of interactional analysis where the identification of “canonic poetics” empirically
reveals many of the implicit participatory hierarchies that more conventional
discussions of intersectionality (Crenshaw 1991) often effectively demonstrate in
more rhetorical settings (Flores 2018). In the following chapter, I will expand on
these themes, showing how the relationship between English and its associated,
racialized signs of cosmopolitanism—as a kind of virtual gravity for Sino-African
interactions—provides often constraining rather than liberating possibilities for a
genuinely decolonized subjecthood.
 3

Who Can Be a Racist?

Or, How to Do Things with Personhood

The previous chapter demonstrated two contexts in which unmarked cosmo-

politan horizons, mediated through unmarked English, ultimately engendered
stratifying intersectional propensities for Rainbow Bridge and Azanian Achiev-
ers. As to how this relationship between the ideological infrastructure of inter-
sectionality and the semiotics of interaction unfolds, a key insight can be drawn
from the work of pragmatist philosopher and semiotician, Charles Sanders
Peirce (1955). He suggests that relations of iconicity or sameness are always
motivated (Carr 2011). That is, the indispensable “iconicities” or relations of
sameness that constitute both our personal intuitions and public institutions
are subject to the intersubjective belief, performativity, and maintenance of
meanings and values that nonetheless come to be perceived as durable, tran-
scendent, and enduring even, or especially, to those subjects tasked with the
labor of belief, performance, and maintenance. The feelings of one’s stigmatiza-
tion and stereotypification in a given situation are seldom not experienced as
a compounding effect of personal and public modes of “being seen.” For those
with experience of race, gender, sexual, or class discrimination, the potential
collapse of public institutions and private intuitions around seemingly arbitrary
propositions of sameness and difference can engender crushing anxiety. Stereo-
types around “who one is” are necessarily inflected by possibilities of “who one
could be” in the perceptions and recognitions of others. Thus, as questions of
racialized discrimination necessarily entail concerns of iconicity and alterity;
so concerns of racism—as the sociopolitical motivation of racial difference—
necessarily entail questions of personhood. This chapter attempts to engage the
broader pragmatic question haunting current inquiries into the (im)possibility
of Chinese racism: Who can be racist?

78
 Who Can Be a Racist?     79

R AC IA L I Z E D I N F R A S T RU C T U R E S
A N D T R A N SL AT IO NA L L A B O R

During the Ebola virus outbreak in 2014, students from a number of different
African countries were quarantined in “Ebola residences”—as students referred to
them—across campuses in Beijing. The policies were not enforced in a way that
took account of different African countries’ relationships to the Ebola outbreak.
One South African student reportedly protested saying the American interna-
tional students were being preferentially treated, as the United States had more
outbreaks of Ebola than South Africa. She accused the administrators of a racist
decision. The administrators were perplexed, arguing that more African coun-
tries had Ebola than North American ones. Hearing this response, many Chinese
students agreed with the African students, suggesting that the university admin-
istration was shifting goalposts on the issue. However, the administration stood
firm on its decision as a statistically and thus scientifically informed set of mea-
sures directed toward the greater good. Testing and quarantine, however, rapidly
concluded once widespread dissatisfaction was apparent. For black students from
African countries, obvious forms of racism persist in China, even when they are
denied through geographical and demographic recalibrations as a particularly
pernicious, though seemingly objectivist, form of gaslighting—mostly because such
denials and recalibrations seem so hurtfully reflexive to black African students in
China. Furthermore, the very fact that forms of discrimination have taken on a
nuance since 2010 does not erase fairly recent memories of racialization (Sautman
1994). In reckoning with these experiences, however, it is unfortunate that the inter-
personal textures a dynamics of these interactions are left out while focusing on
the outcomes of victim and perpetrator—as though both positions can be taken for
granted in the absence of ideological and institutional frameworks. To put it directly,
this focus risks attributing essential agency to gender and racial phenotype in the ways
Barbara and Karen Fields have criticized (2012). Here, I want to explore an interac-
tion that demonstrates how institutional and ideological scales of racialization can
manifest within interpersonal encounters in fairly explicit ways, and importantly,
that this convergence is facilitated by a discourse of racialization that is neither
essential nor quintessentially local.
Chimai and Hondo were two Zimbabweans whom I befriended in the later
stage of my fieldwork in Beijing. Chimai was something of a virtuoso on the
mbira—an instrument with a close association with Zimbabwe, even though it
travels through many musical contexts in Southern Africa. Like me, Hondo played
guitar. The three of us got together relatively frequently to play. We were short
on rehearsal space as our respective residences had understandable noise restric-
tions. At the time, I was fortunate to have access to a working space in one of the
80    Chapter 3

American university research and outreach centers in Beijing, so we would meet

there in the evenings to practice. On one occasion, Hondo left the rehearsal to go
to the bathroom and exited into the seminar rooms adjoining hallway. I then heard
a loud, anxious back-and-forth in the hallway, through the door that Hondo left
ajar: “Why are you here?” and “Who let you in?” I got up to investigate and found
Hondo confronted by one of the center’s visiting faculty, Professor Xu—a prom-
inent scholar at an American university who split his time between China (his
home country) and the United States—where he taught and lived. As both were
looking at me with awkward hesitation, I spoke first and explained that Hondo
was my guest and then asked what was going on. Professor Xu, visibly unsettled,
dropped his voice and explained haltingly that he was concerned with the center’s
security and just needed to establish what was going on. I had seen many foreign
guests enter and leave the center, none of them encountering this reaction.
It is obvious that the surface power dynamics of such an encounter heavily favor
Professor Xu. It is also apparent that Professor Xu was recruiting an uncannily
familiar American mode of urban racial profiling during his late-night encoun-
ter with Hondo. What is perhaps less evident is the effect of my walking in on
the interaction and the immediate framing effects of my entry into the scene—as
a white, English-speaking body. Hondo, up until that point, admitted to being
confused by a Chinese civilian questioning him like a police or security official in
English. My arrival and Professor Xu’s response triggered a different appraisal of
the situation. Later, trying to make light of the situation as we were walking back
to his dorm, he joked: “For a moment there, I felt like I had just stolen fruit from
a [white] farmer.” To be sure, this kind of encounter is less frequent in contempo-
rary Zimbabwe (to say the least). However, socio-linguistic memory reaches back
to times when such interactions were encompassed by cruelly racist ideological
machinery that heavily favored the white farmer.
When I returned to the center he following day, Professor Liu—a different,
locally affiliated Chinese faculty member—stopped me in the hallway and noted:
“I heard about Professor Xu and your friend.” This set up a confidential discussion
during which she assured me that Professor Xu was not being racist, indicating
that he had told her about the interaction and that I might have likely “gotten the
wrong idea.” My witnessing apparently generated potentially problematic iconic
equivalencies with settler colonial racism. More importantly, these equivalencies
not only seemed intelligible to my Chinese and Zimbabwean interlocutors. They
also constituted as source of considerable anxiety and a need for effacement in
light of their name-ability through my walking in. For whom one is racist appears
at least as important a consideration as asking: “Who can be racist?”
What Hondo and Professor Xu’s encounter demonstrates is that racism and
intersectional violence depend on the intersubjective maintenance of forms of
iconicity—this constitutes a division of translational labor that is operational-
ized through motivating a constant tension between whiteness and its unmarked
 Who Can Be a Racist?     81

mediations. Notice the subtle behind-the-scenes work between a number of actors

in managing, on the one hand, the recognition of racial ordering via whiteness,
and, on the other, whiteness’s effacement through claims of misrecognizing “reali-
ties” that were actually unmarked. In the double-movement of recognition and
effacement, race becomes stratified not only in relation to subjects’ capacities for
mobility, but also in relation to the dimensions of language that accompany mobile
subjects like Hondo and Professor Xu. We can observe this more generally where
both explicit racism, in the form of racial essentialism, and liberal racism, as a
relativistic denial of race, require and necessitate consensus and co(n)texts for rac-
ism to do their ideological work.
How a race as a token becomes “iconic” of a horizon of excellence or dysfunc-
tion, or how race as a type becomes obviated by making it arbitrary both depend
on translational labor of sameness and difference—or iconicity and alterity. Such
translations of iconicity and alterity in relation to token and type are necessarily
mediated through practices like alignment, reception, and consensus around how
a race is “like” or “unlike” another, or how race stands as an arbitrary category
rendering races as equal tokens of the same deferred type. It is this simultaneous
dependency on consensus (explicit or implicit) and context that I am trying to
evoke in understanding the pragmatics of race, its contingency on the reception
of whiteness, and how “racism” uncannily emerges among non-white subjects in
a non-western context.
While Peirce himself does not use the metaphor of translation in framing
his definitions of symbol, icon, and index, linguistic anthropologists and many
pragmatists have taken up his identification of iconic and indexical semiotic pro-
cesses as suggestive of fundamentally nonagentive dimensions of social mediation
(M. Silverstein 1976; Carr 2011; Wirtz 2014). In this regard, linguistic and other
semiotic practices make meaning by receiving meaning, which in turn remake
meaning and so forth. This being the case, iconic or iconizing processes—making
things stand as “different” or “same”; and indexical processes, where meaning only
emerges co(n)textually—in “context” and in relation to other signs or “co-texts”—
are fundamentally intersocial and intersubjective (M. Silverstein and Urban 1996).
Thus, translation as an intersubjective as well as iconicity/alterity-motivating pro-
cess does not imply causal volitionality or a commitment to rational, individual
intent. Translation thus presupposes a more interactional, reception-based con-
ception of meaning-making as emerging through encounters, yet always located
within the historical and material conditions that dialectically constitute, and are
constituted by, their motivational space-time. In this way “I” and “you” are per-
spectival signs—or deictics (M. Silverstein 1976)—that occur to their users to be
simultaneously preceding the interaction yet in a dynamic relationship with their
context of utterance, where their translation can never be felt as “arbitrary” in the
ways Ferdinand de Saussure once suggested (2011). In another critique of arbi-
trariness, Frantz Fanon reveals another dimension of this translational sensibility,
82    Chapter 3

where translation manifests itself in the violence of decolonization. In Wretched

of the Earth, he writes: “Decolonization, which sets out to change the order of
the world, is, obviously, a program of complete disorder. But it cannot come as a
result of magical practices, nor of a natural shock, nor of a friendly understand-
ing. Decolonization, as we know, is a historical process: that is to say that it cannot
be understood, it cannot become intelligible nor clear to itself except in the exact
measure that we can discern the movements which gave it historical form and
content” (Fanon 1963, 36).
Decolonization, an always as-yet-incomplete project, is a semantic transla-
tional process—given the ways in which the meaningful relations in one spatio-
temporal context must be “incompletely” reconfigured in another. However, as
Fanon demonstrates, decolonization is also a pragmatic translational process, in
the sense that transformation from colonization to decolonization is troubled by
an ideological context that does not allow for a seamless shift in relations and reap-
propriations of power. For thinkers of decolonization, there is an obstruction to
the simple translation of supposedly arbitrary signs. As English is not merely a lan-
guage among other languages—something Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (1994) continues to
tirelessly demonstrate—so, too, whiteness is not just a race among races. The reit-
eration of these signs, their co(n)textualization, and the way they stratify as much
as commensurate their co-signs reveals both the ideological nature of translation, as
well as the inescapability of translation as simultaneous social fact and stratifying
reality. This is a reality within which “red,” “brown,” “black,” and “yellow” people
have come to inhabit or appropriate positions subordinate or adjacent to “whites,”
and where English becomes necessary social currency for all global migrants even
though their capacity to enunciate its phonemes or inhabit its default white sub-
jectivity is fundamentally unequal. These positions, for Fanon, are not arbitrary,
because whiteness and other signs of the (post)colonial present never can be.
In this regard Fanon’s insights concerning the relationship between race, lan-
guage, and capacities for mobility among subjects of decolonization stand in an
important historical dialogue with thinkers of postcolonial translation like Gayatri
Spivak ([1988] 2010) and Edward Said ([1977] 2003)—a genealogy that has influ-
enced a rich lineage of scholars particularly in fields like English and literature
studies, as well as history.
In their introduction to the edited collection Postcolonial Translation: Theory
and Practice, Susan Bassnett and Harish Trivedi note that translation “does not
occur in a vacuum, but in a continuum . . . an ongoing process of intellectual trans-
fer,” that it is “not an innocent, transparent activity . . . it rarely, if ever, involves a
relationship of equality between texts, authors or systems” (1999, 2). The authors’
main object of critique, however—and the primary concern of much early liter-
ary and historical engagements with the analytic of translation—is whether or not
translation emerged as a process that detracted from, or diminished, the “origi-
nal” historical, literary, or social text being translated. This mirrors a persistent,
 Who Can Be a Racist?     83

but currently more depoliticized, anthropological debate around representation as

translational practice in anthropology—one which perhaps is most iconically rep-
resented by (but certainly not limited to) the methodological tension that emerged
between the translational approach explicated in the work of Clifford Geertz (1973,
1977) and the critiques of James Clifford and George Marcus in their edited col-
lection Writing Culture (1986). All of these debates are important and ongoing
critiques, but only insofar as one is preoccupied with the question: “What is being
translated into what?” The following engagement with translation departs from
this strictly semantic approach.
Instead, following Frantz Fanon’s imperative, explicated at length in the first
chapter of his Black Skin, White Masks, an important translational insight emerges.
Fixation on the question of what is being translated comes at the cost of consider-
ing the more pragmatic condition of possibility for translation of any kind: the
units (linguistic and other signs) and space-times (material and historical con-
texts) of commensuration. “To speak means being able to use a certain syntax
and possessing the morphology of such and such a language, but it means above
all assuming a culture and bearing the weight of a civilization” ([1952] 2008, 1–2).
Here, Fanon was fundamentally concerned with a French colonial context in
which blacks were not only stratified in relation to whites through their capacity
for “good French,” but that they were also similarly stratified among one another:
the Antilleans’ “good French” vis-à-vis their Senegalese subordinates, the elite
cosmopolitan bilingual Martinican vis-à-vis the sedentary peasant who has only
mastered creole. For Fanon, the colonial world produces limited means for moti-
vating one’s subjectivity, value, and conditions of being—commensurations of
value under the sign of capital, commensurations of meaning under the signs of a
standardized language of command and its co(n)texts.
Given these limited means, colonial and decolonizing subjects ultimately come
to rely on the very signs of commensuration that compromise them. The fractal
stratifications that emerge as many of Fanon’s subjects translate alternatives to
their own oppression do not arise because colonial subjects believe in their capaci-
ties to overthrow whiteness and French as signs of commensuration. This is clear
in Fanon’s identification of the unthinkability of black creoles displacing French
whites—the subject of Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s masterful but severely undercele-
brated work (1995, 2003). Instead, the stratifications Fanon observes emerge pre-
cisely because of his subjects’ maintenance of French and whiteness as units of
commensuration in the absence of unthinkable alternatives—a condition that,
in turn, dialectically reinforces the very stratifications his subjects are trying to
escape. In Fanon’s argument, the target of translation—the as-yet-unimaginable
future subjectivity of decolonization—is both obscured by and becomes trans-
formed into its means: French and whiteness.
A recent example of a similar stratification emerges in the work of anthro-
pologist Norma Mendoza-Denton (2008), where the ideological recruitment of
84    Chapter 3

the racialized cultural capital of English and Spanish respectively become mark-
ers of extreme differentiation between two groups of female street gangs within
a relatively ethnically homogenous Latina community in Northern California.
She depicts how a north-south hemispheric localism emerges between two rival
gangs, the Norteñas and Sureñas, and that this hemispheric localism is distilled
through an interlinked process of linguistic and racial hyper-differentiation. Her
book is a fundamentally important ethnographic contribution and its intervention
is very much directed toward informing a public debate around the recognition
of racial and linguistic differentiation as social facts within minority communities
within the United States. Beyond fundamental regional and political contrasts, my
own argument differs from hers in another important sense. Rather than inter-
preting “language” and “race” as categories of differentiation, I treat “whiteness”
and “English” as categories of alignment and disalignment, in relation to which
subjects become stratified. Thus, while I am generally concerned with the overall
relationship between racialization and raciolinguistics (Alim et al. 2016), I am—as
suggested earlier—specifically preoccupied with raciolinguistic horizons of white-
ness as an ideological gravity that enregisters racialization. In line with linguistic
anthropologists Jonathan Rosa (2016a, 2016b, 2016c) and Mary Bucholtz (2010,
2016), I am interested in the relationships between whiteness, English, and their
others, where markedness and unmarkedness, of either English or whiteness, con-
stitutes a constantly negotiated ethnographic tension, between or among subjects,
that both inhabit, and perceive themselves to be inhabiting, this very tension.
In doing so, I also want to break with the idea that critiques of whiteness are
somehow less analytically sophisticated than critiques of race—a blatantly false
and fundamentally paralyzing position that ultimately makes the person articulat-
ing the argument into an anti-white racist pariah. It also generates a theoretical
disposition that enshrines relativistic inquiry—around race and language—at the
cost of recognizing the historically and ideologically situated conditions of possi-
bility for posing ethnographic questions, which are neither equal between ethnog-
rapher and informant, nor among ethnographers themselves. I think this matter
imbricates something wider than the discipline of anthropology and concerns a
climate of consent for exploring certain genealogies of thought while margina­
lizing others.
It is worth momentarily exploring resistance against, and in some cases
hostility toward, attempts at sustaining a postcolonial critique within an elite
Euro-American academic sphere. Beyond my own traumatic (but ultimately sub-
jective) experiences in trying to advocate for the merits of postcolonial theory, it
is apparent that such a hostility does exist, considering the decline of intellectual
spaces engaging postcolonial thought, despite the seemingly unproblematic esca-
lation of academic defenses of empire and historical imperialism in recent times.
Bruce Gilley’s recent article (2017) in Third World Quarterly—titled “The Case for
Colonialism”—serves as a symptomatic example. After undergoing a double-blind
 Who Can Be a Racist?     85

peer review in a journal that has in the past been sympathetic to authors engag-
ing postcolonial thought, the article was published, and to the horror of many of
these authors, Gilley noted that it was “high time” the British empire received its
due as an agent of development. Among those offended were several members of
the journal’s own editorial board who threatened to resign unless the article was
retracted. This set in motion debates around free speech and censorship over an
article many felt should not have seen the light of day unless there was a climate of
consent that was unconcerned with its proposition. It is this climate of consent—
and the complicity of a default liberal intellectualism—that continues to enable
white supremacy under the auspices of open debate.
Opposing this, what I have argued—and continue to argue—seeks recourse to
the intellectual legacy of black consciousness thinker, Steve Biko, who noted that
intellectual propositions that propose a continuity of white imperialism decades
after so-called decolonization ultimately threaten a liberal intellectual sphere that
constantly recruits itself as an ally, while benefitting from racial stratifications
that it criticizes.
Biko’s (1978) revealing critique of white liberal participation in black libera-
tion movements contains a crucial insight for aspiring intellectuals seeking new
liberal utopias in out-of-the-way places: that liberal nonracialist arguments for
racial liberation are always based on the assumption that categories of race are arbi-
trary, that racism is illogical, and that therefore all races are equal. Biko observed
that this easy relativism obscured the fact that races were already unequal in
relation to the racial capital of whiteness, and that liberals were simultaneously
complicit in it as the beneficiaries of systematic structures of racial oppression that
they could criticize at their leisure. For Biko, the capacity to inhabit this privileged
“activist” stance made the “default white” liberal subject the apex predator of a
pervasive liberal-racism complex—discussed in greater detail in chapter 6.
Reading this classic black consciousness critique from Beijing, it became
clear that the dynamics of stratification Biko once identified have neither dis-
appeared nor can they be hermetically sealed within the apartheid matrix. The
historical material conditions that informed the world within which Biko’s argu-
ments were embedded continue to be at play in the cosmopolitan aspirations of
African and Chinese students in Beijing, because the wider context of the Anglo-
scene still encompasses both space-times. However, discerning a transhistorical
Angloscene’s matrix necessitates an approach to translation that operates bottom
up, and does not slip into the kinds of semantic subterfuge that converts every
proposition of iconicity and alterity into a representational hall of mirrors. To be
sure, the target of translation is no less obscured: What indeed is the end goal of
African students’ educational transformations? What are the stakes of their fulfill-
ment through contemporary experiments in Chinese soft power? And, in turn,
what icons of “success” inform Chinese students’ own experiments in cosmopoli-
tanism as they encounter or pass by their African peers? Following Fanon, I believe
86    Chapter 3

that this question, and my account of its theater of interaction, foregrounds white-
ness’s persistent gravity over a diffuse, equal opportunity replicability of “power.”
In what now follows, I would like to contextualize my opening question—who
can be a racist?—within the interactionally translating and translated encounters
of Chinese and Africans in Beijing. In this theater of interaction, the performance,
adoption, and rejection of various manifestations of “politically correct” person-
hood—indexed and iconized through mass-mediated persons like Trevor Noah
and Oprah Winfrey—becomes the mode through which Chinese and African sub-
jects (to differing degrees) raciolinguistically stratify one another.

ENREGISTERING PC

One summer night in 2014, my informant Adam—a black, Zimbabwean political

science student—and I went to a costume party in San Li Tun. With its bars, shops,
and restaurants often frequented by large groups of foreigners, as well as many
Chinese shoppers and partygoers, San Li Tun has also recently become a place
where many young African students started going in order to “make contacts”
and enjoy romantic liaisons. When we arrived, a Chinese woman at the party
called Lili approached Adam excitedly and introduced him to her partner. Lili was
Adam’s ex-girlfriend, and had come to the event with her current white American
boyfriend, Tim. During the introductions, she said jokingly, “Wow, I guess you
don’t need a costume.” “How’s that?” Adam replied. “You know, since you can say
you’re here as an Ebola patient,” she said laughing at what, in the past, may have
been a shared form of rough banter between them. Adam’s smile dropped and was
replaced by an uncomfortable frown. After a moment of hesitation, Adam turned
to address Tim, whose jaw-dropped face expressed liberal horror, and said in a
sotto, patient voice: “You really must explain to her why that is offensive.” Adam
and I left the party after a while and went for dinner, during which Adam vented
about what happened. I asked him what he would have said to Lili if Tim had not
been there. “Well, I guess I wouldn’t have been that offended,” he said. “I probably
would have made a joke about SARS or Chinese people not being able to tell the
difference between kitchens and toilets.”
In Beijing, many interactions between Chinese and African interlocutors
like Lili and Adam are mediated through a complex intersectional relationship
between whiteness, English, and cosmopolitan aspiration. Building on the rela-
tionship between intersectionality and enregisterment discussed up until now, I
will demonstrate how considerations of racially unmarked political correctness—
often reflexively referred to by informants as PC—become mediated through ideal
language registers. The mobilizations of such registers, like Model C English or
the “standard” American Midwest dialect, ultimately engender a highly marked
stratification along intersectional lines.
 Who Can Be a Racist?     87

M A FA N F O R W HOM ?

Adam’s interaction with Lili reveals a number of factors that play a complementary
role in framing the racial and gendered vectors of their encounter. His example
also diagrams a fairly common genre of flirtatious interaction between many
African male students in Beijing and certain female Chinese counterparts. Sexual
relationships between them are fairly common, but these are somewhat short term
because the African students, like many other foreign male and Chinese students,
are in Beijing only for the duration of their studies. Unlike their Chinese counter-
parts, they are open to—and able to have—relationships with white, Chinese, and
African female students. Another and equally important reason for the short-term
nature of these liaisons is that their Chinese and white female student counterparts
rarely conceive of African male subjects as marriageable, but rather as conduits for
sexual experimentation (Rofel 2007).
This context of interaction very much animates Adam and Lili’s exchange. Lili
would later confide that she and Adam had previously had a relationship before
things became mafan—“troubled,” “messy,” “complicated,” or “inconvenient.” We
became acquainted after this event when she learned that I was both a South
African student in Beijing as well as a graduate student in the United States.
She was keen on attending university in the United States and wanted to know
whether I, as a fellow “third-world subject,” would help to edit her application
materials. This is something I did as an acknowledgment of her clear but possi-
bly ironic invocation of “third-world solidarity” (disanshijie datuanjie). However,
admittedly, I was keen to find out more about her relationship and awkward
interaction with Adam at the party. After learning that I was a South African,
she became keen to talk about “Africa things,” given her own regional focus as
an international relations major. This, however, was only on the occasions we
met to talk about her applications, and where she liked to speak about Africans’
“closeness to nature”:
Lili: [Africans] are so innocent, like forest animals.
Me: Is that a good thing, don’t animals get hunted?
Lili: No, don’t think I’m a racist. It’s a good thing because they are everything
[Chinese] have lost. Chinese are now just robots with giant brains.

In conversations with myself and other Africans, Lili would contrast “African
natural” essence with “robotic Chinese society” while simultaneously being quite
reflexive about what constitutes politically correct nonracist language to a hypo-
thetical western listener with the caveat, “No, don’t think I’m a racist.”
When, on a few occasions, we met in a group with her boyfriend’s American
English teacher friends, she would not discuss “African things” and would
emphasize that I was a graduate student in the United States. The present non-
presence, as well as nonpresent presence of her white American boyfriend—in
88    Chapter 3

both Adam and my interactions with Lili—is important here, given the way devi-
ations from a normative center can still be seen to constitute that very normativ-
ity as the regulating principle that makes the deviation legible in the first place
(Bakhtin 1981; Schmidt 1996). However, what ideological gravity imbricating
their interactional space-time allowed Tim to haunt encounters without being
physically present?
It seemed that since her “faux pas” at the costume party, Lili came to adopt a
register of political correctness whenever her boyfriend was around, but which
was almost completely abandoned in his absence. This seemed to emerge over
the time I observed Adam and Lili’s respective interactions. The switching
between abandonments and adoption of PC constituted a fairly extreme form of
code-switching, indexing Lili’s compartmentalization of dual personas and per-
haps suggestive of Lili’s gradual coming to awareness of a transnational, raciolin-
guistic double-consciousness—if not her own, then certainly one she perceived
in her interlocutors. Thus, Lili’s abandonment of PC, in its reflexive transgres-
sion, further reaffirmed Tim’s absent-presence. Likewise, references to Africa,
Africans, and African relations—her university specialization—were only curso-
rily referenced around her boyfriend, while his absence activated revelry in all man-
ner of “African” oddities and inquiries—with qualifications like “I’m not racist or
anything but . . . ” again suggesting a persistent awareness of PC even when—
or perhaps especially when—it was being transgressed. Whether this was due to
her reluctance to let her boyfriend know about the fact that she had had a rela-
tionship with a black African, or her attempt to live up to the cultural expecta-
tions of western liberal political correctness’s essentialism paranoias, is not clear.
In both cases, however, the effect still constitutes an encompassing whiteness,
English, and cosmopolitanism, as an imbricated horizon of aspiration of which
Adam could never be a part of. Adam’s role in her life was that of a conceal-
able conduit. After hours of English lessons, academic paper editing, and the
delineation of cultural references to the world of the Anglosphere and its others,
Adam became a stepping stone to co-presence it. However, it appeared that now,
this “stepping stone” had to be elided as a matter of self-preservation. But self-
preservation from what?
To Lili’s parents and grandparents, America, English, and whiteness are appro-
priate civilizational aspirations. At the same time, they continue to exchange her
details (picture, age, and credentials) with those of potential Chinese male suit-
ors among kinship, friendship, and professional networks in her hometown. An
African from Africa (particularly a black person or heiren) within these aspira-
tional hierarchies simply does not compute. Adam, who has been in China for
almost six years, is aware of this situation and these parameters, which by this time
have the effect of eliciting more cynicism than outrage in our conversations and
interviews. It is also his awareness of the order of things that allows him not only to
recruit her boyfriend to the role of “placing her in the world of her choosing,” as he
 Who Can Be a Racist?     89

would later remark, but also to demonstrate to his former “lover-apprentice” how
he understood the Anglosphere’s regime of political correctness and its limitations
better than she did. In doing so, he imagines that he has made her white American
boyfriend the custodian of her further civilization, as he put it, “she’s now his prob-
lem . . . I’m handing over the reins.”
Here, the veil of white political correctness quickly allows the patriarchal
machinery of civilization to do its work. This machinery—mastered initially by
Adam, given his own historical colonial emplacements, and then later transmit-
ted to Lili—not only delineates what can be said but also the language in which
speech has potency. Adam and Lili could always have continued their exchanges
in Chinese, the initial common language through which the two of them first
met in their university classes. This is due to Adam’s Chinese abilities, which—
like Palesa’s—are considerable compared to many of his fellow African peers.
English, however, gradually became Adam and Lili’s mode of exchange due to
Adam’s initial role as Lili’s English tutor, augmented by his own facility with the
language as an English private-school-educated Zimbabwean. But this was also
driven by Lili’s own desire to rapidly improve her English. Here, her motivation
stemmed from her parents’ own considerable expectations that she attend a for-
eign university, and their investment of millions of renminbi (RMB or Chinese
yuan) toward her attendance of additional English classes at private institutes like
Xindongfang (New Oriental). Such investments—in the case of Lili’s parents and
grandparents—for families from small Chinese towns in northeastern China,
must be contextualized in terms of the ways in which English ability and its asso-
ciated “cosmopolitan” world might allow for a leapfrogging or at least temporary
displacement of brutal regional Chinese classism that a small town northeastern
accent might otherwise engender.1
From the perspective of many multilingual, postcolonial subjects like Lili
and Adam, English and its associated “rational” political correctness—usually in
“un-accented” and “civil” tones—appears to explicitly disavow institutional rac-
ism and classism of any kind (cf. Hill 2009). Compared to the discussion of white
political correctness as a mode of institutionalized othering, as has been discussed
in the United States and other western academic and media theaters (Hill 2009;
Jackson 2010; Gupta 2014), the Sino-African reception and deployment of PC draws
attention to the resilience of white Anglocentrism’s regulatory emergence, even in
a context where it is supposed to be explicitly absent. Here, PC seemingly even
provides a gender- and class-neutral refuge from patriarchal bullying and regional
classism for African and Chinese women in their respective contexts. However, as
reflected by Lili and Adam’s catch-22, this landscape of political correctness—and
the racial-linguistic complex it elides—implicitly generates limited possibilities of
expression for those who are simultaneously its subalterns, and who themselves
have no real stake in the deployment of the asymmetries that white PC-ness (in its
often-sanctimonious invocations) supposedly protects them from.
90    Chapter 3

R AC E A N D E N R E G I S T E R M E N T

The way in which PC-ness becomes linguistically mediated between Lili and
Adam, thus racially stratifying them in terms of the presence/nonpresence of Tim,
can be understood as an extended example of enregisterment as introduced in the
previous chapter. Here, Asif Agha’s general definition of enregisterment must be
considered and then extended:
Language users often employ labels like “polite language,” “informal speech,”
“upper-class speech,” “women’s speech,” “literary usage,” “scientific term,” “religious
language,” “slang,” and others to describe differences among speech forms. Meta-
linguistic labels of this kind link speech repertoires to enactable pragmatic effects,
including images of the person speaking (woman, upper-class person), the relation-
ship of speaker to interlocutor (formality, politeness), the conduct of social practices
(religious, literary, or scientific activity). They hint at the existence of cultural models
of speech—a metapragmatic classification of discourse types—linking speech reper-
toires to typifications of actor, relationship and conduct. This is the space of register
variation conceived in intuitive terms. (Agha 2007b, 145)

Most examples of enregisterment diagram various forms of social stratification

along lines of gender, class, and other modes of hierarchy. In their work, Susan
Frekko (2009) and Kathryn Woolard et al. (2014) have provided canonical exam-
ples of enregisterment among Catalan speakers in Catalonia. Rarely, however, do
studies of enregisterment engage the question of racial stratification in contexts
of encounter that transcend conventionally defined speech communities in an
engagement with the west or western modernity. Additionally, race—in a non-
western setting, among non-whites, and through its mediation via English—is
indeed an unusual case for examining enregisterment. The exploration of enregis-
terment in such a context, however, has important implications for demonstrating
key conceptual interventions of black feminist theories of race and gender inter-
sectionality beyond the English-speaking settler colonial realm.2 Up until now,
canonical case studies of intersectionality have been made primarily in western
contexts or interactions more overtly framed within the rubric of “the west and
its others.” Enregisterment—in this way—becomes a way of expanding the range
of intersectional critique into the discourse of third-world histories and the con-
temporary encounters they mediate and are mediated through. Unlike gendered
and classed terms, like those presented by Agha, racialized non-western, non-
white encounters do not imbricate conventionalized modes of address between
variously raced people in English-speaking societies where white subjectivity
mediates racism. Everyday gendered and classed terms of address can be conven-
tionalized through (nonetheless contradictory) arguments that posit the simul-
taneous “reality” of differences, while at the same time suggesting that they are
“canceled-out” by the equal opportunity promise of long-term social reform where
“things are always getting better” for women and the working class.
 Who Can Be a Racist?     91

Race, in contrast, begins with its nonrecognition, given the ways in which
English-speaking, “liberal” societies tend to treat nonracialism as their politi-
cally correct default (Erkens and Kane-Berman 2000; Mills 2017)—where race is
problematically argued to be logically arbitrary, and therefore ontologically non-
existent. Thus, the experience of racism for those who have it (non-whites),
becomes an absurdity or illogical tragedy to those that don’t have a race (whites).
For this reason, conversations where different societies and language communi-
ties can be enregistered according to different gender norms cannot be broached
in terms of the enregisterment of different societies’ racialization norms. This is
why non-whites, in making use of the English language, could never invoke the
hierarchies of white racism toward whites, anywhere.
This raises a second enregisterment concern—its emergence among non-whites
in a non-western encounter. Why do global, multilingual non-whites play by
the rules (or feel they are expected to) of English PC? If Lili racially insults Adam,
he can—within limits—return the insult with equal and possibly more devastat-
ing effect. Neither of them, however, could ever really turn the racism tables on
Tim, who occupies an unassailable higher ground on the aspirational landscape of
the white, cosmopolitan Anglosphere. Their best chance of offense, although land-
ing with little effect as long as Tim plays by the same PC rules, is to name him a
racist. Here, I propose that Adam and Lili’s encounter—and indeed other Sino-
African interactions in Beijing—certainly fall beyond the conventional sites of
enregisterment, but in ways that suggest a more flexible conception of the “bound-
edness” of speech communities. Analyzing interrelated, but not parallel, racialized
and gendered stratifications beyond nation-state or monolingual speech commu-
nity necessitates an approach that both situates their intersectionality through the
encounter, while simultaneously attending to intersectionality’s contextualizing
historical and material conditions. Here, Frantz Fanon and other postcolonial
thinkers’ transnational and transhistorical analyses of intersectional stratification
become an important theoretical resource.
As suggested so far, the translation of difference (or sameness)—in this case, the
contradictions manifested in the related racial and gender stratification of a non-
western encounter—must account for an intersubjective space-time or chronotope
within which this ordering can unfold: an intersectional order. In contextualizing
interactions like those of Adam and Lili, Frantz Fanon—in his Black Skins, White
Masks (2008)—drew attention to two chronotopes of stratification: “The Woman
of Color and the White Man,” and “The Man of Color and the White Woman.”
These two figures are key psychoanalytic protagonists in Fanon’s analysis of
the colonial encounter and its postcolonial reiteration. As ambiguous formations
that problematize simplistic colonial binaries, they become ideal examples to
depict latent postcolonial asymmetries even where these seem to be occluded
by the appearance of the “progressive” multiracial couple. Adam, Tim, and Lili’s
interactions take this latency a step further in providing a contradictory insight
92    Chapter 3

concerning the relationship between the raced signs of whiteness and non-
whiteness in the Sino-African encounter. In the first instance, we can understand
Adam as linguistically adopting a kind of whiteness both by playing a civilizing
role in Lili’s life at the beginning of her educational life in Beijing, as well as retro-
spectively through her later co-presence with Tim. Ironically, this co-presence also
blackens Adam by virtue of him initially being rejected, and later voicing jealousy
at the position occupied by Tim at the party. Lili, in contrast, appears to become
Fanon’s woman of color at different points during her move from the relationship
with Adam to one with Tim. Paradoxically, her co-presence with Tim also retro-
spectively whitens her in relation to Adam through her negation of their prior
relationship, and simultaneously remakes Adam into Fanon’s dialectical black man
to the white(ned) woman. From this perspective, it may even be possible to con-
strue Adam’s act of revenge at the party as a way to recapture his now retrospec-
tively lost whiteness by underlining Lili’s incapacity to live up to it.
These interactionally emergent potentials reveal a key contradiction. Adam
and Lili, by virtue of Tim’s presence, seem to oscillate in their capacity to occupy
racialized positions vis-à-vis one another. This occurs through their transforming
temporal trajectories and social alignments as Lili ascends an ideological updraft
while Adam plunges down into the turbulence left in its wake. Tim’s position of
whiteness, by contrast, seems firmly entrenched. Their fluid versus his entrenched
relations are strangely at odds with the marked versus unmarked positions they
respectively occupy in American or British Commonwealth racial imaginaries
(Frankenberg 2001; Gilroy 1992; Hage 2000). Whiteness, masked as political cor-
rectness, emerges again as unassailable, leaving its others in a precarious and per-
spectival position: Lili, like Fanon’s Mayotte, aspires to drink the milk that will
make her and her children whiter (Fanon [1952] 2008, 29). But how might white-
ness emerge when Tim is not present?
In 2016, a Chinese detergent commercial went viral in and beyond China. The
American news network CNN was one of the first to pick up on the story. Their
online US edition concisely depicted the commercial with an abbreviated vignette:
“A black man and a Chinese woman are flirting, as he leans in for a kiss she thrusts
a detergent capsule in his mouth and bundles him into a laundry machine. She sits
atop the washing machine as the man screams inside until, to her apparent delight,
out pops a Chinese man dressed in a clean, white t-shirt.”3 The commercial was
for a Chinese detergent brand, Qiaobi, and was released near the conclusion of my
fieldwork. At the time, I did not realize that its circulation and subsequent discus-
sion would become a key impetus for the concerns discussed in this book.
Almost immediately after the ad hit, I noted how my African informants
and compatriots in China, as well as many Chinese classmates and colleagues,
followed and shared the ad on Chinese social media platforms like Weibo and
WeChat. They, along with many others, were in agreement that the reason for the
commercial’s controversy and related virality lay in its apparent racist content.
 Who Can Be a Racist?     93

However—and for reasons that will become clear—not all of my informants

believed that the Chinese ad producers were racist. The authors of the CNN
article, James Griffith and Shen Lu, described the content of the commercial as
“staggeringly racist,” but also noted that: “The ad isn’t even original. . . . It seem-
ingly rips-off a similar, also offensive, Italian advert, in which a slim Italian man
is washed with ‘color’ detergent and emerges as a muscular black man with the
slogan ‘color is better.’”
Indeed, Qiaobi was referencing an Italian commercial for another detergent,
Coloreria Italiana, which had aired ten years before (in 2006)—complete with the
same soundtrack—although, at the time, with far less western media outrage over
its content. The outraged virality over the Qiaobi ad appeared to retrospectively
infect Coloreria Italiana in almost a parody of Walter Benjamin’s (2007a, 2007b,
2007c) famous argument that “copies” of aesthetic objects constitute their “origi-
nality.” Italians and Chinese were not only equally racist, Chinese racism was an
“inauthentic” copy of its Italian original. For instance, in the days following the
airing of the Qiaobi commercial, the UK-based online newspaper, Daily Mail, ran
the headline: “You thought the Chinese advert was racist . . . wait until you see the
Italian ad that inspired it,” along with its own terse vignette: “The advertisement
starts with a wife loading up the laundry before her skinny white husband walks in
wearing only socks and his underwear. She beckons him over with a smile before
shoving him into the washing machine. Trapping the man inside she sits on top
of the device until the cycle is complete. At the end of the wash, her husband has
been completely transformed. A large burly black man is unveiled and rises up to
flex his muscles, the [white] woman looking mighty impressed.”4
Contemporary media representations of black subjects in China certainly do
not celebrate the comradeship of a nonaligned, third-world solidary past. How-
ever, the prevalence of references to blackness, like those in the Qiaobi commer-
cial, continue to generate an important question among internationally aware
African and Chinese students in China: “Can Chinese be racist?” While most of
my African and Chinese interlocutors answered in the affirmative during numer-
ous debates in Chinese and African social media circles, a few had critical reserva-
tions concerning the capacity to return insult: “Can Africans be racist back?” For
this minority of Chinese and African students, racism had a more ideological,
meta-semiotic function. For them, and indeed many thinkers of the critical race
theory canon, racism generates an unassailable inequality and a unidirectional
communicability: “How could you ever racially insult a real flesh-and-blood white
man, other than calling him a racist?” This question was voiced by various Chinese
and African informants. “As for Chinese, you can always laugh at them, even when
they think they are white,” noted others (also both African and Chinese students).
For these informants, racism produces an impossibility of insulting the inhabitant
of whiteness, which stands as the only genuine position from which racism mat-
ters. One informant, Daniel Masuka, who first introduced himself by telling me
94    Chapter 3

that I would only remember his English name, rhetorically asked: “If we can all be
racist to each other, then why would racism matter?” Some informants like Daniel
were former victims of inter-African xenophobia in countries like South Africa.
For them, genocide and other forms of identity-based violence were certainly vio-
lent and terrifying, but they were not the same as racism, which belonged to a very
different cultural, historical, and ideological order of experience.
In fact, for some, structural and other forms of racism were either inevitable or,
in the case of Daniel, “acceptable” compared to the trauma of xenophobic violence.
His reference point, as a Zimbabwean, was the memory of his time as a student
in Johannesburg, South Africa, and the ongoing experiences of his working-class
compatriots who were still there. This was by no means a valorization of racism,
far from it, but rather a testament to an enduring, transnational ideological con-
dition that is so compromised that even in recognizing its contours there is no
way out of its stratifying grip. In this reading of racism, whiteness stood as a con-
dition of value that non-white Beijing informants found themselves marked in
relation to, even when no white bodies were physically present. This was because
unmarked whiteness, as I will argue, was still the privileged category of cosmo-
politan mobility and the assumed point of articulation for standard English or its
received pronunciation (RP)—what I will reveal to be the motivating factors of
mobility and educational desire.
Perhaps in China, as the Qiaobi commercial suggests, Chinese men might
become white enough one day, but that destiny still appears to be very much
deferred for educated, aspirationally cosmopolitan black subjects like Adam. For
he—unlike Fanon’s recruitment of the fictional character Jean Veneuse—does
know his race and has a pragmatic understanding of how whites (and aspiring
Chinese) understand him (Fanon [1952] 2008: 46).
There are, however, varying registers of whiteness that might play a role in
stratifications beyond Lili and Adam’s encounter. In what follows, I will reveal
how a similarly complex enregisterment around English and whiteness can occur
fractally among Beijing’s South African community of students. Here, whiteness
still emerges as the apex of stratification, but with social and historical co(n)texts
particular to one community of students—where the South African historical rela-
tionship to a linguistic register termed Model C English facilitates a more general
intersectional stratification in relation to PC English, reiterating the relationship
between signs of whiteness and English PC depicted in Lili and Adam’s encoun-
ter. I would like to qualify that Model C enregisterment—while being specific to
the context of South Africa and South African students—does have its analogs
among other African students in Beijing. Due to my close familiarity with the
particular context of Model C, being a product of the educational horizon it imbri-
cates, I will focus on explicating the relationship between Model C and the wider
context of English’s raciolinguistic stratification in Sino-African encounters. In
future analyses, by myself or others, I am certain that analogs of this enregistered
 Who Can Be a Racist?     95

stratification of whiteness, at different scales and within different communities,

can be excavated.

ENREGISTERING MODEL C AND PC

For Lerato (see chapter 2) and many other South African students in Beijing, there
is an opposition between black vernacular Englishes and elite Model C English.
In her analysis of the cultural capital of certain English accents in a South African
educational context, Kerryn Dixon provides a fairly standard definition of the
Model C accent as follows: “Speaking with a ‘White’ [South African] English
accent is seen to be ideal—and the students who speak fluent English without
the intonations of African languages are often referred to as having a ‘Model C
accent’” (2011, 81). Animating the notion of Model C is an unmarked, hierarchical,
standard version of English, which comes to mark black African bodies who speak
with it. In the context of certain encounters, it is difficult to separate Model C from
the figure of the coconut—“someone who is dark on the outside but white on the
inside”—as an icon of personhood (Carr 2011) that is the inhabitant of the Model C
accent. This co-presence is key since a white subject can’t have a Model C accent,
even if they had acquired it in the same place. In the past, it has often been used as
an insult to distinguish between elite, compromised blackness with its co-presence
to, and reliance on, whiteness, and authentic blackness marked by a vernacular
accent. In recent times, however, coconut has been positively appropriated by
many black elite South African media commentators and academics like Eusebius
McKaiser and Panashe Chigumadzi. In articulating this choice Chigumadzi states:
I’ve chosen to appropriate the term and self-identify as a coconut because I believe
it offers an opportunity for refusal. It’s an act of problematizing myself—and
others—within the landscape of South Africa as part of the black middle class that is
supposed to be the buffer against more “radical elements.” Instead of becoming the
trusted mediators between black and white, we are now turning to conceptions of
blackness and mobilizing anger at the very concept of the rainbow nation. The fan-
tasy of a color-blind, post-racial South Africa has been projected onto us coconuts,
but our lived experiences are far from free of racism. (2015)

McKaiser, reflecting a similar political alignment, but with a close attention to the
language-based dimensions of the lived experience of being a coconut in post-
apartheid South Africa, writes the following in an article titled The Unbearable
Whiteness of Being:
Hi. My name is Eusebius. And I am fluent in the grammar of whiteness. I am such a
clever black that as a scrawny little boy—hey wena, no one is born with an mkhaba!
I really was scrawny once—I quickly learnt the grammar of whiteness. I remem-
ber practising “bru” in a sentence, followed by other gems such as “sarmie,” “dos”
and “oke.” If you don’t know these words, I pity you. You are doomed. Kiss upward
96    Chapter 3

mobility goodbye, baba. The grammar of whiteness is key to doing well in corporate
South Africa. You must sound like the chief executive’s son, not the chief execu-
tive’s maid’s son. You catch my coconut drift? I am multilingual like that—Afrikaans,
English, a wee bit of Xhosa (on a good day), and a whole whack of whiteness. That is
why I, how do they put it, “fit in everywhere.” (2013)

White grammar, as McKaiser terms it, is the condition of possibility—among

elite non-white, non-Anglo South Africans—for “fitting in anywhere.” In part,
the article was widely understood and cited—even on Anglophone African social
media in Beijing—as an attempt at provincializing whiteness. McKaiser textually
attempts to do this not only through his use of Zulu expressions like mkhaba—
contextually denoting the acquisition of a “beer belly” or “bloated stomach”—as
a moment of self-deprecation directed toward mostly black, specifically Xhosa-
speaking readers familiar with the term. He also does so through his disparag-
ing contextualizations of white South African English terms like bru (“buddy”),
oke (“dude”), sarmie (“sandwich”), and dos (“to take a nap”). McKaiser simultane-
ously does this through linguistic inclusion—of a black-aligned audience—and
exclusion of a white audience ignorant of mkhaba. However, McKaiser also points
to the limits of this provincialization in that the white South African English terms
require no translation for their black interlocutors, while the inverse is not the case
when it comes to a term like mkhaba.
For elites like Chigumadzi and McKaiser, Model C has an additional function
within the communities that would otherwise undermine a so-called coconut’s
lack of black authenticity and capacity to speak. Within communities and interac-
tions where a white space-time is assumed to be absent, and where McKaiser and
Chigumadzi’s arguments are cited—like that of the elite Southern African student
community in Beijing—the emergence of Model C can often become a gendered
talisman against such discrimination by virtue of its association with an inter-
social chronotope of de-racialized or rational political correctness (Bakhtin 1981;
Agha 2007a). In contestation of encounters where black authenticity is brought
into conflict with an adherence to white normativity—often under the guise of
a “modernity versus tradition” dispute—such a chronotope of rational political
correctness can quickly become activated through the invocation of a Model C
register. In what now follows, I will show how one such encounter plays out when
decontextualized from a “typically South African” theater of media reception.

T H E S O C IA L L I F E O F A M E M E

Given many South African students’ access to a black social media sphere in
Beijing, popular memes that emerge in the South African media context—which
certainly do not end at the nation-state’s borders—are quickly circulated among
African students from a number of different African countries. One such pop-
ular meme was Ziright iGirls. As with most social media memes, Ziright iGirls
 Who Can Be a Racist?     97

began its life prior to its mass-circulation, but through that circulation came to
transform its meanings. It is commonly pronounced and spelled “ziright iighels” by
a number of South African Xhosa speakers, although the spelling “ziRight iGals”
has also become a popular alternative, following the wide circulation of a South
African house music track by the same name—performed by Euphonik and Bekzin
Terris, featuring author Khaya Dlanga.5 One informant and South African black
social media expert, Z, explained its prior contextualization as a term usually used
when “young, or older, [Xhosa] men will go enquire if the women still have enough
alcohol to drink by asking ziright iighels, which means: ‘are the girls alright?’”
As a meme, however, Ziright iGirls began going viral when fast-food chain
Nando’s picked up on the expression as it was being used on South African social
media and referenced it in an advertising campaign under the slogan Zisela ntoni
igirls? or “What would the girls like?” This sparked a mass appropriation of both
expressions in situations outside of the Xhosa-specific contextualization within a
matrilineal kinship and gendered-language world. As a result, its appropriation
often came to be denounced as patriarchal, patronizing, and sexist among many
(including many South Africans) who were unaware of its Xhosa-specific contex-
tualization. This, however, did not hinder its popularity and further circulation
among a Pan-African student community—like that in Beijing—attuned to the
South African “Twittersphere.” The absurdity of this circulation came to a head
during a casual soccer game in Beijing between two groups of African students.
Azania United is a group of soccer players from Zimbabwe, South Africa,
Botswana, Madagascar, and other Southern African countries. During my field-
work, I was a regular member of the team, and played on defense, most likely
because of my poor footwork, although—according to one of the senior players—
my selection was based on an ethnic stereotype: “I like the aggression of you
rugby-playing Boers.” On one particular occasion, we were playing against a com-
bined team of predominantly African students from Senegal and Côte d’Ivoire
(including two Koreans and one Fijian to make up their numbers). One or two
of our opponents were classmates who had regular interaction with the Southern
Africans and thus there was a good deal of friendly banter between the two teams,
despite a fierce competition within Beijing’s African University Student League.
A group of Azania United’s female supporters—mostly from South Africa—were
standing behind our goalposts. Early in the game, one of our opponents broke
through the middle and scored a spectacular goal in the top left-hand corner of
Azania United’s goal posts (this may or may not have been partly my fault). The
goal scorer, however, rushed toward the group of girls in celebration yelling Ziright
iGirls? in what was clearly an abrasively French accent. The addressees of this
inquiry were at first dumbstruck, but confusion quickly gave way to hilarity as the
addressor’s intent became apparent. Following the laughter, the latter sheepishly
rejoined his team for a more collective celebration. Not all invocations of Ziright
iGirls, however, are met with the same hilarity.
98    Chapter 3

During an argument on the social media forum Azanian Students in China

(ASIC), Ziright iGirls reared its head once more. One black female member—
Comrade Y—was making a politically charged argument about the #RhodesMust-
Fall protests taking place in South Africa: “We must oppose violent means of protest
at all cost. . . . It plays into the hands of our oppressors.” This was endorsed by two
other female students on the forum. At that moment, another black male partici-
pant—Comrade X—entered the fray stating “Ziright iGirls?” The female members
immediately turned on him in English, accusing him of being “patronizing” as well
as “sexist.” Seeing this exchange, I privately contacted Comrade X—who was one
of my teammates—and asked whether he thought he was guilty of the charges laid
against him. His response—stated in a heavy Zulu accent—was that “This Oprah
[Winfrey], PC thing is a problem. Take away the Model C shine and the story is very
different.” Here, Comrade X not only draws a link between PC—as a very general,
English discursive type—and Model C—as a specific token of phonolexical speech.
He also suggests that these discursive formations—as sign sets—work together in
blocking him from getting his meaning across. Thus, by way of unifying these sign
sets, he invokes the figure of Oprah Winfrey as a distilled archetype—or icon of per-
sonhood—transferrable across the potentially divergent chronotopes that PC and
Model C might otherwise index. In doing so, Comrade X generates a third space-
time (with Oprah Winfrey as a mediator) within which PC and Model C operate
very much like Weberian elective affinities—in that they reinforce and constitute
Oprah Winfrey as the ideal type of modern, cosmopolitan black femininity.
Here, and in other instances that will follow, we see Oprah Winfrey emerge as
an unwanted (or perhaps even dystopian) icon under which a particular brand of
metadiscursive encoding (Urban 1996) is perceived as regulating appropriate PC
behavior in the register of Model C, which has now become unmoored from its
South African context. In this sense, Comrade X is modeling one of Slavoj Žižek’s
(1989) observations concerning the nature of ideology: that ideology operates less
because we believe it than because we believe others do. Comrade X judges him-
self as being critical of the relationship between PC and Model C in regulating the
signs of value available to Africans in the world. However, he is also fully aware
that knowing this and recognizing its conduits—in this case, Oprah Winfrey—
does nothing to change the ideological gravity of the world within which black
Africans stake out a legibility even among one another. In light of this observation,
the question emerges: Does Oprah Winfrey have any challengers?

O P R A H G I R L S A N D T R EVO R N OA H B OYS

After Adam and Lili’s fallout (discussed at the beginning of the chapter), Adam
and I chatted over a small pile of Portuguese egg tarts that can be bought for a
bargain at any Chinese KFC. The topic of discussion predictably centered around
racism in China, after which Adam—washing down a final egg tart with a gulp of
Pepsi Cola—concluded in mock melodrama: “Ah, you know, sometimes, you want
 Who Can Be a Racist?     99

to explain to [Chinese] people why things are racist, but then, you look into their
eyes and you realize . . . there’s no hope.” The last phrase was a direct quote from
South African comedian Trevor Noah’s portrayal of an encounter with a white
American Californian girl who had asked Noah if he “had ever had AIDS” in his
2012 stand-up show, That’s Racist.6
It is frustration at the inescapable inevitability of race that perhaps prompts
Adam to invoke Trevor Noah’s figure at the KFC that night. Voicing Trevor Noah
as an icon of personhood appears to momentarily provide an escape from the
space-time of dead-end inevitabilities masked by the language of “rational,”
“nongendered,” “nonracialized” egalitarianism. Here, mirroring Noah indexes a
streetwise worldliness that can quickly transform both universalizing political cor-
rectness and Beijing’s more predictable street racisms into the kind of farce that
the sassy anti–politically correct, stoic male Afropolitan can always rise above.
However, as will become apparent, committing explicitly to Trevor Noah as a
mass-mediated icon of personhood, and implicitly to what Noah is not, engenders
its own limitations.
“These fucking Oprah girls, they come to Beijing, only hang out among them-
selves, then they get all pissed off when their boyfriends want to date other girls.
Then, when they get ditched, they go and sleep with their ex-boyfriend’s best
friends. It’s lame, bro.” South African student Edlulayo “Ed” Zuma said this to
me when commenting on African girls in Beijing’s student community and their
incapacity to move—romantically speaking—beyond relationships with African
men. The “Oprah girls” comment was provoked by an ex-girlfriend “bombing”
him with messages on WeChat accusing him—in English rather than Zulu which
they both speak—of “male insecurity,” “internalizing his problems,” and “not shar-
ing his feelings.” As we sat in his shabby dorm room eating pap (a South African
maize porridge) while he continued to engage with his ex’s WeChat messages, his
roommate walked in, stole a glance at Edlulayo’s exasperated texting, and com-
mented in his French accent: “How is Oprah Winfrey?”
The person referred to as Oprah Winfrey in this conversation is one of the
members of Azanian Achievers (from the previous chapter), who herself began
to feel socially alienated and made a choice to withdraw from community
gatherings—soccer matches, parties, and cultural days organized among African
students in Beijing—to focus her energies on projects like Purple Cow and Miriam
Bakgatla’s organization. She was about to graduate and return to her country
to take up a government job. Hers is a prominent pattern among talented black
female students in Beijing, who—with exceptions like their mentor, Miriam—find
the environment fairly hostile and usually end up returning to their home coun-
tries to try and take up government or private sector posts with little possibility
of travel, and seldom recognizing their China-Africa expertise. While in Beijing,
once they commit to styling themselves “professionally”—that is, with Model C
English accents and formal “business language”—male students like Edlulayo
refer to them as Oprah Winfrey girls. “They constantly want to go Doctor Phil on
100    Chapter 3

you . . . how’s that working out for you?” (voiced in a mock American accent). To be
sure, this is not the Oprah Winfrey of black, everyday female empowerment as has
been both invoked and critiqued in the media context of the United States (Epstein
and Steinberg 1995; Wallace 1992). Rather, it emerges in its Anglophone African
guise as a negative figure of personhood that stands for a naïve commitment to
western-centric white political correctness, which for many of my informants is at
best idealistic, and more commonly, out of kilter with the jaded expectations of
many aspirational black postcolonial subjects. This perception certainly has much
to do with Oprah’s bad press in South Africa, following the media scandals around
her leadership academy in Soweto (Hughes 2011; Stephey 2011). However, this
is also part of a more complex denigration of the Oprah brand by a number of
prominent African media personalities—notably, Trevor Noah. In what follows,
I aim to analyze the process by which Oprah Winfrey becomes a negative icon of
personhood via her recruitment into an oppositional role to the Trevor Noah icon
of personhood.
Media historian Jim Pines (1992), and subsequently others (Torres 1998;
Leonard and Guerrero 2013), have noted how—like in the United States—black
experience in Britain was initially constituted from the perspective of a white
media context of reception. The picture Pines describes is one in which “the
stridently liberal position vis-à-vis white responses to black presence in Britain”
becomes increasingly assumed in media representations of racial relations.
As Pines unsurprisingly notes, this white liberal position “had precious little
impact on overall institutional thinking and practice” within the mass-mediated
default of white Britain, in spite of its diversity (1992, 10). This observation in
the British mass-media context mirrors the arguments of a genealogy of critical
race theorists like Paul Gilroy (1993), Anthony Kwame Appiah (1992), Charles
Mills (1998), Frantz Fanon (2008 [1952]), and notably Steve Biko (2002); the
latter was quite explicit in denouncing this liberal white position prior to his
death in 1977:
A game at which the liberals have become masters is that of deliberate evasiveness.
The question often comes up “what can you do?” If you ask him to do something like
stopping to use segregated facilities or dropping out of varsity to work at menial jobs
like all blacks or defying and denouncing all provisions that make him privileged,
you always get the answer—“but that’s unrealistic!” While this may be true, it only
serves to illustrate the fact that no matter what a white man does, the colour of his
skin—his passport to privilege—will always put him miles ahead of the black men.
Thus, in the ultimate analysis, no white person can escape being part of the oppressor
camp. (Biko 2002, 22)
Making clear that implicit white liberalism always entails an explicit compromise,
Biko mirrors Fanon (2008 [1952]), and subsequently Achille Mbembe’s (2001)
critiques, in reflecting how there is no “outside” to the black-white dynamic that
stages and restages the colonial-apartheid complex. It is through the vortex-like
 Who Can Be a Racist?     101

force of this regulating chronotope, that—these thinkers have suggested—black

Africans are “blackened” even among one another. Oprah Winfrey, for comedians
like Trevor Noah, embodies this compromise, not through the color of her skin,
but through the color of her language and the space-time of utopian, politically
correct privilege it activates. This interplay of language and race, however, arises
in a curious relationship to the gender asymmetries it diagrams, and through it,
Oprah Winfrey becomes a disdained archetype among African students in Beijing.
By contrast, the performed figure of Trevor Noah—for African male students—
emerges as a more relatable alternative to the icons of personhood represented
by the world of the Purple Cow and its not-yet-emerged Purple Giraffe. However,
even this commitment has slim hopes of escaping the orbit of the Angloscene.

EV E RY B O DY ’ S G E T T I N G A B E AT I N G

Noah’s world, or at least the version of it that emerges among many of my infor-
mants, is filled with materials that students in Beijing can make use of to dynami-
cally figurate internal divisions and asymmetries.7 As suggested earlier, male
Sino-Afropolitans quote Trevor Noah far more frequently than their female
peers, with men usually voicing themselves as the “Noah-ing” subject in
the moment of citation. As such, Noah represents an archetype or icon of per-
sonhood that men can far more easily slip into than their female peers. Fur-
thermore, many of these citations are both directed at as well as about other
female African students, or they become resources to depict and conceptualize
relationships with Chinese and white foreign students. Here, many of my male
African informants used Trevor Noah’s own depictions of his “equal opportu-
nity” sexual exploits to depict their own African, Chinese, and other “cosmo-
politan romances”—as one informant put it. Whether these were “fictitious”
or otherwise “genuine” depictions of transnational eros, the citation of Trevor
Noah’s English-language sound bites seem directed toward verbally cosplaying
a desired “efficacy”—in mobile or racial terms—which their “success” in achiev-
ing it appears to entail. In what follows, I aim to analyze the citation of one
of Trevor Noah’s well-circulated comedy routines, and how its invocation dia-
grams the contours of a key dimension of the Sino-Afropolitan ethnoscape and
its limited contextualization within the Angloscene.
The footballers of Azania United, including myself, stood in a tiny patch of
shade next to Lei Feng University’s soccer pitch, gingerly warming up as the sear-
ing sun refracted off Beijing’s hazy, polluted summer air. The team—made up
mostly of students from Southern African Development Community (SADC)
countries—were preparing to face their next opponents in the Beijing inter-
African league. As each player for Azania United was given their kit, they donned
their yellow shirt and blue pants, rolled-on their white socks, and strapped on their
boots. As if magically protected by their Nike and Adidas talismans, the tough
102    Chapter 3

talk soon began in spite of the weather and air quality that promised a harrowing
ninety minutes. As I did my best to muster enough energy just to participate in the
heat-exhausted banter, I overheard this exchange:
Comrade B:  “Eish, we are going to give those Senegalese boys a spanking.”
Comrade C: “No, no, bra . . . we spank the monkey, we are going to beat them.”

Hearing this, I continued: “And because this is the Oprah show, EVERYBODY
GETS A BEATING.” At this, the entire group sitting under the tree laughed
loudly at what was a direct quote from a widely shared Trevor Noah comedy skit.8
I could complete the punch line only because all of us had intimate knowledge
of Noah’s comedy routines and social commentary, which are extremely popular
among young Africans throughout the world—even more so since Noah became
the host of The Daily Show. His prominence was apparent among my informants,
precisely because his observations, recontextualized in a concentrated African
student community in Beijing, capture the absurd—and often satirical—ways
in which already complex miscommunications between Africans become even
further distorted when resituated more globally. Noah’s routines were constantly
shared by Beijing-based African community members who verbally cited, or
digitally cut and pasted his YouTube links, if they had access to a VPN (Virtual
Private Network) to get around the Chinese firewall. Sometimes his clips were
downloaded, copied, and circulated via flash drives or portable hard drives that
are exchanged when students gather at social events. It was a common practice,
for instance, to bring a media object or shareable data to a sport, music, or drink-
ing event organized among the students. Collective screenings of such materials,
some hosted by myself, were also common and reciprocally expected at social
gatherings. Trevor Noah features prominently at these events, either explicitly—
in the case of viewing one of his routines—or implicitly, where many one-liners
from his endlessly circulated skits become ventriloquized. Virtuosic perfor-
mances become social currency with which to banter about other media materi-
als being shared, or, more commonly, to depict relationships between African
students as well as their everyday interactions with Chinese and other foreign
interlocutors within Beijing’s increasingly hybrid student community. Such vid-
eos are media artifacts that play a key role in imagining “cosmopolitan” identities
that are simultaneously “Afrocentric” and “global,” “grassroots” and “cosmopoli-
tan”—self-descriptive keywords and combinations of phrases that are ubiqui-
tously juxtaposed in gatherings among African students. It is important to note,
however, that the “global” and the “Afrocentric” only seem to become translatable
in measured Model C English. This combination of register and deixis, mediated
through tone, vocabulary, and accent, engenders the simultaneous stratification
and articulation of relationships between languages, racialized identities, and
classes of mobility emergent in Noah’s humor. Furthermore, the ideal signifying
 Who Can Be a Racist?     103

subject of this imagining—the figure of personhood inhabiting Model C English

and its associated hierarchies—is far from neutral.
In the exchange between Comrade B, Comrade C, and myself, the Noah
joke referenced was from a sketch on Oprah Winfrey’s Soweto-based leader-
ship academy, which was established in 2007. At the time, the school had come
under heavy criticism in the South African and international media when
reports surfaced, exposing the extreme abuse and implementation of corpo-
ral punishment that female students attending Winfrey’s “50-million-dollar”
institution had to endure.9 Noah noted that the disjuncture between “state-
of-the-art facilities” and not state-of-the-art teachers was the result of the fact
that Oprah “was not dealing with Brad Pitt” when she was interviewing her
school’s prospective teachers. Through an improvised dialogue between Oprah
Winfrey and the school’s imagined principal, Noah imagines the dynamics of
a hypothetical interview, mimicking Oprah’s accent in contrast with an imper-
sonation of a Soweto-style stereotyping of township English. He exaggerates
the latter in particular, most likely because of the predominantly South African
audience for The Daywalker.
Oprah: You’re not going to spank them are you?
Principal: No, nevah, nevah, no, we can nevah spank a child.
[Noah mimes Winfrey’s departure on an airplane while cheerfully waving goodbye]
Principal: [Speaking township slang and English] Oprah is right. No, us, spanking a
child? Nevah. We BEAT them. Ja, we BEAT children. Don’t spank a child
heh, eh . . . spanking is for playing, you can spank a monkey, spankey,
spankey . . . spankey, spankey, monkey, spankey, spankey, ja . . . You can
spank a monkey, you don’t spank a child. We BEAT.

Here, Noah contextualizes the expectations of a western liberal education within

the setting of a township school with a very different disciplinary outlook. The
reception of “spanking” is very different on the parts of Oprah and the school
principal—not in terms of what spanking is or whether it is necessary or not, for
they both seem to settle on the idea that “you must never spank a child.” Their
contextualization, however, makes explicit that their reasons for agreement arise
from very different assumptions regarding spanking’s inappropriateness. In cre-
ating such scenarios, Noah generates a potential to restage “progressive” global-
ism within a context that talks back by juxtaposing Oprah’s chronotope with that
of the township. For Africans who are abroad—men in particular—Trevor Noah
has become a resource for coping with their own contextual challenges by spatio-
temporally opening up the possibility of translating a difficult encounter in their
own imagined Trevor’s terms. In the same comedy routine, he goes a step further
by drawing attention to the way in which this contextualization and recontextu-
alization is a far from even process. He does this by reflecting how, even when
104    Chapter 3

Oprah’s liberal educational outlook is resisted by the school principal’s alterna-

tive interpretation, this resistance nonetheless takes place with and in relation to a
theater of evaluation that valorizes the horizon of expectation represented by
Oprah’s world. In the sequence following the principal’s earlier monologue on the
distinction between beating and spanking, Noah transports us to an imagined
encounter between a student and teacher in Oprah’s school:
Teacher:  Mavis, did you do your homework?
Mavis:  No, Ma’am.
Teacher:  Then you are going to get a BEATING . . .

At this moment Noah switches from a township accent to an impersonation of

Oprah Winfrey, which suggests that in some way Mavis’s teacher has transformed
into (or perhaps become possessed by) the ghost of Oprah:
Teacher: .  .  . but because it’s Oprah’s school, EVERYBODY’S GETTING ONE.
YOU’RE GETTING A BEATING, YOU’RE GETTING A BEATING, YOU’RE
GETTING A BEATING . . . EVERYBODY’S GETTING A BEATING . . .
LOOK UNDER YOUR SEAT, YOU’RE GETTING A BEATING.

By transforming the time-space from that of a Soweto classroom to a more sin-

ister iteration of Oprah’s Chicago West Loop studio—facilitated through his shift
in accent—Noah indicates that even the beatings take place within the logics of
Oprah’s world, imbricating both its horizon of expectation as well as the exclu-
sions facilitated by her brand. Noah himself is only able to momentarily subvert
this hierarchy, by himself adopting his default, meta-commentary accent, which
is always in well-delivered, Model C English. The invocation of English as a ratio-
nalizing register places him—if somewhat precariously—as a translator between
Oprah’s world and the Soweto school. Here, he is only able to get away with this
move because of his self-identification with the category coloured.10 Noah, however,
emerges as coloured-but-not-quite through his routines, because even coloureds—
whom he frequently parodies—come across as a stereotype that he would struggle
to “authentically” identify with. As the child of a relationship between a Xhosa
woman and Swiss-German man, Noah always situates himself in his comedy as
both “born a crime”—given the illegality of interracial relations under the con-
ditions of apartheid during his formative years—and “daywalker”—drawing on
the popular culture figure of a black half-human, half-vampire character in the
Holly­wood franchise Blade. This serves to deictically situate him in a familiar, con-
stantly deferred “not-quite” hybrid, and thus an unassailable position from which
to deliver his particular brand of comedy. But it is from this position, tellingly,
that he is able to rely on a neutral English accent for delivering reflexive punch
lines and meta-commentary to the multivoice, multiracial, polyglot scenarios and
interactions he depicts. It is also this neutral meta-voice that utters “madness!” in
every skit where the concatenation of speech genres and their worlds climax in a
 Who Can Be a Racist?     105

kind of semiotic excess—for it is within the politically correct space-time of the

Angloscene that madness’s comedic possibilities can reflexively emerge in rational,
commonsensical Model C English.
For different African subjects in Beijing, “being Oprah” and “being Trevor
Noah” are not only gendered archetypes. They also become foils for mediating
the tension between two chronotopes: one the one hand, an unmarked PC—thus,
white—space-time, and on the other, a reflexive, sassy, third-world cosmopolitan
space-time. Oprah was not a subject position any African female subject would
want to inhabit, given its derisive invocation by many of their male peers. Trevor
Noah, in contrast, appeared—at times—to be an available, third-world cosmopoli-
tan type—one that allowed for a dignified disalignment from the ironically racial-
izing propensity of English’s PC space-time. I say “at times” because Trevor Noah’s
position as third-world cosmopolitan hero is both highly perspectival and situ-
ationally precarious. This is not only given the highly gendered and sexist exclu-
sions this alignment perpetuates, where only male African subjects could aspire to
be Trevor. It is also because Trevor Noah’s own sassiness is completely contingent
on the adoption of a highly rarified English register as the simultaneously rational
and rationalizing meta-voice of anti-PC, anti-imperialism, symbolized by the cari-
catured archetype of Oprah Winfrey in this particular comedy routine.
I would argue that neither Trevor Noah nor Oprah could be racists even if they
were to hold racist views and engage in racial essentialism, because—as genera-
tions of critical race theorists have argued—racism is not an equal-opportunity
proposition. This does not mean, however, that the gendered and raced invocations
of Oprah or Noah—as archetypes—do not enregister racism and racist effects.
Similarly, Qiaobi and Lili’s racism, discussed at the outset of the chapter, is not
commensurate with the racisms of white supremacists in Britain, Europe, or other
white settler societies—that is, until Chinese become white enough to be colonial
agents. Instead, I have suggested that racist encounters—viewed through the lens
of a Fanonian translation—are not only about what is said between interlocutors,
nor purely about who those interlocutors are, but—equally importantly—what
space-times they are both able to recruit, and are excluded from recruiting, to
their interactions. In Sino-African encounters, the question of what racism can be,
and who can be racist, remains constrained by its still Anglo-centric medium of
translation and English’s associated PC theater of evaluation. For this reason, “who
can be racist?” remains—at least for now—imbricated in a dialectical interaction
that both recruits and constitutes white space-time as its ideological gravity.
 Part II

Compromise
 4

How Paper Tigers Kill

The expression “America is just a paper tiger” has remained a common platitude
in China ever since its first invocation in Mao Zedong thought. Historian-activist
Judith Balso has noted: “Like many other statements of Mao Zedong, the descrip-
tion of imperialists—or even all reactionaries—as ‘paper tigers’ (zhi laohu) became
famous beyond China through [Lin Biao’s compilation of] the Little Red Book,
where paper tigers feature in the title of its sixth chapter” (2019, 161). Here, Balso
crucially draws attention to the ways in which the paper tiger—as an ideological
metaphor—stands in a dialogical relationship with metaphors like “lifting a rock
only to drop it on one’s own feet,” “nooses round the neck of US imperialism,” and
“the East Wind is prevailing over the West Wind,” which are juxtaposed through-
out the text. Of this juxtaposition, Balso further notes: “the paper tiger, far from
being a trompe l’oeil in which the fragility of the enemy would be masked by a belief
in its appearance of ferocity, reveals the double nature of any class enemy” (2019,
161). Mao Zedong himself was dialectically reflexive about this double nature:
Here I should like to answer the question of whether imperialism and all reactionaries
are real tigers. The answer is that they are at once real tigers and paper tigers, they are
in the process of being changed from real into paper tigers. Change means transfor-
mation. Real tigers are transformed into paper tigers, into their opposite. This is true
of all things, and not just social phenomena. But why take full account of [the enemy]
if he is not a real tiger? . . . Just as there is not a single thing in the world without a dual
nature (this is the law of the unity of opposites), so imperialism and all reactionaries
have a dual nature—they are at the same time real tigers and paper tigers.1

Additionally, we can understand paper tigers, in their popular metaphorical uptake,

as ultimately human-made media artifacts that do not represent the same danger as
their real others existing within the realm of a primal, chthonic nature. In recent
times, however, nature has also emerged as a countertrope to China’s postsocialist
rush toward the terraformation of an alienating, nature-destroying Anthropocenic
modernity—where nature is invoked as a utopic, more Apollonian space-time of
109
110    Chapter 4

harmonious existence between human and nonhuman worlds (Paglia 1990).

Nature—in this Eurocentric and dualist (but nonetheless persistent) folk ideology—
imbricates a tension between utopic and dystopic potentials. This chapter discusses
the mass and socially mediated recruitment of nature as metaphor and translational
technology in Afro-Chinese encounters. In doing so, I propose an account of danger-
ous mediation and translational attunement in Afro-Chinese encounters.

M A S S - M E D IAT E D T IG E R S

On July 23, 2016, at Badaling Wildlife World, near the Great Wall in suburban
Beijing’s Yanqing district, a family of three became victims of a tiger attack. The
event received wide coverage in both the Chinese and international media. Fol-
lowing the release of a short clip of surveillance video footage broadcast by main-
land media, the South China Morning Post provided the following account to an
English audience two days after the attack:

[The video] shows a woman exiting the front passenger door of a white sedan and
walking to the driver’s door, where she stands talking to the driver, later confirmed
to be her husband. A tiger appears from behind her and drags her off. The driver
gives chase and all three disappear off camera, before he returns to the car where
he is joined by another woman from the back seat, and they run in the direction
the tiger dragged the first woman. The second woman was confirmed by relatives to
be the 57-year-old mother of the woman who was dragged away.2

All subsequent news reports of the event in the week following the attack
based their accounts on the Yanqing district government press statement, which
noted that the mother was tragically killed by the tiger, and that the daughter was
raced to a hospital where she had to undergo surgery. A government spokesperson
for the district also indicated that the woman had ignored danger warnings from
nearby personnel before the attack, and emphasized that the wildlife park had
multiple signs telling tourists to stay in their cars, with warnings being repeatedly
broadcast via loudspeakers. The event sparked major debates among Chinese neti-
zens, followed by reams of meta-commentary by journalists following the case as
a human-interest story. Debates among Chinese netizens, mirrored in journalistic
analyses and investigations, appeared to follow two major themes: victim account-
ability and modernity critique.
In the first scenario, netizens debated whether the daughter was to blame
for leaving the vehicle, or whether the husband caused her to leave the car, and
whether the victim should receive compensation. One Sina poll of over 310,000
netizens indicated that only 2.3 percent of respondents thought that the zoo should
be punished for the attack.
On Chinese social media platforms like Weibo, commentators made statements
like: “The zoo should be asking the family for compensation, they should be com-
pensated for their losses after being forced to temporarily shut down,” or “Refund
 How Paper Tigers Kill     111

her the ticket fee and nothing more.” The second theme of critique, however,
emerged more tacitly: that despite the provision of an array of signs that danger was
present, the victims were somehow oblivious to, or ignorant of, the immediacy of a
tiger threat. This tacit media discourse suggested that there was an emerging panic
around the possibilities of semiotic failure, which were revealed in the subsequent
legal case around reparations, as well as the institutional responses that followed.
These institutional and legal responses focused on the presence of “clear” signs of
danger on the one hand, but also emphasized the need for more innovative signs
of danger for future visiting tourists on the other. Thus, a contradiction emerged:
the media infrastructure of danger was revealed to be paradoxically both adequate
and in need of an upgrade due to its presupposed inadequacy. Here, however, an
important question emerges: Could the mediation of danger itself have been the
very obstacle to experiencing the immediacy of a tiger threat in the first place? One
report discussing the victim-blaming that followed the attack insisted on a common
saying: “People’s words are perhaps more scary than the mouth of a tiger.” In the
case of warning signs that demarcate the semiotic infrastructure of danger, could it
be that perhaps the translations of metallic, digital, and paper tigers are out of synch
with the unpredictable, and thus dangerous, alterity represented by the tiger itself?
These questions mirror an older but persistent media and semiotic anthropo-
logical tension—between the interplay of alterity and its translation, where transla-
tion has been understood as a general trope of mediation for generations of media
theorists. This contrasts with its “purely” language-metaphorical interpretation
and implementations in mainstream anthropology (Geertz 1977; Asad 1986). To
be sure, this translational concern with alterity has also been demonstrated, with
perhaps more explicit, broader anti-colonial stakes in the equally ethnographic
work of many literary and postcolonial theorists (Spivak 1993; Bhabha 1994; Sakai
1997). In alignment with critical media and postcolonial concerns, many linguis-
tic anthropologists and semioticians have pointed out that eliding the particu-
larities of language, media, and alterity as a densely imbricated and convergent
social-semiotic interface risks occluding its existence as a total set of historical
material conditions as well as the sign relations that operate and are given reso-
nance within them (M. Silverstein 1976; Gal 2015; Nakassis 2016b). From such a
perspective, language—as a media infrastructure in itself—dialectically precedes
and is maintained through langue, parole, and an array of communicative and
embodied practices and phenomena. Here, it is precisely the dialogical nature of
these maintenance processes that many ethnographers might often inadvertently
misconstrue as “non-linguistic” or “unmediated”—where communication nests
itself in the “differences that make a difference” within a total semiotic domain,
as Gregory Bateson once suggested (1972).
Beyond the obvious point that many analysts who are critical of translation as
analytic must themselves ultimately commit to a highly mediated set of methods
and technologies in order to write about media objects, sites, and informants—
including the language—it is clear that the pragmatic indispensability of translation
112    Chapter 4

in undertaking research, writing, and analysis becomes nonetheless inevitable.

This is because the interpersonal encounters that co(n)textualize media objects
and their mediation invariably must presume upon epistemologies of universal-
ism as “structures of aspiration” (Li 2021, 234). For those engaged in the endeavor
of translation—like Chinese netizens mediating social hierarchies through media
meta-commentary around a tiger attack—the achievement of a translation exists
as an unquestionable horizon of possibility, even while its contours seem to ever-
recede from one’s semantic grasp.
Tigers and their associated natures have led a vibrant life through metaphor in
China. Though continually framed as representing a mysterious alterity—a hid-
den, merciless threat—tigers are nonetheless tirelessly recruited to folktales, anal-
ogies, and tropes of compassion, fidelity, and power throughout the Chinese and
broader Asian literary context. Similarly, Chinese language and civilization has
led a vibrant life through metaphor in the Orientalist west, despite being reduced
to a frequently racist “inscrutability” or Herderian “providential” foil for Aryan-
Semitic linguistic chauvinisms (Olender 2009). Inscrutability and alterity, thus,
represent no obstacles to our capacities for reflexivity about subjects designated
as such, nor the ability of so-designated inscrutable or alter subjects to inhabit the
intelligible, ethical, and politically recruitable forms of personhood they have been
recruited to. Furthermore, metaphors and the reflexive, intersubjective processes
through which they are generated are in fact mediating processes in the broader
Hegelian sense—in that they have concrete, material effects: they constitute both
the reflexive actors and their referring subjects as entities that are vulnerable to
laws, infrastructures, and violence.
Thus, my framing of translation encompasses this broader process of mediation
in the metaphorical-materialist sense. In clarifying, however, I am compelled to
distinguish my position from a prominent set of translational genealogies in post-
or nonhuman ethnography and criticism.

G R I D S , E X P L O I T S , A N D N E T WO R K S

Arguing for an approach that obviates or at least problematizes the role of transla-
tion in nonhuman interactions, a growing genealogy of posthuman anthropology
and media theory posits subjects and objects of analysis that imbricate realms of
human, animal, natural, and technological emergence. An array of metaphors to
describe such subjects and objects abound: cyborg, milieu, actant, grid, network,
and parasite are prominent examples:
Cyborg (Haraway 1991; Helmreich 2007)
Milieu (Foucault 2007; Galloway and Thacker 2007; Mackenzie 2010)
Actant, Grid, Network (Latour 1983, 2005)
Parasite (Serres 1982; Derrida 1988)
 How Paper Tigers Kill     113

Figure 2. Bus route in Beijing.

Despite a complex and growing analytical epistemology and nomenclature, much

of this work insists on post-epistemological, posthuman (even postsemiotic),
techno-social ensembles of becoming. These appear to generate possibilities of
mobility and encounter between human and nonhuman that are seen as troubling
or transcending mediation. This position, at first glance, appears to call forth the
liberal narrative of the emancipatory possibilities of information technology and
social media, on the one hand, and on the other, a validation of recent theories
of technological and object agency as still “in vogue” media anthropological con-
cerns. Both outlooks presume either a kind of prior or virtual radically egalitar-
ian zone of interaction, be it potential radically democratic mass-mediated publics
or synchronic vacuums of constant becoming as well as symmetrically colliding
actors and actants. Framed as such, the human-animal encounter becomes a foil
for two prominent narratives. One contrapuntal manifestation of these emerged
during fieldwork in Beijing in 2013. In the summer of 2013, I was waiting with John
Rousseau, a Francophone Malagasy who was studying at Aiguo University, to board
the 355 bus to get to Renmin University’s east gate. Negotiating this urban landscape
as newly arrived students with little Chinese, John and I were trying to decipher a
bus stop with hundreds of destinations laid out on a green, black, and white grid
marked only with arrows and hundreds of Chinese characters (see fig. 2).
114    Chapter 4

As I clumsily tried to read these characters with my still limited Chinese, John
pulled out his iPhone and activated the well-known app Pleco. He used the recog-
nition software to instantly translate the relevant characters. Like QR code read-
ers, Pleco accesses a smartphone’s camera, recognizing and instantly translating
Chinese characters, allowing the user to visually capture and store the translated
item in a flashcard for later review. In this way, the entire city of Beijing can be
converted into a digital archive for language review later.
The process of incrementally compiling this digital archive allowed us to read
the names of all the bus stops we had come to know aurally within our first few
months in the city. However, at that time, we were not yet able to recognize them
visually. We quickly scanned all the bus stop names into Pleco so we would know
which direction to catch the bus from, as well as at which stop to get off at once
we had caught the right bus. We were relieved to be standing at the right stop and
were fortunate to catch one of the 355 buses as it was arriving. It was getting dark
and we were late for a dinner appointment with some other African and Chinese
friends, having just returned from a sports meeting at a different university an
hour before. Along with a massive, impatient crowd, we pushed on board as the
rain began to pour and remained squashed-up against the window as we watched
rush-hour traffic visibly escalate on the other side of the bus’s window. As digging
elbows pushed us right up against the breath-fogged window, John turned to me
saying, “Wow, that girl driving the Mercedes-Benz out there is really cute. I’m
going to get her number.” I thought he was joking until he once again pulled out
his iPhone, this time opening WeChat, and started searching the application’s local
network function for connections that might have the woman’s photo. When she
accepted his request, John, grinning sheepishly, showed me his phone. Her name
was Mingming. The conversation that followed was mediated by a combination of
her broken English, his Pleco-assisted Chinese, and WeChat’s English translation
function that came in handy when Mingming texted in Chinese characters that
were beyond our (at the time) somewhat rudimentary language abilities. Eventu-
ally, she wanted to know where he was chatting with her from, so she could see
her interlocutor, since he did not have a WeChat profile picture of himself, opting
instead for a cartoon character as his icon—Doraemon, the time-traveling and
earless cyber cat.
As we pulled even with her car, he waved frantically to her from the bus win-
dow, trying to get her attention. She turned and must have been curious about the
visibly keen black man waving at her, and gingerly waved back. He showed her his
WeChat screen on his iPhone and she nodded. What appeared to be initial mutual
interest quickly petered out after this, and her car disappeared behind several lanes
of traffic ahead of the bus. John tried to contact her on many occasions afterward,
but never heard back from Mingming again.
In one popular media narrative, John emerges as a subject whose legibility,
history, and ideological landscape becomes nondifferentiable from the emergent
 How Paper Tigers Kill     115

potentials of his technological assemblage. He appears to emerge as simultaneous

actor-actant in Bruno Latour’s nomenclature:
[T]he actor-network theory (hence A[N]T) has very little to do with the study of
social networks. These studies no matter how interesting concerns themselves
with the social relations of individual human actors—their frequency, distribution,
homogeneity, proximity. It was devised as a reaction to the often too global concepts
like those of institutions, organizations, states and nations, adding to them more
realistic and smaller set of associations. Although A[N]T shares this distrust for
such vague all encompassing sociological terms it aims at describing also the very
nature of societies. But to do so it does not limit itself to human individual actors but
extend the word actor—or actant—to non-human, non individual entities. Whereas
social network adds information on the relations of humans in a social and natural
world which is left untouched by the analysis, A[N]T aims at accounting for the very
essence of societies and natures. It does not wish to add social networks to social
theory but to rebuild social theory out of networks. It is as much an ontology or a
metaphysics, as a sociology. (1996, 369–70)

Analytically, actor-actant formulations present a problem: though they are posthu-

man analytics, they apparently need to be understood against the backdrop of the
negated individual human subject—as the paradoxically presumed-upon primary
social unit. Latourian and many postmodern media theorists often present their
critique of “rational actor” biases, as though no theorist in the humanistic social
sciences has ever considered moving beyond individual-centrism. Even Eurocentric
thinkers like Emile Durkheim, Karl Marx, and Max Weber—all of whom have con-
siderably influenced generations of social inquisitors in the global social sciences—
would likely balk at Latour’s claim to innovation in this regard, particularly given that
all three thinkers and their intellectual genealogies have in fact contested the “indi-
vidual human actor” as the primary unit of analysis for many decades prior to ANT.
Here, a perhaps impertinent question emerges: if John and Mingming are equal
actor-actants in relation to their phones and the surrounding traffic assemblage,
could we even see—let alone account for—racism and racial ideology as supplying
ideological gravity to Latour’s account of their colliding on his network? Are there
hills and valleys in his grid, and if so what forces allow them to both be felt as well
as to stratify actants?
Perhaps actors like John and Mingming would cherish a fluidity of existence
where epistemology has no bearing on their passage through the world, but such
an experience of fluid subjectivity is reserved for an unmarked few. Being “just an
actor-actant” might appear like wondrous oblivion to the marked subject in a
marked body. In this sense, ANT emerges as a view of the social that ultimately
stratifies those reaching for it—in this case, the materialized epistemology of John’s
racialization emerges despite the proposition of its “objectively relative” ontology
on a posthuman network. It is in this way that sensual, intersubjective pheno­
menologies problematize even the most logical metaphysics.
116    Chapter 4

In a second prominent media narrative, John—like a twenty-first-century

cyber-guerilla—can be seen contesting the cabalistic forces of governmentality
and neoliberalism by appropriating the intrinsically democratic, mass-mediated
weapons of emancipatory self-fashioning. This trope emerges particularly strongly
in Alexander Galloway and Eugene Thacker’s The Exploit: A Theory of Networks.
Masquerading as a kind of intellectual anarchism, Thacker and Galloway ulti-
mately enshrine the privilege of making an argument that can, in their words:
“avoid the limits of academic writing in favor of a more experimental, speculative
approach” (2007, vii). Not unlike Latour, Galloway and Thacker regard the net-
work itself as an arbitrary commensurator despite the asymmetrical human labor
that goes into its construction:
The nonhuman quality of networks is precisely what makes them so difficult to grasp.
They are, we suggest, a medium of contemporary power, and yet no single subject
or group absolutely controls a network. Human subjects constitute and construct
networks, but always in a highly distributed and unequal fashion. Human subjects
thrive on network interaction (kin groups, clans, the social), yet the moments when
the network logic takes over—in the mob or the swarm, in contagion or infection—
are the moments that are the most disorienting, the most threatening to the integrity
of the human ego. (2007, 5)

In this quote, there is a troubling slippage from the exploitative asymmetries of

human labor to the exploitable symmetry of an unruly nonhuman network. The
signs, “nonhumanity” and “disorientation” do considerable work here to con-
vert the network into something impersonal and out-of-control, thus equivo-
cating an egalitarian exploit. This shames the vulgar humanist or materialist:
“One must be an egoistic, anthropocentric narcissist to suggest that networks
could be in any way interested or contingent infrastructures.” The exploit rhe-
torically posits: “Now that the intractable network is beyond hegemony, don’t
we all have equal access?”
In both Latour’s and Thacker and Galloway’s narratives, translation—as an
ambiguously nonagential, yet uncannily vitalist metaphor—emerges as either
inherently arbitrary or inherently egalitarian. In their schema, John’s techno-
social ensemble in the previous interaction either explicates a flat, synchronic
grid—agentless symmetrical translation without mediation, or, paradoxi-
cally, a super-agential appropriation of an equal opportunity techno-linguistic
media assemblage—the hijacking of the means of translation as a radically
democratic exploit.
However, both of these prominent media narratives elide three important
receptional dimensions of translation: (1) “languages” or units of commensura-
tion; (2) ideological space-time or gravity; and (3) sensory-semiotic capacities
that make such a translation intelligible. These three dimensions can be under-
stood as register/genre; context or co-text; and conditions of reception (see fig. 3).
 How Paper Tigers Kill     117

1) ‘‘languages’’ or units of
commensuration—
register/genre

3) semiotic (in)capacities
2) ideological space-time, or that such a translation entails
gravity—co(n)text —conditions [limits as well
as possibilities] of reception

Figure 3. Three receptional dimensions of translation.

Together, they extend from what linguistic anthropologists of media have dis-
cussed as indexicality (Nakassis 2018; Chumley 2016). However, in articulating
some of the more apparent critical theoretical stakes of this analytical approach,
I have found the work of Frankfurt School media historian Susan Buck-Morss
particularly productive. Buck-Morss points to “numbing” or anesthesia as his-
torically situated, techno-social strategies to diminish shock as a response to
industrial modernity. In doing so, she argues for an etymological resuturing of
the discourses of aesthetics and anesthetics. Here, she points to a broader con-
textualization of aesthetics as imbricating a kind of calibration of the sensorium.
As she suggests: “the experience of intoxication is not limited to drug-induced,
biochemical transformations,” in fact, “narcotics” can be “made out of reality
itself ” (1992, 22). In the meta-debates around the mediation of danger in Bei-
jing’s Tiger Park, and in John’s recourse to WeChat and the avatar Doraemon
in sustaining his interaction with Mingming, we see an analog to Buck-Morss’s
argument. Western industrial modernity’s sensory numbing of twentieth-century
urban inhabitants finds its counterpoint in the animal-cyborg ensembles of
twenty-first-century mediation—a process that does not unfold outside of an ide-
ological landscape that still stratifies along intersectional lines. Like Buck-Morss’s
(an)aesthetic dependencies, Chinese netizens and African media users invest in
semiotic infrastructures of danger-avoidance and self-curation. In doing so, they
118    Chapter 4

recruit variously mediated “natures”—paper tigers, real tigers, and cyber cats
alike. Such techno-sensory investments facilitate an analogous protective shield-
ing from the disappointments of cosmopolitan modernity. What, however, does
this shielding conceal through its numbing effects? If nature as material metaphor
in contemporary China is indeed recruited for anesthesia, what kinds of traumas
are being elided and displaced?

F R OM NAT U R A L SE M A N T IC S T O R AC IA L I Z E D
P R AG M AT IC S

In 2013 I began conducting preliminary fieldwork on the racialized interactions

between African students and their Chinese interlocutors in Beijing. At this time,
one informant—an elite Chinese journalist named Yiwen—offhandedly remarked
that she liked Africans “because they are just like animals,” mirroring my interac-
tion with Lili in chapter 3. As with Lili, I adopted the default position that this
was a racist thing to say. She, like other Chinese informants who had said similar
things, balked at my reading and said: “You misunderstand. I think it’s wonder-
ful that they [Africans] are so close to nature. We Chinese are nothing, we just
eat the world’s resources.” To be sure, the idea that there exists a kind of originary,
authentic subject of nature that contrasts with a compromised Chinese modernity
is a fairly pervasive sentiment in urban China.
Understanding how this subjectivity becomes mapped onto black bodies, how-
ever, requires an approach that accounts for the ways in which nature is not only
recruited but also racialized as a means of mediating that modernity.
Mingming’s negation of John could be an open-ended, nonselective act—like
the obvious frequency with which black African students are more frequently
ignored by Chinese cab drivers compared to their foreign counterparts. Yiwen’s
nature-black African equivalencies may well emerge from a place of innocent
concatenations of categories of alterity, which can be miscontextualized by
Anglophone intellectual observers. The issue, however, isn’t whether Mingming
and Yiwen are racist in the semantically flat-footed Euro-American sense. Rather,
what is at issue must account for what is pragmatically experienced: (a) whether
John and others like him face persistent racialized discrimination in China; and
(b) how to account for the ideological manifestation of racism in a context that
denies that racism is possible because of a hyper-localist analytical exoticism.
The question of whether Chinese subjects are racist, as suggested in the previous
chapter, problematically assumes that the translation of the meanings of actions
are determined by “sign production” and their always elusory intentions. This pre-
occupation both occludes reception as a vast domain of semiosis and denies the
possibility that meanings of signs are transformed through the interaction of per-
sons coming from different participant frameworks.
 How Paper Tigers Kill     119

John and others are not being profiled because they are “dark” or because some-
how there is a folk-schema of segmentable “blackness” in China. Black African
students are profiled because they are racio-politically black in a more transna-
tional sense, for Chinese cosmopolitan interlocutors are judging them according
to imagined international, unmarked horizons of aspirational personhood—with
English-language characteristics. Far from being “local,” various black subjects
have undeniably become a part of the always-shifting, yet always-stratified schema
of Chinese urban, class, and racial capital. The question is not whether one is black
in some essential semantic framework, but rather—in a more pragmatic sense—for
whom one is black, and in what ways this category of racial capital becomes con-
figured through other intersectional vectors of social stratification in an encoun-
ter that includes subjects who are not in fact Chinese, but who are undeniably in
China and helping to expand a Sinophone world.
To ask “Where is blackness in China?” is as absurd an intellectual question as
asking where Europeans’ “yellowness” philologically stems from in their percep-
tion of East Asian alterities. Furthermore, we are not undertaking study into the
visual cognition of racism, but rather the pragmatic and perceptible features of
politicized blackness and black experience. It is as inappropriate for a Sinologist
to dismiss racism, racialization, and racial capital in China as it is for a scholar
of English literature with no experience with the Chinese language to posit cal-
ligraphic divinations of the potential meanings of Chinese characters and how they
might determine cultural features of Chinese-language speakers. Sinologists are no
more equipped to study transnational racial capital than a nonlinguist is to evalu-
ate language features of a language they have no personal or disciplinary experi-
ences with, making use only of their own mother-tongue bias. Perhaps Sinological
perspectives, in their current form, are not all that well equipped to undertake the
increasingly urgent inquiries into making and translating of China’s others?
It is understandable that this is an uncomfortable proposition in an analytical
tradition like western Sinology, which has focused on segmentation, differentia-
tion, and exegetic nuance in building an impressive archive around the proposition
of quintessence and civilizational integrity, while simultaneously being compelled
to enact a conceptual monopoly on every interaction the Sinosphere touches. This
compels a number of career Sinologists, at present, to saunter into debates on the
racialization of blackness in China, without bothering to engage the substantial
archive on transnational black experience and with no awareness that this is sig-
nificantly different from: (a) the national histories of citizens of different African
countries; (b) the ethnic identities within and across them; and (c) the textual
semantics of hei in the exegesis of Chinese classical texts. Rather, it may be prudent
to ask how the historical fact of global-colonial racial capital inflects Sinology’s
institutional orientations around durability and agreement on the names of things.
I am in fact willing to bet my life that such a change in orientation—approaching
120    Chapter 4

Sinology from politically black genealogies of the Global South—will reveal sig-
nificant disciplinary blind spots.
Two prominent blind spots that are important to this discussion include Occi-
dentalism and semantic relativism; in many ways, the former can be understood as
leading into the latter.3 The unfortunate effect of standardized western languages
as the target context for Sinophone and Sinosphere matrixes is that a monolinguis-
tic “dictionary” bias enters the frame when discussing and ultimately essentializ-
ing the names of the ten thousand things as the ten thousand things in themselves.
Many Herderian-influenced western Sinologists essentialized this “frozen-in-time”
quality as an intrinsic feature of Chinese (Olender 2009). It is apparent, however,
that this perception of language was problematically disconnected from Chinese
speakers’ diverse practices through time down to the present, and stemmed more
from western Sinologists’ own Lockean biases around what languages are or how
languages should work. Though the surface racist forms of this bias have been
scraped away, their foundational element persists in semantic relativism. Let’s con-
sider two frequently motivated equivalencies: hei as the limited semantic range
of both “blackness” (of color) and “darkness” (of skin) in China; and ziran and
shanshui as expressions of a semantic “nature” dualism in the Sinosphere.
Here, shanshui might be understood as a poetic expression of ethical nature-
feeling or “landscape” in classical Chinese art and writing, while ziran represents
more of a Linnaean biological segmentation of the (scientifically) natural world—a
kind of nature without classical poetry. I have encountered the leveraging of these
equivalencies mostly when presenting early versions of these chapters to China
studies scholars. In such settings, mostly western-trained or Chinese cosmopoli-
tan Sinologists frequently attempted to correct my third-world misconception of
what “blackness” and “nature” meant in China by seeking recourse to Han Chinese
hyper-localism as a means of erasing black experience in the area sphere of their
object of study. The problem with semantic relativism around limited distillation
of terms like shanshui, ziran, and hei (among practitioners of what should be an
exegetic tradition) is that the game of defining singular words posits a conceptual
Shangri-la, where “Chinese” concepts are hermetically sealed from the world—a
recapitulation of Herderianism.
Beyond this political problem of Orientalism in the motivation of shanshui’s
and ziran’s seemingly apolitical semantic range, a foundational semiotic as well as
conceptual problem emerges around the fetishization of graphic = semantic conti-
nuities in reading the character for hei (see fig. 4). The understanding of words like
hei having a singular apolitical association with some kind of ambiguous “black-
dark” gradable and arbitrary color scheme presents not only a misleading one-
to-one relation between hei as character and hei as univocal semantic unit across
contexts referring to color, skin tone, and political blackness. It also elides the fact
that Chinese subjects of variously stratified class and educational backgrounds can
in fact distinguish the lexical differences of hei—which are neither frozen in time,
 How Paper Tigers Kill     121

Figure 4. Semantically relative associations of hei.

nor inter-linguistically isolated—in the same ways English speakers can distin-
guish the homophones dark (as a transcendental state) and dark (as a gradable
quality). Consider the following sentences:
A) Lili’s mother: “Lili’s husband became rather dark after their honeymoon.”
B) Lili’s mother: “Lili’s husband is a little dark.”

Sentence A suggests that Lili’s husband became tanned, and that there is a con-
cern for the degree to which he has been tanned, as tanning can be graded into
the limited categorial distinctions of English from dark, to darker, to darkest. In the
racial ideologies of many liberal intellectual theaters, race and racialization are
interpretable only in these categorial distinctions, which deny categorical racial-
ization as political and equally pragmatic realities. Sentence B, though it might
seem to suggest a categorial gradeability in the sense of “a little,” in fact presumes
upon a categorical thus transcendental darkness even in its Chinese gloss: yi dian
(dian). With reference to the previous chapter, Tim’s “darkness A” can be changed
by degrees, while Adam’s “darkness B” cannot. Racism and various kinds of essen-
tialism geared toward social stratification frequently nest categorical ideologies
of distinction within a categorial language of potential disavowal. Saying “your
husband is a little dark,” as in the second sense, implies a categorically nongradable
blackness through the absurd and thus deniable equivocation of darkness’s catego-
rial gradeability (see Kockelman 2016).
Furthermore, such sematic-relativist fixations occlude what linguist Benjamin
Whorf (1956) might describe as the cryptotypic articulations that exist within lan-
guages or inter-linguistically among members of a speaking community that operate
through more than one language. The proposition that racist articulations between
122    Chapter 4

blackness and nature don’t exist in Chinese in the way they do in English—
and that therefore articulations of blackness and nature are meaningless—shares
the same conceptual problem as suggesting English lends itself inherently to gen-
erational and gender equality because it lacks honorific structures and gendered
nouns. As Whorf demonstrated, English shares many covert categories of all kinds
of hierarchical structures that were otherwise embedded in the actual grammatical
forms of other languages. He referred to these covert categories as cryptotypes. In
a similar way, it would be useful to point out that the articulation of nature and
blackness in China needn’t operate through the semantic ranges of hei, shanshui,
and ziran. In fact, they can even do so in English. Consider the following extract in
Michael Sullivan’s discussion of an infamous letter to African embassies in Beijing,
sent on behalf of the Chinese Students Association (CSA) in 1989. It is an example
that demonstrates this cryptotypic articulation handily:
China whose thousand-year glory and cultural tradition is ineffaceably written in
the history of mankind, stands today, because of the great Xiao-Ping’s merit in front
of a new historical prime. . . . We are walking towards our great aim on a broad road
opened to [the] advanced and civilized world. It doesn’t mean, however, that we will
feed the whole uncultured Africa with the results of our efforts and we will allow any
Negro to hang about our universities to annoy Chinese girls and to introduce on our
academic grounds manner[s] acquired by life in tropical forests, offending our tra-
ditional hospitality and broad mindedness. If . . . there will be no correction in [the]
behaviour of idling black students, new and even harder lessons of “friendship” will
follow. They [i.e., these lessons] will be based on the experience of Americans, who
know very well what to do to curb the Negroes in their country.4

If one were reading this extract through the myopic lens of word-production, one
might infer that no political meaning resides in phrases like “black students” or
“life in tropical forests”—that these are disinterested observations of the skin tones
and climactic terroir of the students being described. The reader will hopefully
agree that this would not only be an idiotic reading, but also a completely bad
faith interpretation that is likely informed by a perspective so mired in racism
that it mistakes outright discrimination for an innocent politics of unmarkedness.5
Again, beyond the obvious political problems of semantic relativism, this letter
and countless Sino-African communications like it over the preceding decades
should draw our concern not to the semantics of word-production, but rather the
more pragmatic dimensions of reception and translation. The writers of the letter
wrote the letter in English with the intention that it was meant to be read in English
by African diplomats. The letter further recruited a US-specific but transnation-
ally mediated chronotope of race relations, referring to black students as Negroes.
This may prompt the conspiracy theorist to infer a CIA plot in the circulation of
the letter. However, I have witnessed too many racialized interactions between
Chinese and African students that recruit the same contextually peculiar but
 How Paper Tigers Kill     123

transnationally intelligible combinations of Anglo racist tropes (even into

Chinese) to attribute the content of the letter to US imperialist sabotage—even
though such expressions of imperialism are very real in many other contexts.
Thus, conjoined interpretations of Anglo-racial blackness and nature as somehow
foreign concepts to cosmopolitan Chinese subjects who are cognitively seques-
tered in their own linguistic prisons of hei, shanshui, and ziran seems like a fairly
obvious recapitulation of the Anglo-colonial mentalese of inscrutability.
A more explicit iteration of this articulation between blackness and nature
emerged during an art exhibition in Chengdu, where the exotic imaginary that
black Africans index an originary state of nature was literally put on display through
a series of photographic juxtapositions by acclaimed Chinese photographer
Yu Huiping. His photographic series—titled This is Africa—placed African photo-
graphic subjects next to those of animal subjects. In defense of artistic expression,
and against initial protests directed toward the exhibition, the juxtapositions were
praised by Zhao Yixin—president of the China Photographic Publishing House—
as “perceptive, smart and visually impactful, capturing the vitality of primitive
life.” Wang Yuejun, a curator of the museum, also came to Yu’s defense, stating that
“in Chinese proverbs, animals are always used for admiration and compliment.”
Nature again operates as anesthetic against a diffuse but compromised moder-
nity. In the exhibit of This is Africa, this framing is perhaps taken a step further.
We may understand anti-modernist strategies of synesthesia as necessitating
the recruitment of a racialized “blackness of nature.” Is this a counterpoint to
an unmarked “nature of whiteness” at the core of Chinese and African subjects’
emerging cosmopolitan horizon of aspiration? Adding weight to this proposi-
tion, it is worth pointing out that blackness-equals-nature equivocations only
stand while African subjects in China are not taken as speaking, communicating,
urban subjects, that are already extractively incorporated in China’s social media
matrix. Their participation in this domain bears crucial insights for a critique of
posthumanism from the perspective of Afro-Chinese interactions. If Chinese
subjects are (syn)aesthetically articulating new discourses of nature and race as
a response to an acceleratively anomic modernity; how might we understand
African students’ (syn)aesthetic approaches to the similarly alienating conditions
of educational labor migrancy? Engaging this question, I observed a resonance
between the intersectionally compromised dependencies on the Angloscene as
demonstrated by Lerato and Damien in chapter 1, and a dimension of social life
that some anthropologists have discussed broadly as affect. In situating affect in a
discussions of raciolinguistic encounter, I must qualify that I align more with
a historical-materialist framing of affect (Berlant 2011; Mazzarella 2017) than a
vitalist and post-representational one (Stewart 2007; Massumi 2015). However, my
fundamental inspiration in situating affect in Afro-Chinese encounters takes its
cue from Frantz Fanon’s own permutations in Wretched of the Earth.
124    Chapter 4

A F F E C T I V I T I E S O F T H E A F R O - C H I N E SE A N G L O S C E N E

In John’s smartphone vignette recounted earlier in this chapter, we see a further

analog to Buck-Morss’s argument. Western industrial modernity’s sensory numb-
ing of twentieth-century urban inhabitants also finds its counterpoint in John’s and
others’ commitment to the techno-linguistic ensembles of twenty-first-century
social media within the ideological landscape of white, English, cosmopolitan
cultural capital. Like Buck-Morss’s (an)aesthetic dependencies, John’s and others’
techno-linguistic investment facilitates an analogous protective shielding from the
disappointments of cosmopolitan mobility, while simultaneously committing
them to its very means of dissemination—an English-iPhone-mobility ensemble.
Many students like John arrive in Beijing after grueling personal and academic
trials only to find many of their Chinese peers aspiring to enter American and
European universities. At present, there is a massive and expanding education
industry in centers like Beijing, where Chinese aspirational cosmopolitans are
learning English as well as taking courses on how to pass European and American
standardized exams for university entrance (figs. 5 and 6). Within this language
market, many Anglophone African students—almost upon arrival—find them-
selves in illegal, hence exploitative, English-teaching positions to supplement their
somewhat meager stipends. To buy the desirable iPhone, and to acquire the desir-
able Pleco app, a student will almost certainly teach English, given the absence of
alternatives (a theme I explored in chapter 2). Even Francophone African students,
like John, will quickly recognize this opportunity, committing themselves more
diligently to studying English than Chinese.
Thus, it isn’t purely the iPhone and its apps that anesthetize the panic of a bus-
schedule comprised of only indecipherable hieroglyphs. It is also the necessarily
imbricated ideological space-time of Anglo-cosmopolitanism—the Angloscene
chronotope—within which John and Mingming imagine “safety” as long as they
commit to that world. I asked John if he was ever worried about getting arrested
for teaching English illegally. “Look,” he said, “as long as you speak English, no
one is going to hurt you.” Here, it is more the belief than the reality of John’s claim
that is important. For many, English indeed appears to provide a literal, protective
shielding from discrimination and persecution. But, again, this belief comes with
significant compromise.
In Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon explores a similar politicization of
the sensorium in his discussion of affectivity: “In the colonial world,” he writes,
“the colonized’s affectivity is kept on edge like a running sore flinching from a
caustic agent. And the psyche retracts, is obliterated, and finds an outlet through
muscular spasms that have caused many an expert to classify the colonized as hys-
terical. This overexcited affectivity, spied on by the invisible guardians who con-
stantly communicate with the core of the personality, takes an erotic delight in the
muscular deflation of the crisis” (1963, 19).6
Figure 5. Yao Ming studying English.

Figure 6. Cowboy-themed ad for English and standardized test prep instruction.

126    Chapter 4

In depicting how the colonial state governs the (re)production of violence

through its governed and colonized bodies, Fanon uses this psycho-physical con-
cept as a way of understanding an exploitable capacity for affective interpolation.
Here, I hope to suggest that affectivity becomes a way of understanding how phe-
nomena like governance (Xi 2014), hegemony (Gramsci 1975), and essentially the
colonization of consciousness (Comaroff 1991) are all attained through managing
affect by recruiting a capacity for its calibration—through forms of anesthesia or
stimulation. For Fanon, affectivity is manifested through forms of repression—
in the Freudian sense ([1920] 2015)—where the colonized subject is constantly
dreaming of taking the place of the colonist. This “envy” persists through an ideo-
logical “compartmentalization” within, and subsequent to, the colonial order—
from outright subjugation and constantly deferred dreams of racial inclusion. This
situation creates perpetually “penned-in” colonial and postcolonial subjects who,
accordingly, have what Fanon evocatively refers to as “muscular dreams, dreams of
action, dreams of aggressive vitality” (1963, 15). For him, these dreams are not
of “becoming a colonist, but of replacing him,” not only of escaping the colonized
hell immediately, but desiring “a paradise within arm’s reach guarded by ferocious
watchdogs” (16). On the surface, the colonized subject learns not to overstep the
limits of this compartmentalization, yet at a deeper level, the colonized subject
secretly harbors the dreams of a vital efficacy, engendering self-recognition as ani-
malcules or monsters: “He patiently waits for the colonist to let his guard down and
then jumps on him” (16). For Fanon, this figurative “patient waiting” is embodied
in muscular tension, spasm, and so-called hysteria of the colonial bodies. In this
way, colonial bodies keep on accumulating “aggressiveness,” while accumulating
tension through a compelled stasis given the ideological and thus “physical” limits
of the continually colonized condition.
This reinforced intensity in bodies—through a capacity or susceptibility—for
further forceful actions on the part of the colonized, can be understood through
Fanon’s evocative somatic metaphor as being “kept on edge like a running sore
flinching from a caustic agent” (19). Here, affectivity is more than “being emo-
tional,” since it imbricates a susceptibility to potential physical forces that tran-
scend emotion as a rational reduction of complex affective states. Through his
examples, he shows how—in needing to find “an outlet”—this affective capacity
can be “drained of energy” through forms of crisis, the ecstasy of dance, spirit
possession, fratricidal struggles, or intertribal conflicts (19). In its self-destructive
manifestations, “the supercharged libido and the stifled aggressiveness spew out
volcanically” (20). Thus, for Fanon, managing these “outlets” becomes key to
maintaining the equilibrium of a social world: “On the way there [to the dance]
their nerves ‘on edge.’ On the way back, the village returns to serenity, peace and
stillness” (20).
In contemporary Sino-African encounters, affectivity perhaps no longer
manifests through a barely suppressed rage. However, this manifestation—in
 How Paper Tigers Kill     127

Fanon’s context—is merely one symptom of affectivity as an exploitable capac-

ity. Perhaps adaptation to transformed modalities of colonial capitalism, in
the postcolonial era, necessitate a reconsideration of how affectivity must be
(an)aesthetically apprehended, in and beyond the “third world.” Here, I sug-
gest that a partial, (an)aesthetic management of this capacity might be at play in
Chinese and African informants’ persistent commitments to cosmopolitan desire
despite encountering considerable obstacles within a landscape of exclusionary
“global” cosmopolitan aspiration. I say that it is a partial management for two
reasons. First, because affectivity—as an intersocial, beyond conscious capac-
ity—thwarts the agential imperatives of rational freedom or capacity to choose,
and second, because the (an)aesthetic conditions within which contemporary
Chinese and African subjects find themselves to be emplaced complicate the
outright manifestation of barely controllable rage in the ways that Fanon described
decades ago. This speaks to the ways in which the world has perhaps not decolo-
nized, but rather, that the sensory and semiotic conditions of subjecthood within
that world have become compromised.
Thus, affectivity—as a sensory semiotic capacity—can be understood as a vola-
tile nexus of intersocial forces that acts on subjects’ not-necessarily-rational, not-
necessarily-conscious propensities for reception and action, a space-time emerging
between the volatile sensorium and the ideological materialities within which it
becomes imbricated. Providing the example of dance, Fanon locates the capacity
to calibrate affectivity as the political site of both resistance and control: “[T]he
colonized’s affectivity can be seen when it is drained of energy by the ecstasy of
dance. . . . The dance circle is a permissive circle. It protects and empowers” (19–20).
Affectivity is thus a capacity, exploitable either on the part of the colonizer, which
renders the colonized more tractable, or on the part of the colonized—as a means
of resistance through (an)aesthetic calibration similar to that proposed by Buck-
Morss. Here, it is important, that this calibration dialectically draws on the ideolog-
ical and material conditions at the experiencing subject’s disposal—the articulation
or anesthesia of histories of capitalist modernity and colonial stratification.
In Fanon’s case, it is the dialectical space-time of the colonial encounter
that supplies the ideological gravity or indexicality for grounding affectivity’s
exploitation, mirroring the ways in which the traumas of modernity require the
cultivation of (an)aesthetic technologies (Buck-Morss 1992). It is in this way that
the very means of emancipation for the postcolonial subject entails either an
unlimited unfolding of endlessly limited compromises—perhaps fractally—or the
violence of a discourse-ending tabula rasa. Perhaps there should be a reevalua-
tion of the nexus between the sensorium and the semiotic in postcolonial studies’
engagement with the analytic of translation. When the meaning of “language” is
less overdetermined and the relationship between signs more dialectically consid-
ered, perhaps more attention can be given to the pragmatics of postcolonial trans-
lation as opposed to semantic fetishism over how to define it. The analyst might
128    Chapter 4

then begin to begin to consider language as (an)aesthetic technology—where

affectivity mediates English, as English mediates affectivity.
In the way that unmarked whiteness, as liberal ideology and horizon of aspi-
ration, both necessitates and occludes the racial stratification of all other racial
imaginaries, so too, I argue, the proposition of unmediated encounters necessitates
the recruitment of new, silent subalterns. In many ways, this is critical race theory’s
most important critique of contemporary anthropology’s failure to decolonize:
That Euro-American anthropology’s analytical focus from marginal humans to
marginal nonhumans perpetuates the discipline’s still-colonial impetus: its contin-
ued propensity to privilege speaking for, and representing, those who are unable
to speak; its more recent propensity to resist translation as a disciplinary metaphor
(in an act of spectacular representational denialism); and, finally, its escalating
propensity to actively seek out nonmediation and nonhumans while nonetheless
continuing to depict such topics and subjects only in terms of anthropology’s own
all-too-mediated and all-too-human relativistic proclivities. A translational atten-
tiveness to the (an)aesthetics of mediation attempts a way out of the flat-footed
impasse between so-called structural and non-/anti-representational anthro-
pologies of nonhumans. It does so by understanding the sensorium as material,
semiotic, as well as fundamentally ideological, and therefore as intersubjectively
contingent. This is in fact not a new position, but it does require a translation of
an older argument.

T H E M E A N S O F T R A N SL AT IO N

In stating famously that “the forming of the five senses is a labor of the entire his-
tory of the world down to the present,” the young Karl Marx once pointed to the
centrality of the sensorium as a zone for mediating or alienating personhood, an
understanding that has informed the ideological centrality of the sensorium for
subsequent generations of Marxist scholars.
[Persons] appropriate [their] total essence in a total manner. . . . Each of their human
relations to the world—seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling, thinking, being
aware, sensing, wanting, acting, loving—in short, all the organs of [one’s] individual
being, like those organs which are directly social in their form, are in their objective
orientation or in their orientation to the object, the appropriation of that object, the
appropriation of the human world; the orientation to the object is the manifestation
of the human world; it is human efficaciousness and human suffering, for suffering,
apprehended humanly, is an enjoyment of self in man. ([1884] 2007, 87)

Since we are “affirmed in the objective world not only in the act of thinking, but
with all [our] senses,” according to Marx, the capacity to appropriate the means
for translating the senses is central to affirming species being (88). The senso-
rium—a far from depoloticized semiotic and material nexus that is vulnerable to
 How Paper Tigers Kill     129

ideological and intersectional stratifications—is thus a grounding point for

thinking and producing both human and nonhuman, as well as mediated and
unmediated possibilities of personhood. In this regard, personhood does not
require the narrow typification of an individuated “human.” Since, if we regard
the sensorium as the means of production for fashioning more capacious person-
hoods, then the attempt to wrest control over the translational labor it already
performs, is ultimately a claim to that means of production.
 5

Ubuntu/Guanxi and the Pragmatics

of Translation

Thinking from the South is necessarily an endeavor of translation: between scales

of representation and materiality, between ontology and epistemology, and cru-
cially between chronotopes of encounter.1 As such, thinking from the South, in its
very proposition, is compelled to shift the interzone of encounter from the west
and a world full of its aspirationally cosmopolitan Others to a more horizontal, and
thus ultimately more multilingual, conception of intersubjective interactions
and collaboratively translated personhoods—these being interactions and transla-
tions that unfold in a world of mutually negotiated alterities that resist the flat,
commensurative relativisms of Anglo multiculturalism in a still-decolonizing
world. For a generation of postmodernists, exploring such fraught social inter-
zones of endlessly becoming alterity seemed to induce a representational delirium,
leading to an initially ecstatic rejection of so-called structure and translation, even-
tually culminating in the awkward, privileged avoidance of society and the human
altogether. This remains the intellectual equivalent of retreating into a gated com-
munity—away from the unsettling discomfort of an increasingly stratified world.
Destabilizing this logic, as I began to suggest in the preceding chapter, entails the
embrace of translation as an intersubjective imperative and social fact, without
the expectation of universal commensurability that remains appropriately impos-
sible in a multilingual world.
In this chapter, I take this approach further and explore the indispensability of
translation as social practice not only in the particular instance of Afro-Chinese
interactions, but in the broader context of non-western encounters beyond the
settler-colonial encounter. This is a step that I hope will be of benefit to many
projects of intellectual decolonization that take thinking from the South as their
starting point. Demonstrating a pragmatics of postcolonial translation, I analyze
the reflexive, intersubjective mediation of Southern African and Chinese “culture”

130
 Ubuntu/Guanxi     131

concepts—those of Ubuntu and guanxi—as my primary example for discussion.

I begin with a discussion of affinities between these concepts as they have been
written about, or publicly contextualized in some of their respective genealo-
gies. I then move to a discussion of their reflexive translation in contemporary
Afro-Chinese encounters. Following this, I conclude with a discussion about how a
pragmatics of translation intervenes in a number of popular non-representational
or anti-translational literatures in the western social sciences.
In their independent and synthesized contextualizations, Ubuntu and guanxi
share a general feature of “intersubjective interdependency”—a convergence of
interpretations that has allowed many African students in China to not only treat
the respective cultural ideologies of Ubuntu and guanxi as malleable enough
to permit a translation of one into the other; but also the capacity to reflexively
re-purpose the pragmatic deployment of these concepts for limited gains within
a still-inequivalent context of encounter and exchange. In line with these
observations, and drawing on the shared intersubjective sensibilities of guanxi
and Ubuntu, I understand translation—always simultaneously interpersonal and
intertextual—as a pragmatics of mediating incommensurability. Thus, transla-
tion is not only an immanent capacity that always entails the acknowledgement of
difference in the abstract analytical sense, it should also be understood as a vital
and inevitable social process that is both reflexively referred to and relied upon to
permit transformations of social and material worlds without reducing cultural
concepts—like Ubuntu or guanxi—to arbitrary propositions under the banner of
cultural relativism.
In addition to facilitating the observation of social dynamics, a pragmatics
of translation and its contingent translational attunement has implications for
methodology and research ethics more broadly. The research orientation such an
approach necessitates is that encounters and interactions are never single events,
but ultimately encompass a wider social context as well as socio-spatiotemporal
trajectories that are evidenced through interactions. What the reader may initially
discern as a series of “individual encounters” in the context of an interaction-
based ethnography is a misleading understanding of what happens between the
ethnographic context and the subsequent representational act of ethnographic
writing—historical or anthropological.
“Single” interactions are meant to diagram, with depth, positionalities, con-
texts, and dispositions that are occupied by a broad range of subjects over time
in the ethnographic context. It would be profoundly monolingual—in the Lock-
ean sense—to believe that an ethnographic interaction represents (a) a singu-
lar event, and (b) “real” people, since textual representations are extensions of
social realities as opposed to the realities themselves. Just as no large-scale quan-
titative survey will ever capture why subjects, collectively, behave the way they
do, an interactional analysis is by its very nature incomplete. This is because no
132    Chapter 5

interaction is ever a social isolate—given that they encompass a distillation of

language, performances, and ideas that are never, and have never been, the sole
authorial objects of interlocutors. Understanding that there is no one-to-one corre-
spondence between the number of interview subjects and the possibilities of their
alignments, perspectives, opinions, and personae, it is inevitably the ethnographer
who—through mediating between ethnographic context, research institutions,
writing, and critical reception—is undertaking the burden of qualitative explora-
tion and evidence-based argumentation. Here, I can only claim that my informants
and their social milieu were observed in depth, in a context full of informants,
longitudinally, and that I conducted over two hundred interviews over a period of
four years. However, should the reading audience really be persuaded by me or any
other ethnographer simply saying so in a methodology or a footnote, especially
when a chapter that is eight thousand words long can only accommodate a frag-
mentary representative sample from years of observation and interviews? These
are disciplinary and conceptual biases that my work is directly aiming to write
against and thus, the interactions explored in this book are precisely a reaction to
default ethnographic textures (as they are commensurated in much contemporary
American anthropology) that attempt to perform ethnographic multiplicity which
ultimately reduces the depth of ethnographic insight.

B EYO N D SY N C H R O N IC G UA N X I

In western anthropologies of Chinese guanxi (M. Yang 1994; Bian 1994; Kipnis
1997; Bell 2000), the concept has often been understood through two of its more
obvious iterations. First, it might manifest in many Chinese social settings in a
variety of modalities, including the exchange of gifts like luxury goods or “red
envelopes” (that contain money), patronage and patrimony networks (particularly
in government institutions), as well as an array of functional and dysfunctional
techniques, tactics, and economies of corruption. This latter kind of guanxi has
been the central theme and focus of a number of MBA-style courses and guide-
books providing financial guru-like advice on “how to do networking in China.”
However, this MBA-style guanxi caters to a more western and instrumentally
inclined understanding of the short-term and transactional appearances of guanxi.
Critiquing such token essentialisms of guanxi—both their self-help appropriations
and Orientalisms within Euro-American corporate literature and education—a
number of anthropologists of (but mostly not from) China have pointed out how
such approaches run the risk of reducing guanxi to a purely instrumental social
practice, lacking specificity in its hyper-local Chinese context. Here, guanxi’s
more ethical or practice-based dimensions appear to be “rescued” by scholars
like Andrew Kipnis (1997). For Kipnis, in particular, guanxi has a mutually con-
stitutive affinity with another Chinese concept of intersubjectivity, one that is
inseparable from guanxi’s contextual and co-textual meanings: renqing. Building
 Ubuntu/Guanxi     133

on French sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu’s (1977) work, Kipnis suggests that renqing
emerges within a simultaneously ‘embodied’ and “compassionate” habitus that
guanxi sustains and is sustained by—intersubjectively—between persons mutually
committed to maintaining habitus in a mainly nonreflexive, “beneath conscious”
manner. Following Kipnis, guanxi exists in a dis-articulable equilibrium with
renqing. Following his former teacher, anthropologist Judith Farquhar (2002), it
can additionally be argued that guanxi might do so in ways that are simultaneously
particular to, and reiterated through, embodied practices that both constitute and
are constituted within an intersocial space-time: that of an anthropologically
delineable community, society, or polity (Munn 1986; Bourdieu 1977).
However, at the heart of this rescue attempt by western anthropologists of
China, there is a persistent tension between cultural determinism and emer-
gence of the everyday. In much of this west-to-Other anthropology, guanxi and
renqing—still read through an Orientalist gaze—are unproblematically maintained
through the work of the everyday. In much of this writing, which negates the dia-
lectical in favor of the linear-descriptive, it is as though guanxi were hermetically
sealed from the continuous remaking and redefining of its meanings through
interactions among those for whom guanxi matters. There is still a presupposi-
tion that the definer and reader of cultural terms and concepts is able to observe
a synchronic durability of guanxi, which somehow overshadows, and yet escapes
the notice of, those undertaking the labor of guanxi’s diachronic maintenance. A
way past this contradiction may be attendance to interactional and intercultural
contextualizations of guanxi that take seriously the reflexive, diachronic mediation
of such ideas not only among subjects who believe they own such concepts, but
also for their interlocutors who believe they have cultural analogues for the same
ideas. Such an approach, to be sure, would be more dialogical and dialectical by
its very nature. In this vein, it will be argued that culture concepts like guanxi have
a vibrant cultural and historical life in Sino-Other encounters that entail third-
worldist histories and genealogies.

F R OM G UA N X I T O U BU N T U

Diverging from the inalienable romance of cultural synchrony, what I argue and
demonstrate aligns with a few important (if somewhat marginalized) critical the-
oretical analyses that have attended to the ways China continues to make itself
through making its others—particularly in relation to the play of external and
internal forces that are necessarily ideological and political in the making of cul-
ture (F. Yang 2015; Rofel 2007; P. Liu 2015; L. Liu 2004; Vukovich 2012). Impor-
tantly, such approaches do not provincialize the cultural but understand culture
as very much at stake in the vibrant making and contestation of social life under
the predatory as well as contradictory conditions of cultural alienation and appro-
priation that typify the experience of modernity in postcolonial and postsocialist
134    Chapter 5

settings. Guanxi is both a cultural and (self-)Orientalized culture term that has
had a vibrant life in pre- and postsocialist China, and has seen its fair share of
colonial translations and reductions. Guanxi’s reflexive referability—manifested
in a vast range of “guanxi-talk” across time, space, and languages—makes it both
a contested and ideal lens through which to explicate the tension between inter-
cultural awareness and cultural fetishism that haunts even the most mundane
interaction between mutually constituted others, particularly in the context of
Afro-Chinese cultural translations.
Guanxi, for many Chinese, thus imbricates a meta-awareness of intersubjectiv-
ity as social practice, which is made apparent through guanxi talk. Guanxi, in this
sense shares affinities with the trans–Southern African intelligibility of Ubuntu
as not only a similar moral and ethical contingency that animates intersubjective
relations, mediations, or supernatural efficacies; but once again is an idea that
is reflexively accessible through Ubuntu-talk. My emphasis in this chapter is
on Ubuntu-talk as a living, intersubjective object of cultural reference and as a
translational analog for guanxi in Afro-Chinese encounters. Here, I am not
engaging Ubuntu as analytical proposition in contemporary African and Africa-
engaged analytical philosophy, as demonstrated in the debate between Matolino and
Kwindingwi (2013), Metz (2014); and the subsequent commentary by Chimakonam
(2016). My response to this issue is that—regardless of the logical propositions
of the life, death, or afterlives of Ubuntu as analytical object—Ubuntu remains
rehearsed and discursively under continuous maintenance in the “language
games” of those for whom the existence of Ubuntu remains indispensable. Fol-
lowing Michael Silverstein’s (2004, 621–22) elaborate discussion of the discursive
maintenance of “cultural concepts,” it might be analytically expedient to grant
Ubuntu’s pragmatic and public materiality as a portable and transmissible dis-
course object, beyond its suffocating reduction to existential binarism.
In this more public and pragmatic realm, Ubuntu’s ethical and co-textual
dependency—that is, its reliance on reception as much as representation—has
been articulately captured by African language and literary scholar James Ogude:
“In the Nguni saying popularized by [Desmond] Tutu, ‘Umuntu ngumuntu
ngabantu’ (a person is only a person in relation to other persons), the idea is that
no individual can become a person without the role played by other individuals
and by society more wholly and generally. In other words, humans are made to be
interdependent with each other. Humans realize and fulfill their selfhood only in
interplay with others as a moral and metaphysical destiny” (Ogude 2019, 4).
It is important, however, that the moral and ethical contingencies of Ubuntu
might also include witchcraft. As with guanxi, Ubuntu is as much the condition
of possibility for mutually beneficial social relations, as it affords propensities for
mutual destruction. Such transcendental ethical propensities have been partially—
though not fully—explored in the innovative work of Adam Ashforth, where he
frames witchcraft’s contingent relationship with Ubuntu—witchcraft as a kind
 Ubuntu/Guanxi     135

of “dark matter” of Ubuntu (2005). In his excellent Madumo: A Man Bewitched

(2000), Ashforth demonstrates this principle at work in the life of his friend and
informant Madumo, who must counter the effects of witchcraft directed toward
him through his close kin ties, as those very ties are the source of the witchcraft
as well as the means for combating it. In Madumo’s bewitching, Ubuntu—as the
mutually constitutive force that engenders one’s personhood through others—is
the metaphysical infrastructure that permits both the efficacy of witchcraft and
commonality of personhood between subjects.
In this vein, anthropologists John and Jean Comaroff (2012, 102) have described
Ubuntu as “a common African humanity” that has profound consequences for
how we understand the nature of reflexive personhood maintenance as a feature
of Southern African social life across cultural communities. In popular culture,
Ubuntu is often explained in English through the phrase, “I exist because you
exist,” and by a number of commentators including notable public figures like
South Africa’s Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela. This double-edged public life
of Ubuntu permits insights into exploring the dark side of guanxi—namely, fubai
(“corruption”)—a relation that anthropologist Cheryl Schmitz’s recent exploration
of witchcraft “translation” in the context of Sino-Angolan encounters evocatively
suggests but does not quite articulate (2020). With the exception of this excellent
work, Chinese and western Sinologists have been somewhat loath to explore the
relationship between guanxi and its dialectically negating shadow: witchcraft.
By contrast, attention to the everyday governance of China reveals a fairly
explicit public awareness of guanxi’s corrupting or fubai affordances. In both rural
and urban settings in the PRC, this public awareness is manifested officially, not
only in the form of large-scale anti-corruption campaigns, but also at the marginal
scale of everyday policing where public messaging ubiquitously warns passers-
by of the inveigling influence of “dark forces” (heishili)—referring to criminal,
political, or religious fundamentalist underworlds. China observers attuned to the
discursive transformations of public anti-corruption advocacy in the PRC would
not fail to have noticed a recent historical sequence of anti-corruption political
campaigns: starting from the “fighting the tiger” (dalaohu) campaign in 2013—
metaphorically meaning to persecute corrupted government leaders—and then
followed by the “squashing the flies altogether” (dahu paiying) campaign, referring
to the purging of mid-level corrupt officials, one sees a steady propaganda build-
up to eliminating “the dark and evil forces” (hei e shili) that began around 2018,
targeting kinship-based organized crime. In this discursive shift it would be diffi-
cult to miss the escalating degree of insidiousness of these campaigns—from tigers
to flies to dark and evil forces—a shift that mirrors the shrinking distance between
public criminality and the intimate realm of the “common person” (putong ren).
It would be both anachronistic and overly simplistic to view Chinese
corruption’s witchcraft-like manifestation in relation to guanxi as a byprod-
uct of the spectral machinations of neoliberalism operating in the shadows of
136    Chapter 5

Sino-governmentality—particularly given that there is nothing spectral, cabalis-

tic, or “hidden in the shadows” about the PRC’s relationship to capital. Rather,
outside of western Sinology, there is a much older genealogy of thought exploring
the dualistic—both loving and corrupting—dimensions of guanxi. This genealogy
is associated with (arguably) China’s most famous anthropologist, Fei Xiaotong.
Contrasting the intersubjective ethical pluralism of Chinese social relations with
western social organizational principles based on monotheistic moral centrism,
Fei Xiaotong famously outlined what he calls societies with a “differential mode of
association.” By way of Mencius, he analyzes the interactional basis of intersubjec-
tive ethics, while also demonstrating his own pragmatics of translation in analyz-
ing cultural concepts like guanxi:
Mencius replied, “A benevolent man neither harbors anger nor nurses resentment
against a brother. All he does is to love him. Because he loves him, he wishes him to
have rank. Because he loves him, he wishes him to be rich. [For the emperor to love his
brother] was to enrich [his kin] and let him have rank. If as emperor he had allowed
his brother to remain a common man, could that be described as loving him?”
A society with a differential mode of association is composed of webs woven out
of countless personal relationships. To each knot in these webs is attached a spe-
cific ethical principle. For this reason, the traditional moral system was incapable of
producing a comprehensive moral concept. Therefore, all the standards of value in
this system were incapable of transcending the differential personal relationships of
the Chinese social structure. The degree to which Chinese ethics and laws expand
and contract depend on a particular context and how one fits into that context.
(Fei [1947] 1992, 78)

For Mencius and Fei Xiaotong, interaction and ethics are fundamentally inter-
twined—there are no ethics without interactions to recruit them, and no inter-
actions without ethical maintenance. Here, Fei Xiaotong also demonstrates the
translational implications of web-like contingencies of intersubjective relations
decades before Geertz. Elaborating on the ethical capaciousness of guanxi,
he continues:
I have heard quite a few friends denounce corruption, but when their own fathers
stole from the public, they not only did not denounce them but even covered up
the theft. Moreover, some went so far as to ask their fathers for some of the money
made off the graft, even while denouncing corruption in others. When they them-
selves become corrupt, they can still find comfort in their “capabilities.” In a society
characterized by a differential mode of association, this kind of thinking is not con-
tradictory. In such a society, general standards have no utility. The first thing to do
is to understand the specific context: Who is the important figure, and what kind of
relationship is appropriate with that figure? (78)

As with Ubuntu, persons are maintained through their mutual contingencies—

both through their ethical recruitment and through their seemingly contradic-
tory yet ultimately dialectical ethical propensities (Lukács 2010). There is no
 Ubuntu/Guanxi     137

ethics of guanxi without its contingent propensities for corruption, just as there
is no Ubuntu without its propensity for witchcraft. Conversely, a consideration of
Fei Xiaotong and China’s contemporary public anti-corruption discourses should
prompt us to ask why such similar social insights and intersubjective contingen-
cies have (with few exceptions) not been taken seriously in the context of Southern
African governance. Particularly in the context of South African corruption dis-
course, consideration of Fei Xiaotong’s ethical pragmatics would quickly demon-
strate the limits of referring to government corruption as antithetical to Ubuntu as
a naïvely incorruptible intersubjective ethics.

P R AG M AT IC S O F T R A N SL AT IO N

Having highlighted a few grounds for contiguity in discussing guanxi-Ubuntu

translations, and having speculated about certain grounds for their comparison
or shared affinities, a question must be addressed: How do contemporary Chinese
and African actors pragmatically bring guanxi and Ubuntu and their intersubjec-
tive underpinnings into a shared field of recognition and reflection? Answering
this question necessarily entails identifying and “siting” translation as pragmatic
imperative between African and Chinese subjects (Niranjana 1992).
As Tejaswini Niranjana has suggested, the act of translation—considered capa-
ciously—is a political act. As such, political acts are by their nature pragmatic and
performative acts in that doing and defining become inextricable semiotic events.
Building on this approach to translation, what follows will draw on a long gene-
alogy of pragmatist thought, including the ideas of several anti-imperialist and
third-worldist thinkers, from Du Bois (1903) to Mills and Gerth (1953). At the
same time, I must qualify that I understand pragmatist thought as something that
is not merely reducible to William James, Charles Peirce, and the Johns (Dewey
and Austin), but rather part of a shared humanistic heritage of thought—one
in which ideas are understood as constituted through, as well as constitutive of,
reflexive processes of mediation. An example of this heritage is demonstrated in
the pragmatic sensibility through which Fei Xiaotong interprets the ethical and
pragmatic imbrications as well as genealogies of Chinese (and indeed other)
intersubjective modalities of social organization—ideas that have been around at
least since the early versions of the Dao De Jing, The Analects, and The Mencius.
These genealogies have further been transformed, maintained, and syncretized via
Neo-Confucians and a broad range of East Asian literary and historical scholars
down to the present.
At the same time, a pragmatics of translation opposes the understanding that
culture is the exclusive analytical object of anthropologists who are uniquely
situated to identify, translate, and study it. Rather, it prompts us to embrace the
fact that cultural translation is an almost mundane reality in most societies that
must confront diverse human interactions as their simultaneously ethical and
138    Chapter 5

pragmatic foundations—culture does, life is lived, and translation is done, regardless

of “loss” or anyone’s semiotic nihilism. Actual intercultural, interlinguistic, and
intersubjective translations—those happening between persons reflexively
invested in receptional and representational labor—are pragmatic translations.
Their pragmatic effects and reflexive meta-semantics—that is, their definability
as translational events—constitute perhaps the closest thing to a “bounded” or
“defined” semiotic subject, object, process, or “event.” Understood in this vein,
a pragmatics of translation opposes the conventional semantic or metaphysical
concern with cultural translation as cause for existential dread and liberal horror
in much of the Anglocentric western academy. This position necessarily proposes
that we can in fact have pragmatic translatability and intersectional incommen-
surability at the same time. As the Americans might say: “We can walk and chew
gum at the same time.” The subsequent discussion provides a unique opportunity
to demonstrate an example of what this might look like.

F R OM U BU N T U T O G UA N X I

Drawing on a key series of interactions that emerged during my dissertation work

([Ke-]Schutte 2018, Ke-Schutte 2019), I will now discuss a situation where media-
tion between guanxi and Ubuntu becomes a key site for excavating a pragmatics
of translation. In a research period between 2012 and 2016 in Beijing’s Haidian
district, I frequently observed one informant, Patrice Moji, making statements
about his shared cosmopolitanism with various interlocutors: Chinese, African,
and white “internationals.”2 He was a senior master’s student who had been liv-
ing in Beijing for a few years. Patrice was one of my informants and regarded
himself as a cultural translator between Chinese and African students in Beijing.
From these interactions, I gathered that Patrice believed there to be a privileged
position of mobility that permitted one to be situated as a translator, that cos-
mopolitan aspiration was a condition of possibility for translation: “You cannot
be a translator unless you have gone from one place to another,” he once noted.
Elaborating on his claims of cosmopolitanism, he compared Beijing’s obvious
mass urbanism to the contrasting spaces of both his childhood background
in southern Zimbabwe as well as his experiences as an undergraduate student in
South Africa—the place where we first met a few years prior while Patrice was
an undergraduate.
On one occasion, I learned that Patrice’s teacher, Professor Li was holding a
banquet for a group of his students. Professor Li, who I also knew as an infor-
mant, was a Chinese language and literature professor at Da Hua University—a
pseudonym for one of the most elite educational institutions in Beijing. In addi-
tion to Patrice, Professor Li had reached out to me with an invitation. During the
elaborate dinner—which included Peking duck, double-cooked pork, fried string
beans, and a number of other delicacies (with rice only served on request)—Patrice
 Ubuntu/Guanxi     139

told a story about his grandfather’s travels to China and the Soviet Union as a
Zimbabwean diplomat. He explained that many in his clan had middle names
indicative of his grandfather and family’s political alignments: Marx, Mao, Lenin,
Fidel, and Trotsky abound on family birth records.
As I have indicated elsewhere, Patrice’s overly elaborate setup was very much
intentional and directed toward establishing a third-world socialist rapport with
Professor Li, given that he desperately needed Professor Li’s letter of recommenda-
tion to maintain his scholarship at Da Hua University (Ke-Schutte 2019). Before
and after the banquet, Patrice reflexively noted that he was building rapport as an
instrumentalization of guanxi—a conceptual vocabulary he acquired after arriv-
ing in China. Patrice’s labor was explicated during a climactic moment during the
banquet ritual, where participants are meant to toast the professor in brief, lau-
datory speeches—a common practice during relatively frequent teacher-graduate
student gatherings in the Chinese academy. Patrice raised a glass of liquor (baijiu)
and proclaimed: Disan shijie da tuanjie! (“To third-world solidarity!”) Acknowl-
edging Patrice, Professor Li responded in deliberate English, while obviously not-
ing my presence as the white anthropologist at the table, whose alignments were
uncertain. Looking at me, Professor Li seemed to make up his mind and stated
(by way of translation): “Third-world solidarity!” as though Patrice’s toast not only
required translation, but that I needed to be appraised of who it included (and
perhaps who it did not).
I learned from both parties later that Professor Li had in fact written the elicited
letter of recommendation. Whether engineered or coincidental, this was taken by
Patrice as evidence of both his prowess in managing social relations as well as the
ritual efficacy of historical invocation—that he had pragmatically deployed guanxi
through his own translation of it.
A few days following the banquet, I met with Professor Li to discuss what had
transpired. Since guanxi was a regular topic of conversation between us and hav-
ing benefitted on multiple occasions from Professor Li’s guanxi, I couldn’t resist
the opportunity to gauge his reflexive awareness of Patrice’s engineered hailing. The
position he held at his university was officially academic professor; however, due
to his social connections and skills in acquiring them, he was more known as a
highly talented broker between educational, political, and private sector interac-
tional spaces. In a Chinese bureaucratic setting, he would easily be understood as
the guanxi artist or manager of an institution—an unofficial, but indispensable
position in most Chinese organizations. As I have noted, beyond just being “some-
one who networks well,” a guanxi artist is someone who is particularly skilled at
recognizing, building, and maintaining guanxi relationships (Ke-Schutte 2019).
For Professor Li, the emphasis on an aptitude for recognition and reception as
imbricated translational processes—rather than on performance and produc-
tion of instrumentalized rapport—was an important nuance in distinguishing the
effective management of guanxi from competent networking.
140    Chapter 5

By the accounts of Professor Li’s own peers, he was such an excellent man-
ager of guanxi “that he was able to send his children to [an Ivy League] university
in America.”
Perhaps as part of this skill set, Professor Li also mastered a genre of self-
exoticism that I had seen him perform with predominantly white visiting scholars
and officials from US institutions with whom his institution had formed benefi-
cial ties. In these interactions with his US visitors, he had to manage two perfor-
mances. On the one hand, he had to advertise China’s emerging, cosmopolitan
educational status, while on the other, he needed to advertise himself as an expert
on socialist political or administrative protocol in China: a translator of otherwise
“inscrutable” signs to his American colleagues. This dual performance allowed
him to motivate his own indispensability. Beyond his obvious skill at manag-
ing guanxi, Professor Li was also uncharacteristically keen to engage in a genre
of guanxi talk, in which he was willing to reflexively discuss making guanxi in
detail and at length.
He noted that it wasn’t merely about giving people money or things, empha-
sizing that this was “the lowest guanxi.” Instead, he noted the centrality of con-
textual self-awareness: “who you are” and “what you have” and that, in turn, this
awareness should be extended to “who others are to you.” This contextually shift-
ing relationship between you-to-others, and others-to-you, underpins the central
question in the guanxi interaction: “Why would I spend my time on guanxi with
others?” Here, he emphasized that in the cultivation of guanxi relationships, we
needed to want to spend time on others. This degree of sincerity, however instru-
mental it may obviously be, is an essential part of making guanxi. “Take you, for
instance,” he noted to my slight alarm. “You have a good attitude, but as someone
from Africa, you are not as useful to me as an American graduate student or pro-
fessor. [However], you are easier to build a relationship with, and if there is mutual
benefit, that is a good thing for both of us. . . . You and I both have to understand
and meet our mutual obligations to each other .  .  . otherwise we sabotage one
another” (Ke-Schutte 2019, 328). The importance of sincerity is demonstrated in
Professor Li’s invocation of attitude. Both seem to matter in calculating whether to
commit to a guanxi relationship or not, since “attitude” would be a strong indica-
tor of an interlocutor’s willingness to reciprocate and maintain the relationship—
one that precariously might leave both interlocutors vulnerable to sabotage, or
possibly witchcraft.
Seeing an opportunity to shed light on his earlier interaction with Patrice, I
asked whether the two of them had a guanxi relationship. He responded emphati-
cally that they did not, adding: “I don’t mean to sound like a bad person, but he
can’t offer me anything since he is only a student” (Ke-Schutte 2019, 328). Given
that Professor Li wrote many recommendations for his student and also aligned
himself—at least performatively—with Patrice’s recruitment to third-world soli­
darity, a question emerges: Is conscious, or, perhaps more accurately, reflexive
 Ubuntu/Guanxi     141

knowledge about being in a guanxi relationship a necessary and sufficient condi-

tion to deny its emergence in an interaction?
This question certainly proved to be at stake in Patrice Moji’s interpretation of
the exchange at the banquet, as well as its aftermath. When I asked him about it,
Patrice provided a translation of his own. He understood guanxi to be a funda-
mentally translatable and, in fact, substitutable with another intersocial category
drawn from social settings that were mutually intelligible to us: Ubuntu. “Look, it
[guanxi] is the same as Ubuntu.” Patrice’s own translation attempts an iconizing
equivocation of Ubuntu as being “the-same-as” guanxi.
This iconizing modality of interactions, where the motivation of sameness is
at stake, has been evocatively captured in the work of anthropologist Summerson
Carr. Interpreting the pragmatist philosopher, Charles Sanders Peirce, she notes
the ways in which iconic signs “gain their meaning in a contiguous relation to
their object (as in the case of smoke and fire) and also from symbols, which have
an arbitrary (that is, conventional) relationship with that which they represent,”
that—following Peirce—“iconic signs are necessarily ‘motivated.’” In this sense
icons are “the product of the analogic practices of language users as they selec-
tively establish relationships of likeness . . . [gaining] their meaning not because
they naturally resemble some unmediated thing in the world but instead because a
community of speakers collectively designates that one kind of thing is like and
therefore can come to stand for another” (Carr 2011, 26).
Beyond drawing equivalences between words—since Carr’s work is focused on
interactional settings where interlocutors have an overlapping language commu-
nity—Patrice’s translation of Ubuntu into guanxi brings entire notions of intersub-
jective space-time in relation to one another. The resulting effect is not only the
augmentation of the social-semiotic range of guanxi, but also that of Ubuntu. Fur-
thermore, rather than essentializing both Ubuntu and guanxi, Patrice’s pragmatic
translation via iconization of these concepts should perhaps be understood as an
attempt to bridge very different theories of social relations that nonetheless allow
for intersubjective contingencies and their personhoods: a cultural translation as a
transnationally portable resource.
In my own attempt to provoke Patrice’s meta-talk of translation—perhaps
mirroring what Peter Mwepikeni (2018) has depicted as an abuse of the Ubuntu
concept to further neoliberal extraction in the guise of Rainbow Nationalism—
I responded to his transfiguration with a well-known quip among fellow South
and Southern African students: “I thought Ubuntu was dead?” (Ke-Schutte
2019, 329). For many post-apartheid and postcolonial subjects, this more
cynical take on Ubuntu is often suggestive of alienations or anomic disillu-
sionments of various forms (Durkheim [1893] 2013). From the ties of kinship
and basic human compassion to a corrosion of cultural forms of belonging and
emplacement typified by increasing and destructive commitments to self-
interest. These conditions are furthermore understood as eradicating the
142    Chapter 5

underlying ethical space-time of Ubuntu through which one might be or

become a person through other persons (Makgoba 1999, 153). Responding to
my pessimism, Patrice noted: “maybe Ubuntu is dead for us, but guanxi is alive
for them” (Ke-Schutte 2019, 329). Pragmatically, Professor Li’s letter-writing
constituted sufficient evidence—for Patrice—that a translatability between
guanxi and Ubuntu did exist.
Importantly, neither guanxi nor Ubuntu are terms that can fully represent an
inalienable cultural romance for Professor Li and Patrice. On one occasion after
a failed meeting with an associate, Professor Li lamented: “You know, guanxi has
really changed. When I was young, giving a person a ride in a truck or feeding
them some dumplings was enough [to secure loyalty for life]. Now [this is] not the
case. . . . You know, under Mao, guanxi was a lot more real . . . look, I’m not saying
[the Cultural Revolution] was a good time, but guanxi meant more because it was
all [we] had” (Ke-Schutte 2019, 330).

C O N C LU SIO N : F R OM A SE M A N T IC S
T O A P R AG M AT IC S O F T R A N SL AT IO N

The preceding interactions with and between Professor Li and Patrice Moji dem-
onstrate a pragmatics of translation—one drawn from an actual micro-interaction
(as opposed to those announced, yet seldom demonstrated, by a number of
American Foucaultian devotees). This approach contrasts with much current
China-Africa related scholarship, particularly research situated in China, which
has concerned itself mainly with macro-scale phenomena often providing com-
pelling insights concerning political and economic dimensions of Sino-African
interactions (Bodomo 2012; King 2013; Chang et al. 2013; Brautigam 2009; Li et al.
2012; Snow 1989). These studies rigorously attempt to delineate and summarize
the various strategic interests of China, African nation states, and a conspicuously
silent western audience, often marshaling vast swathes of data to depict very large
social formations on a continental scale. As Kenneth King (2013) has noted, how-
ever, our picture of the actual people involved in this interaction remains incom-
plete. This is troubling since, at least from my preliminary research, it appears that
what constitutes the capacities for intersubjective personhood is very much at issue
in measuring the success or value of an educational development initiative the scale
of which is unprecedented on the African continent. “Who Africans are,” and “who
Africans are capable of being”—to themselves, their sponsors, their communities,
as well as other aspirational or elite audiences—depends largely on acquiring and
performing capacities to speak, network, and move without cultural constraints in
a Chinese world. It is the recruitment of translation in the service of such goals
that is at issue in actual face-to-face interactions between Africans and Chinese
as non-western interlocutors that must cultivate their own trans-languages
(Hanks 2010). But, how does a pragmatics of translation—in the still decolonizing
 Ubuntu/Guanxi     143

South—unsettle the post-translational lament of the Northern academic Anglo-

sphere? By way of extended conclusion, I hope to meditate on how a pragmatics of
translation might productively engage a number of “settled” assumptions around
what Gayatri Spivak once termed “the politics of translation” (1993).
Translation, in the explicitly linguistic sense, has been a central concern for
literary theory (Spivak 1993; Sakai 1997) in ways that it has not been for anthro-
pologists, who in the past have borrowed or recruited terms like mana or hau as
disciplinary analytics (Durkheim [1912] 1995; Mauss [1925] 1967), and yet more
recently have come to disavow or lament the nihilistic impossibility of translation
(Asad 1986). There have been notable critical exceptions, in linguistic anthropol-
ogy, to both this polemical legacy of translational “borrowing” as well as post-
translational “nihilism” (cf. Michael Silverstein 2017, 2004). In their work, Michael
Silverstein (2003a) and Greg Urban (1996) have elaborated some of the imbricated
problems with both textual “translation” and its “impossibility,” demonstrating the
limits of actualizing either in the strictly literary sense. The understanding here is
perhaps that translation—insofar as it is understood to be a practice of “commen-
surating meaning” between languages—has analytical limitations when applied
to a spoken language and its inextricable context of signification. This is because
language, when understood to be inseparable from the life world of its community
of users, is always a mutually constituting process rather than an object. Thus, it
is more akin to a process, dialogically and semiotically unfolding in the moment
to moment of real-time speech (Silverstein 2003a, 1976; Irvine and Gal 2000;
Keane 1997, 2007; Agha 2007b; Urban 1996; Bakhtin 1981; Austin 1975). Thus the
target and matrix languages in the context of a translation might be seen to be
constantly under construction, rendering translation as a stabilization of mean-
ing a somewhat remote goal. Yet outside of the Andersonian language ideologies
of the “west,” this precariously maintained state of translation and translatability
has never been about the stabilization of meaning, but rather the commitment to
translational maintenance—both entextualized or interactional. For those com-
mitted to the endeavor of translation—like African students and their Chinese
teachers in Beijing—the achievement of a translation, however imperfect or fleet-
ing, exists as an unquestionable horizon of possibility, even if a durable perma-
nence or stabilization never emerges.
Of course, in its more metaphorical uses, translation has been a classical
concern for scholars of culture more or less up until the Writing Culture “crisis”
(Clifford and Marcus1986). Given the obvious, if somewhat problematized, resi­
lience of this analytic (Spivak 1993; Derrida 1976; Sakai 1997; Chakrabarty 2000;
M. Silverstein 2003a; Urban 1996) and its contestations (Asad 1986; Clifford and
Marcus 1986; Abu-Lughod 1991) particularly in the domain of cultural translation,
a key question emerges: How is it that a concept so closely associated with the
formal uses of language seems to have such a broad purchase for an immensely
divergent group of disciplinary concerns?
144    Chapter 5

This question, however, presupposes language as a stable category to begin

with—as though we know where language or multilingualism begins and ends.
Rather, we should ask how purely linguistically a concept like translation glosses
once the analyst unsettles the very category we call language to begin with.
However, in the monolingual seminar rooms of Global North, such extensions of
translation as metaphor don’t even seem worthy of consideration in the work
of scholars like Bruno Latour (1996), Adrian Mackenzie (2002), and Stefan Helmreich
(2007). As indicated in the previous chapter, translation, in its posthuman framings—
and particularly in the case of Latour—bypasses its linguistic and semantic asso-
ciations in favor of generating the emergent nature of ontological legibility as
both the object and outcome of translational or transductional processes that are
left bracketed in their analyses. Here, the Southern scholar is compelled to ask:
How does Latourian translation understand the relationship between emerg-
ing formations of subjectivity that are not in engagement with the translation or
translation-defining Global North? In my case, the translational labor of Afro-
Chinese interactants on Beijing’s university scene would easily disappear in the
network of social relations and cultural mediations enveloping subject formation
in the definitions of non-representational or post-representational translation.
Additionally, how would we do so without considering the fact that these subjects
both speak and reflect on translation as reflexive process? Here, the preceding dis-
cussion provided a unique opportunity to engage these questions by way of dem-
onstrating how cultural translation cannot be disarticulated from the culturally
situated social relations practices, institutions, and infrastructures that translating
subjects both performatively constitute and depend on.
However, such primitivist and Orientalist circulations differ drastically from
the attempt at cultural translation unfolding between Professor Li and Patrice,
and indeed within a great many other Afro-Chinese encounters unfolding at
present. Rather, we can understand their respective recourse to guanxi and an
Ubuntu translation of guanxi as standing in for a humanistic attempt to disrupt
often alienating, machine-like, automatic, and bureaucratic social institutions that
surround most other aspects of their interaction: the global inequalities and inevi-
table racisms that haunt Patrice’s educational endeavor, and Professor Li’s mostly
under-appreciated and “hidden” affective labor in managing it. In the face of their
respective but fundamentally unequal alienations of labor and personhood, both
guanxi and Ubuntu can be seen as a refuge—a cultural space-time of reintegration
representing transcendent cultural justifications for enduring forms of solidarity.
Cultural translation, as a condition of possibility for generating such a cultural
space-time, might only then be understood as a way of resisting a contemporary
corruption of expectations of mutual obligation—perhaps suggestive of the spec-
tral residue of “organic divisions of labor” within “mechanical divisions of labor”
(Durkheim [1893] 2013; Benjamin 2007c). In this way, we might understand guanxi
and Ubuntu as coming to ground third-world solidarity as the romantic promise
 Ubuntu/Guanxi     145

of a social bondage that mutually excludes the immediate, utilitarian purchase of

the first world either by China or Africa. However, such speculative possibilities
were less easy to discern, since both interactants were careful to hedge—despite
frequent recourse to utopic imaginaries of culture and history—that these terms
are not immune to historical forces and reappropriation, and certainly could not
unfold in an ideological vacuum. Regardless of apparent obstacles, their attempts
at cultural translation persist.
For subjects like Professor Li and Patrice, misrepresentations, misunder-
standings, and mistranslations will and certainly do abound, but the attempt at
translation—despite the violence of its failures—remains unmitigated between
non-western others. These must be accounted for rather than denied, preferably
by researchers from the Global South, and building analytical approaches to cul-
tural translation that are drawn from contexts that disrupt, complicate, diversify,
and provincialize encounters between the west and its Others. From this stand-
point, cultivating a pragmatics of translation will be an important empirical start-
ing point to decolonizing the study non-western, non-Anglocentric interactions
and the framing of their polyphonous scales of cultural encounter.
 6

Liberal-Racisms and Invisible Orders

In the preceding chapters, I have offered an account of the ways in which whiteness,
English, and cosmopolitan mobility together form an intersubjective space-time
of mediation, an Angloscene, that can be understood as simultaneously reconsti-
tuted through, and recruited to, African and Chinese encounters in contemporary
Beijing. Throughout, I framed this simultaneous recruiting and reconstituting
process as a form of translation—conceptualized more in a dialectical and inter-
actionist sense. In doing so, I drew attention to the historical material condition of
decolonization that animates an emergent but far from depoliticized non-western
encounter. I further suggested that this approach has important implications for
the study of interactions—in both anthropology as well as a variety of disciplines
concerned with contact, encounter, and the stratification of social diversity along
multiple intersectional vectors.
In reconsidering postcolonial translation in this critical semiotic sense, I have
suggested that there are three dimensions to understanding translation or media-
tion as simultaneously a pragmatic and dialectical concern. I suggested that there
is, first, a chronotopic dimension to interactions, in the sense that they require the
recruitment and construction of space-time(s) through which units of commen-
suration and social value—like English, whiteness, or unmarked cosmopolitan
mobility—become co(n)textualized. Second, I suggested that such interactions—
including but not limited to dialogical speech acts—are intersectionally emplaced
(Crenshaw 1991), complicating the possibilities of “taking any line” (Goffman 1959)
of interaction by any subject at any time. This is due to the ways in which relation-
ships between race, gender, and sexuality have a propensity to stratify subjects in
relation to an emergent ideological gravity of whiteness—even if their presumed
national and intersocial chronotopes were very different. Finally, I showed how
interactions among subjects—who are variously stratified by aspirationally cos-
mopolitan horizons and the personhoods these imbricate—have an (an)aesthetic
propensity. Here, I reflected that the affective and mimetic capacities of non-white
146
 Liberal-Racisms and Invisible Orders     147

sensoriums—and their techno-linguistic dependencies—become recruited to sus-

taining a persistent stratification through whiteness—whether by embracing a lib-
eral nonracial cosmopolitanism, or a reconstituted “third world” imaginaire—as a
means to escape the gravity of white space-time.
The universities and wider settings within which I was able to work during the
course of my fieldwork certainly amplified the tensions imbricated by the Anglo-
scene—tensions that both promised young Africans and their Chinese inter-
locutors access to unmarked, cosmopolitan social mobility while simultaneously
deferring it. The fact that the means for making and acquiring the ideal future
subject of third-world cosmopolitanism was a promise that became continuously
elided prompted my observation of (an)aesthesia as a way to mitigate the disjunc-
tive ways in which a cosmopolitan future was constantly being brought closer
while being kept at bay. In this way, the interactional space-time of whiteness
was very much distilled by the global university and transnational educational
matrix within which African and Chinese students found themselves: transform-
ing on- and off-campus interactions as a theater for aspiration and privilege that
must (still) be imported from an “enlightened” (perhaps en-whitened) elsewhere.
For many educational migrants, adolescence remains endlessly augmented, and
adulthood deferred, just to cope with the “youthful” experiences of “exclusion
and in-betweenness” that twenty-first-century conditions of mobility and person-
hood impose on non-western subjects—a concern that has emerged in the work
of anthropologist, Constantine Nakassis (2016a).
In his work, Nakassis suggests that the southern Indian university campus’s
interactional space-time suspends the ideological gravity of stratification acting on
his “youthful” Tamil-speaking subjects, “allowing for a moment to pause and play
on those hierarchies by figuratively reanimating and deforming them” (228). On
campuses in Beijing, such moments of suspension are certainly present, but rather
than pointing to a kind of radical, poststructural agency within conditions of neo-
liberal compromise, the transformation of experiences of liminality and hierarchy
through such moments of suspension have an equal propensity to also reinforce
liminality and hierarchy. Transformation in the interactional here-and-now can
go in more than one direction. (An)aesthetically, it can open up “spaces for youth
sociality, aesthetics, value, and subjectivity” as much as it can compromise such an
“opening-up” (228). Thus, it is precisely through commitments to the possibilities
of opened-up conditions of youth sociality, aesthetics, value, and subjectivity that
we note their dialectical, cruelly optimistic other: how the powerful conditions
for historically material and semiotic alienations of personhood become not only
equally possible, but also intersectionally inevitable.
I have emphasized throughout that the mediation of intersubjective and
mass-mediated icons of personhood—in dialectical interactions—are central to
sustaining a pragmatics of postcolonial translation: “the unmarked cosmopoli-
tan,” “the Purple Cow,” “Sheryl Sandberg,” “Oprah Winfrey,” and “Trevor Noah.”
148    Chapter 6

These archetypes come into intersubjective existence through interactions, and

yet are also experienced as both prior to, and impinging upon, African and Chi-
nese encounters. It is this interplay between present and past, interior and exte-
rior, and emergent and transcendent that I have tried to emphasize by framing
these encounters as dialectical interactions. Inhabiting this dialectical tension, my
informants both attempted to overturn complex stratifications they found them-
selves in, as well as to recruit them in their favor—thus ultimately compromising
themselves through transforming and reinforcing the very conditions of stratifi-
cation they were attempting to escape. Thus, the recruitment of such archetypes
and mass-mediated icons of personhood certainly allowed for a partial suspension
from precarious intersubjective tensions. However, the emancipatory propensities
of this recruitment and suspension—once committed to on the part of the cosmo-
politan aspirant—can also be interpreted as eliding the inaccessibility of cosmo-
politan realities through the fetishization of cosmopolitan potentials.

T R A N SL AT IO N ’ S M O B I L E E N TA N G L E M E N T S

The attempt to convert the precarities of mobility into aspirational possibilities

entails the recruitment of a universal, perhaps cosmopolitan, register to enact a
postcolonial translation—in this case not only English, but also its elided racio-
linguistic entailments. Suggesting a similar set of dynamics, Homi Bhabha writes
that “culture as a strategy of survival is both transnational and translational. [T]he
transnational dimension of cultural transformation”—which I interpret as a salient,
although not totalizing dimension of mobility—“turns the specifying or localizing
process of cultural translation into a complex process of signification” (1995, 48).
For him and many others (Gilroy 1993; Spivak 1993; Nuttall and Mbembe 2008;
Butler 1995), this transnational condition disrupts the capacity to reference “the
natural(ized), unifying discourse of ‘nation,’ ‘peoples,’ ‘folk’ tradition” (Bhabha
1995, 49). In mobility, there is a transformation in concrete and signifying condi-
tions that disrupt the signs of identity or personhood in their national or local
expressions—a theme that becomes salient in transnational encounters. This dis-
ruption, for Bhabha, problematizes identity formation by short-circuiting the read-
ing of such signs by changing the national or local context from which they derive
their legibility. Since the meanings of signs are contingent on the spatial, tem-
poral, and material totality of their context of utterance—or simply their indexi-
cal factors (M. Silverstein 1976)—conditions of mobility necessarily impinge on
signs of personhood. To be sure, such disruptions open gaps in taken-for-granted
worlds that are unsettled by transnational interactions and their emergent com-
munities of reception and reproduction—where African educational migrants in
Beijing and cosmopolitan Chinese graduate students in America all encounter
and appropriate various cultural signs, producing perhaps productive ambiguities,
curiosities, and forms of mimesis. Or is the Sino-African encounter—an object
 Liberal-Racisms and Invisible Orders     149

of analysis to the western media and academic Anglosphere—merely a poten-

tial staging ground for Eurocentric multicultural fantasies, or when they fail,
racist dystopias?
This book did not seek to argue against novelty or contestation. Rather, it
attempted to capture the ideological conditions that both obstruct and perpetu-
ate this fantasy of equal opportunity multiculturalism as an outlook undergirding
western intellectual expectations of Chinese and African contemporary encoun-
ters. If Sino-African encounters could be genuinely equitable, egalitarian mobility
would be a condition of possibility for such encounters. But what kind of mobility
is in question? Is mobility an experience, or is it a physical state, objectively deline-
able, irrespective of the one experiencing it? In this experience of mobility, where
and how does this experience become legible? In posing such questions, temporal-
ity and sequence become key considerations. In the movement or reproduction of
language, race, and cosmopolitanism, what exactly does this mobility entail?
Homi Bhabha clearly situates the state of mobility as being in translation, while
on the other side of the same epistemic coin, Jacques Derrida and Gayatri Spi-
vak have suggested that it is the state of translation that is a mobile one. There is
something happening at the confluence of mobility and translation that appears to
generate the solipsism at issue for these thinkers. It is also out of this solipsism (or
perhaps dialectic)—of history, meaning, and material conditions—that translation
as the primary analytic of postcolonial theory has emerged—and while I do not
explicitly enter into a semantic exegesis, it is translation in its postcolonial mode
that has haunted my engagement throughout this project.
This necessitates a polemic of sorts, in which I have drawn on, and recontextu-
alized a very particular genealogy of postcolonial theory—in some ways at odds
with what I have experienced as its canonical, mostly American, reduction in the
US university classroom. In fetishizing the moment of translation and its discur-
sive consequences, Bhabha, Spivak, and Derrida—in a poststructural or decon-
structionist mode of postcolonial inquiry—have largely been recruited into the
proposition of intellectual equal opportunism within privileged American higher
educational settings. I mean no disrespect to these ancestors of postcolonial the-
ory since it is on the foundations of their work that my own critique is constructed.
Instead, I am criticizing from a position of frustration at the way in which their
work has both been co-opted, and (perhaps unintentionally) lends itself to a still
pervasive, extractive logic that underpins many intellectual interventions that
sustain social science and humanistic inquiries that simultaneously aim to be
both objective and relativist without questioning the condition of possibility for
this very proposition. While colonization certainly transforms the colonizer too,
I feel that a discourse from nowhere because it is everywhere approach to postco-
lonial translation makes power an ultimately arbitrary proposition, where those
who don’t have it critique it and ultimately reconstitute its persistent salience. It
was Erving Goffman—a contemporary of Michel Foucault—who also concluded
150    Chapter 6

that hierarchies of power or “interactional orders” ultimately required interac-

tional labor to sustain them. However, Goffman also pointed out that subjects
were not equal in their capacity to participate in the maintenance or contestation
of hierarchy—there was an ordering of the interaction that emerged as though
imposed on it, that made the same marginal subjects perpetually bear the burden
of marginality in any interaction, and that this occurred regardless of the unfi-
nalizability of personhood that exists as a default proposition in liberal societies.
Even in the more general political writings of Frantz Fanon, Achille Mbembe, and
Mao Zedong—working at fundamentally different scales, and out of contrasting
settings—a micro-interactional dynamics of stratification is at play in the politics
of revolution and decolonization. In his lectures on surveillance at the University of
Tunis, Fanon noted the raciolinguistic contingencies of reception (as production)
that make the encounters of the colonized with the ideological space-time of the
colonizer a far from open-ended one (Browne 2015). In this regard, he preceded
both Said ([1977] 2003) and Foucault (2007, 1995, 1982) in noting how subject for-
mation unfolds through “ascending relations of power,” as well as how this forma-
tion is contingent upon mediated modes of reception, like surveillance.
All of these thinkers point to the dialectical emergence of an ideological gravity
where despite the constant propositions of decolonization, modernity, sovereignty,
and equal opportunism, marginal subjects of history are stratified so as to bear the
seemingly perpetual burdens of blackness, refugee-ness, or Chineseness as liabili-
ties. Regardless of the volatility of semiotic forms—due to the open-ended play of
difference and repetition, or the arbitrariness of signs of alterity—there appears
to remain a durability in the ideological gravity of stratification: a durability that
is pragmatic rather than semantic. Thus, there is no “failure” or “impossibility” of
translation as a pragmatic proposition, and indeed no interaction without some
attempt at translation. Even if translation fails every time, the interlocutor remains
committed to it, thus sustaining translation as a durable social process even if it
remains incomplete, hierarchical, and ultimately compromised—a point demon-
strated explicitly in chapter 5.
Communicating this has been difficult in my time in the United States—as a
graduate student and, later, as a postdoctoral student and faculty member. I can
cite my own experiences of teaching postcolonial theory and attempting to make
use of it in my research within the evaluatory regime of the American academy.
I was constantly informed not only of how “out-of-date” this genealogy was, but
also of its lack of theoretical rigor and ethnographic nuance. “More complex”
readings of my own postcolonial interlocutors were constantly encouraged, where
colonialism suddenly became “not the real concern” of Spivak, who could now
“easily be updated with Povinelli (2001), Brown (2005), and Butler (1997).” Fanon
was suddenly “not really advocating violence” as a challenge to white liberalism
in the shadow of decolonization, and those who would dare to read Fanon in the
“wrong way” were suddenly not “exegetic” enough—an accusation recently directed
 Liberal-Racisms and Invisible Orders     151

toward South African students voicing Fanon to protest white monopoly capi-
tal. Latour, Agamben, Foucault, and Writing Culture became almost dogmatically
prescribed (or perhaps proscribed) as a theoretical panacea to the “hysterical
radicalism” that would dare to challenge the “unmarked” “objectivity” of liberal
intellectualism. Masquerading as open-ended and open-minded deconstruction,
so many of these accusations against radical hysteria, some of them even of racism,
continue to conceal the ideological gravity within which updated translations of
postcolonialism unfold.
This both implicit and explicit concealment evidences the existence of vast
institutions and regimes of arbitration, not to mention economic systems that are
sustained by commitments to translatability and commensuration (Sassen 2014).
For example, journalistic and academic institutions of the Anglosphere that are
committed to a situated objectivity—and yet speak for all others—are still squarely
situated within what Adorno once called the culture industry, yet on a fundamen-
tally more global scale masquerading as intellectual excellence. There are clearly
a set of institutional practices that authenticate both legibility and value to Sino-
African interactions within a subjective, far from arbitrary, regime of arbitration.
There is a lot at stake in translating the cultural and economic value of a China-
Africa interaction, and there are certainly those who are the authenticators of such
translations. Meta-translators, like anthropologists, not only exercise authority
over a translation, but also mastery of the original, the ur-text, and thus authorize
an appropriate relationship to history. It is precisely for this reason that anthro-
pologists’ situatedness in relation to both their field of study and research subjects
should not be elided. “Who are the anthropologists in the field?” is a question
many anthropologists these days engage with great relish, eager to perform the
genre of narcissistic navel-gazing even while reflexively deriding it. Few, however,
need to ask: who are they to their field?
As an Afrikaner anthropologist, I felt more at home in my field site of Beijing
than I ever did as a graduate student in the United States. I found refuge among
my informants in China and elsewhere, learning a language that I still struggle to
speak. However, I will maintain that proclaiming “friendships” between myself
and my informants within the chronotope of an ethnography is wholly inap-
propriate, even though such claims have increasingly become commonplace in
the English anthropological literature. This representational politics becomes all the
more apparent as increasing numbers of non-American and non-white anthro-
pologists must internalize an appropriate affective disposition to their research
subjects so as to perform an acceptable “Anthroman” (Jackson 2005). The per-
formance of an appropriate sentiment must be mastered to put an imagined (and
thus omnipresent) Euro-American arbiter at ease. We must make our friendships
with our informants accessible to our evaluators by mastering a representation of
our subjects that we imagine will affectively trigger our teachers’ evaluations of us.
In my fieldwork, there were and continue to be genuine friendships—meaningful
152    Chapter 6

ones—but I have tried, as far as possible, not to make these available to the parasit-
ically voyeuristic imagination of the default monolingual, white, English-speaking
public of American anthropology’s reading Anglosphere. Proclaiming friendship
in the rhetorical service of assuring the reader that one had “genuine rapport with
the natives” is disingenuous at best, but it also dismisses possibilities of insight that
can only be gained through other kinds of “misanthropic,” or (mis)anthropological,
social intensities—violence for instance.
During my fieldwork, one personal experience demonstrated the productive
insights to be gained from violent, but nonetheless socially intensive, interactions.
As a member of a Southern African student soccer team—Azania United—which
participated in the competitive inter-Africa league in Beijing, I was at one point
deliberately injured by an opposition player who was humiliated by his teammates
and Azania United’s manager for giving the ball away to “the only white guy on
the field.” Incensed by this, the freshman from Nong Da (Agricultural University)
broke my leg and caused an ACL tear with an off-the-ball revenge foul. As I was
recovering from my injuries, my teammates and informants—both Chinese and
African—often jokingly told me that I could “walk them off.” Toward the end of
my fieldwork, I saw the student who had injured me in a university canteen sev-
eral months later, he looked at me limping, and also jokingly said: “When are you
going to come and try to steal the ball from me again?” We had rapport, but were
not friends; nor would we ever be “equals” in the relativistic sense. In this regard,
violent recognitions can render very different kinds of anthropological insights
between increasingly atypical not-quite-native informants and not-quite-native
ethnographers, making persistent American ethnographic platitudes, like “my
friends, the informants,” seem somewhat out of touch with reality and worthy of
suspicion by the other social sciences.
In retrospect, “violent recognition” as a constant experience in and beyond
the field was likely a strong motivator for my depiction of Fanon’s “violence of
decolonization” as a mode of translation, where “decolonization .  .  . sets out to
change the order of the world” and “cannot come as a result of magical practices,
nor of a natural shock, nor of a friendly understanding” (1963, 36). Here, I under-
stood decolonization not only as “an always as-yet-incomplete project,” but also,
one that is “translated” in the pragmatist sense I discussed before. By this empha-
sis on translation, I will further suggest that communicative incompleteness does
not mean that translation is either open-ended or arbitrary—for open-endedness
and arbitrariness are ultimately visible only from a truly privileged perspective.
As I will demonstrate, movement between colonization and decolonization is
very much contingent on an ideological context that does not allow for a seam-
less shift in relations and reappropriations of power, and here I will emphasize
that the same is true for disciplinary debates in anthropology and other social
sciences—particularly in the privileged domain of the American academic Anglo-
sphere where consensus and passive-aggressive gatekeeping constrain debates in
 Liberal-Racisms and Invisible Orders     153

their insistence on a nonconfrontational, analytical equal opportunism. This is an

experienced daily reality for any third-world or intersectionally marginalized sub-
ject participating in collegial interactions within America’s knowledge industry. If
our debates are to be relevant, and if we are genuinely committed to decolonizing
anthropology—which, I would argue, no amount of privileged relativism can ever
accomplish—we may want to consider Fanon’s imperative more seriously:
The Third World has no intention of organizing a vast hunger crusade against
Europe. What it does expect from those who have kept it in slavery for centuries
is to help rehabilitate man, ensure his triumph everywhere, once and for all. But it is
obvious we are not so naïve as to think this will be achieved with the cooperation and
goodwill of the European governments. This colossal task, which consists of reintro-
ducing man into the world, man in his totality, will be achieved with the crucial help
of the European masses who would do well to confess that they have often rallied
behind the position of our common masters on colonial issues. In order to do this,
the European masses must first of all decide to wake up, put on their thinking caps
and stop playing the irresponsible game of Sleeping Beauty. (1963, 63)

Given that the apex of white imperialism—following Said (2003)—has perhaps

shifted from Europe to the elite of America, where privilege is validated by its most
prestigious institutions of knowledge—like the University of Chicago and Harvard
University, for instance—the semiotic value of Europe and the European in Fanon’s
words must be understood as a “shifter” (M. Silverstein 1976). This shifter, how-
ever, forms an important component in enabling the maintenance of a more tran-
shistorical, transnational, yet implicit white gravity that reiterates the stratification
of its constantly thwarted others. In this regard, I understand that the American
academy as the driver of a global knowledge industry (followed by an increasing
number of transnational franchises) does not operate in an ideological vacuum. I
also acknowledge that many of its personnel believe themselves to be fighting the
good fight. Here, I hope to have demonstrated the degree to which this remains
a compromised belief, while an elite—mostly liberal—American intellectual
class remains oblivious to their complicity in stratifying subjectivity far beyond
their own imagined, utopian horizons. I argue that this complicit stratification
is enabled by many of my elite colleagues and teachers both in underestimating
and investing in arguments against an imagined boogeyman of “structure.” This is
an ultimately lazy intellectual commitment that bypasses the ideological impacts
of vast belief systems that are dependent on structure and structural sense. The
literary registers and publication industries promoting the most committed post-
structural and nonrepresentational work; the mass- and linguistically mediated
cosmopolitan horizons of personhood academia itself engenders; the aesthetic
and ethical forms that persuade us about the existence of a culturally diverse, but
far-from-disconnected Anthropocene—all of these ultimately depend on a signifi-
cant faith in structure. The dismissal and denigration of postcolonial critiques of
Anglo-centric mass media and English monolingualism as simplistic and somehow
154    Chapter 6

“less complex” are all significant manifestations of this structural blind spot in
western anthropology’s relativist yet still monolingual theater of operations.
Neither “complex” nor “novel,” this critique merely underlines the compromised
conditions within which so many American-trained anthropologists are attempt-
ing to rescue efficacious agency in the lives of informants who experience neither
efficaciousness nor agency. In the following concluding interactional analysis, I
hope to not only demonstrate some of the limits of rescuing agency and the situ-
ated theater of personhood that informs it. I hope to additionally reveal how the
very proposition of liberal subjecthood—emerging in the following interaction
through contestations around the term “freedom”—generates the otherwise invis-
ible ideological order within which interactional participants are stratified.

M U T UA L B E N E F I T S , I N V I SI B L E O R D E R S

As China’s contemporary engagement with Africa continues to engender a ten-

sion between “mutually beneficial” and hierarchical relations, a number of west-
ern journalists have begun to critique China as a modern-day colonizer, restaging
Africa as the eternally colonized. This staging recruits Africans as a popular and
recent addition to their list of China’s subalterns—equating China’s relationship
with ethnic minorities, who themselves are seeking various degrees of sovereignty,
with Africans’ historical and political history with Europeans. Given a topical
interest in these “colonial” Sino-African encounters, increasing numbers of west-
ern journalists have become a prominent presence in a number of ethnographic
settings in China and Africa. Through their hyper-legibility, they play a key role
in recontextualizing the interactional frameworks that imbricate both African and
Chinese actors and their ethnographic voyeurs. But, what does this recontextuali­
zation do?
This final, hopefully revealing, account of an interaction in Beijing was medi-
ated by a famous American journalist, who, through her own attempt at “equal”
participation in a Sino-African encounter, inadvertently generated the very ideo-
logical gravity that inflects Afro-Chinese “interactional orders” (Goffman 1983).
I have suggested in preceding chapters, and following Goffman, that interactional
orders can be understood as a dialectical, interactionally immanent, ideological
stratifications that appear as transcendent to the participants in that interaction.
I also theorized such interactions as mediated through linguistic enregisterment. In
the interaction that follows, the stratification that unfolds is significantly informed
by a set of historical and material conditions assumed to be absent in Sino-African
engagements—the absent presence of a recontextualized white space-time.
In 2015, near the end of a stint of fieldwork in Beijing, I attended a talk by a
former chief economist of the World Bank, Justin Lin. The talk was hosted at the
Beijing branch of an elite American university—one of several Ivy League outposts
in the Chinese capital. In attendance were numerous high-profile personnel from
 Liberal-Racisms and Invisible Orders     155

state-related financial institutions. Liu Xiaoming, a high-ranking economist who

was in charge of the Africa division of one of China’s top three foreign-develop-
ment banks, was among them. Attendees also included a number of journalists
like Anne West, a well-known white American writer who had been active for a
number of years as a feminist and ethnic minority activist in China. At the end of
Lin’s talk, there was a Q and A, with many of the questions coming from younger
Chinese men, such as: “How does one make the most of a western education as
a Chinese man?” Other questions, all of which were posed in English despite the
fact that more than 90 percent of the attendees were Chinese, focused on China’s
future role in a world where not only Chinese labor, but Chinese capital, became
central to more countries’ development strategies, and the global economy as a
whole. Justin Lin emphasized that China was positioned to see different kinds of
investment potential compared to past European American investments, “espe-
cially in places like Africa.”
At this, Lin Xiaoming somewhat overeagerly leaped out of his seat and moder-
ated his own question to Lin: “I am the chief economist for the Africa division of
China’s Da Qian Bank and we have been struggling with this question for a long
time. How is China going to develop Africa when we have seen many failures of
development in the past? There are so many obstacles, the most pressing being
epidemics, corruption, and civil war.” Justin Lin looked genuinely confused by the
question, perhaps due to Xiaoming’s self-introduction and the contradiction of
his question with China’s already considerable investments in Africa. Why would
an Africa investor for the Chinese government be so opposed to investment in
Africa? After a considered pause, Justin Lin responded: “I think your opinion is
exaggerated; surely, Africa is a big place with many different strengths in differ-
ent regions?” Anne West—whom I had met on an earlier occasion through my
partner—was sitting next to me at the talk, and commented in a whispered aside:
“Are you kidding me?” Feeling incensed by Xiaoming’s question, I had the same
phrase in mind at the time, but as I would come to learn later, our exasperation
stemmed from very different alignments and assumptions about the ideological
context within which Sino-African interactions were emplaced. At the end of the
talk, as attendees broke into groups with wine glasses in hand, Anne immediately
gravitated toward Liu Xiaoming and I followed.
“I really enjoyed your question,” Anne said to Xiaoming, who gleefully nodded
and said, “Thank you so much, Anne, I am a really big fan of your work.” Anne
then introduced me as “an expert on China-Africa relations from the University
of Chicago” and then immediately stepped back from the interaction, watching.
Xiaoming smiled, shook my hand, and told me the name of his Ivy League univer-
sity where he had studied for an MBA degree in finance. I then asked Xiaoming
how often he traveled to Africa for his work. Wasn’t it exhausting? He responded
that it wasn’t all that necessary in his position, but that he had once gone to
Tanzania for two weeks. He was proud of the fact that his organization was
156    Chapter 6

fortunate in that they were able to work with reliable forecasting data, making use
of both Chinese and American think tanks to get the information they need to
make “informed policy decisions.” As we spoke, and as Anne watched, I increas-
ingly began to feel as though I was being drawn into an American fraternity
chronotope of sorts, as his register shifted from professional to American college
colloquial. As he commented on the Chicago Bulls’ poor basketball perfor-
mances in recent years and whether I had been following their season, I began
to realize that Xiaoming was entering into this register because he thought that
I was an American. Confirming this, he then asked—probably noting my inabil-
ity to engage in basketball banter—“Where in the States are you from?” When I
answered, “I’m not from the States,” thus confirming his suspicions, and followed
up with “I’m from South Africa,” Xiaoming’s expression and register instantly
changed. The interaction stopped dead in its tracks as he said, “Oh” and looked at
Anne, as though waiting for further instructions. On cue, she quickly suggested
that we should “continue this fascinating conversation” over dinner the following
week. Xiaoming eagerly agreed and we exchanged WeChat accounts to arrange the
event, which did actually come about a week later.
Anne texted me and my partner a few days before the dinner with Xiaoming,
saying that she was bringing one of her ethnic minority informants to the meet-
ing. She then suggested that I “bring one of [my] African friends [to challenge]
his assumptions.” What Anne meant by Xiaoming’s assumptions was “patriarchal
Han Chinese ethnocentrism,” a theme she had often contextualized in her own
work with ethnic minorities in China, and particularly ethnic minority women, and
which—in interactions with (particularly male) Chinese government officials—
she rarely hesitated to call out. The presence of another—this time African—
subaltern would both serve as an opportunity to (perhaps intersectionally) extend
her argument beyond China, as well as provide a provocative ethnographic
encounter through which to demonstrate it. It is worth noting that, without Anne’s
mediation, a meeting with Xiaoming would have been an unachievable feat for
me, a South African anthropologist. Given my status, interactions with people like
Xiaoming are mostly out of the question. When the high-profile Chinese gov-
ernment official and the renowned American journalist discuss their subalterns—
ethnic minorities and Africans—it is anthropologists and “their colorful friends”
who become the parasites of the journalistic encounter.
In preparation for our meeting, I chose to invite my informant Rousseau
Asara—an ambitious finance student from Madagascar studying at one of Beijing’s
top universities. Through my fieldwork, I came to know Rousseau as both a confi-
dent conversational provocateur as well as someone who had obsessively acquired
knowledge of Chinese development banks’ investment strategies—the topic of his
honors thesis. Thus, of all my informants, he was the one most likely to benefit
professionally and academically from meeting Xiaoming. Anne and Xiaoming left
it to the rest of us to make the arrangements and my partner (fittingly) chose an
 Liberal-Racisms and Invisible Orders     157

ethnic minority restaurant in the Haidian district for the setting of the conversa-
tion. On the appointed day, Rousseau arrived early, wearing a pink polo shirt and a
gold-colored watch, which I had never seen him wear before—possibly to impress
Xiaoming. Soon after, Xiaoming arrived wearing a black suit and tie despite the
heavily polluted, scorching hot weather—to impress Anne. The rest of us—includ-
ing Anne, my partner, and Anne’s informant—were wearing less “high stakes,”
casual attire.
From the moment we took our seats inside the air-conditioned restaurant, it
was apparent that Xiaoming was uncomfortable, arising perhaps from a percep-
tion that he was obviously being set up as the overdressed Beijing government
official who had to encounter an array of exotic others in an ethnic minority set-
ting. By contrast, Anne was clearly enjoying herself, enthusiastically commenting
on the diversity of ethnic minority dishes in China, before asking Rousseau all
about his home country and praising his educational cosmopolitanism. Rousseau,
who seemed either oblivious to the tension at the table or determined to ignore
it, addressed Xiaoming and said that he admired his institution’s development
strategy in Africa. This broke the ice somewhat and allowed Xiaoming to empha-
size the party line—“mutual benefit should always be win-win, so China is also
grateful to Africa.” Here, Xiaoming emphasized the “r” in “grateful,” as well as
nasalizing the first “A” in “Africa” to suggest an American accent, thus empha-
sizing his education abroad, something he indexed later in the interaction when
telling Rousseau that he had “studied the same major, but in the US.” After Xiaom-
ing dropped the party line, Anne was quick to interject: “But can Africans move
as freely in China as Chinese can in Africa, or Tibet for that matter?” This three-
way dynamic set the tone for an exchange that took up almost an hour: Rousseau
attempting to network with Xiaoming, who would voice a party-line platitude,
which would be scathingly set upon by Anne, who would recruit Xiaoming to
the role of privileged Han Chinese, an ethnonationalist patriarch and colonizer of
transglobal subalterns.
My partner, Anne’s informant, and I watched as Xiaoming would listen
thoughtfully to Anne, and then pretend that he did not entirely understand what
she was driving at—turning his attention time and again to Rousseau, someone he
normally would not have given the time of day, but whom in this encounter repre-
sented an escape from an unexpectedly hostile interaction. Another escape tactic
presented itself when—as one dish after another arrived in our restaurant booth—
Xiaoming somewhat over enthusiastically entered into a mode of connoisseurship,
praising “the skill of these people.” As a distraction tactic, it backfired when Anne
stated: “Well, enjoy it while it lasts,” hinting at her own journalistic criticism of
the Chinese central government’s heavy-handed regulation of ethnic minorities in
China. Rousseau, who had by now become aware of and/or fed up with the inter-
actional dynamic, turned to Anne and said: “You know, everybody wants freedom,
but maybe everybody doesn’t want your freedom” (Rousseau’s emphasis). At this,
158    Chapter 6

Anne looked visibly flabbergasted, and perhaps even a little betrayed. Rousseau
stared at her firmly, standing his ground. It was the first time in the interaction
that Xiaoming smiled, and—spotting his gap—suggested that despite a “wonder-
ful evening of important conversations” we should all probably “get some much
needed rest.” In this way, both the evening and our interactions with Xiaoming
came to an awkward end.
In a brief interaction one afternoon following the dinner, Anne voiced her
disapproval of Rousseau’s views, which to her seemed naïve and uncritical of
China’s real relationship to its subalterns, suggesting that Africans were “back-
ing the wrong horse.” We were standing in her kitchen brewing a pot of tea when
she said this. I asked her what horse she thought they should be backing instead.
Looking at me over her glasses, she replied: “Whoever guarantees their freedom.”
“Are you thinking of America?” I asked. Avoiding the question, she emphasized
again: “Whoever guarantees their freedom.” Irritated, I replied: “It’s funny how
those guarantees never seem to work out for blacks and indigenous people in your
own country.” Anne happily conceded this point, but having now proposed both
my alignment with Rousseau’s argument and her historical alignment with white
settler colonialism, I was not invited back for tea. Regardless of what horse I might
have been backing, it was clear that I was not backing hers.
Freedom, for Anne, certainly represented the capacity to move without con-
straint, and in China, she certainly observed a blatant stratification of constraint.
Some people are able to move more freely than others both economically and
in physical space. In addition, China has a bureaucratic system in place that
entrenches these capacities for mobility along ethnic and class lines. However,
while holding China accountable for entrenching inequality within a largely invis-
ible global order of value that necessitates inequality, Anne fails to recognize that
her capacity for mobility depends precisely on the relative immobility of others—
that, in fact, the liberal horizon of egalitarian freedom her criticism of Rousseau
presupposes, necessarily requires an outsourcing of the dirty work of stratification
on the part of subalterns still willing to throw each other under the bus for the
privilege of second place.

R E T U R N I N G T O A M E R IC A : E N C O U N T E R I N G
T H E L I B E R A L - SU P R E M AC Y C OM P L E X

In this final coda, I want to take a step back from the preceding interactional ten-
sions between third-world cosmopolitanism and white space-time as they played
out within Sino-African encounters in Beijing and resituate them in the space and
time of writing. I want to reminisce somewhat more freely and recontextualize
their revelations of still-compromised ideological conditions of personhood in the
early twenty-first century by introducing a final provocation that emerged upon
my return to the United States, and during the completion of my degree. Here,
 Liberal-Racisms and Invisible Orders     159

I point to a wider stratification of intersectionality and mobility that I believe

animates both this research and the wider context of my work.
In November 2016, following my return from fieldwork, the campus of the Uni-
versity of Chicago, my home institution, was vandalized with neo-Nazi or other
white supremacist artifacts. Many people were outraged and upset by the racist
paraphernalia littering billboards and buildings, igniting horror among liberal,
elite American students and onlookers, and painful familiarity for others. For
some, these signs were reiterations of nightmares that were thought to belong to
another time. For others, the clumsy wielding of their signifying potential repre-
sented further evidence of the laughable ignorance of “open” white supremacy in
America. As for myself, I was neither traumatized, nor laughing. The initial impact
of American white supremacist gesturing emerged as a dangerous combination
of absurdity and trauma, generating a climate of fear for friends, colleagues, and
loved ones alike. I was compelled to take these events very seriously, because—for
me—they were uncannily familiar.
I have known white supremacy intimately for my entire life: from the time I
was a child growing up in apartheid South Africa, into post-apartheid adulthood
when the language changed, but the inequalities remained, and all the way to the
United States to pursue a graduate degree. What I initially encountered in America
was the fresh face of an analogous racial, gender, queer, religious, and class preju-
dice. When I began my studies in the fall of 2010, during the early Obama years,
the blatancy of inequality was rationalized and perpetuated through an ingenious
veneer of unmarked (yet default white) liberalism. I recall at the time that it man-
ifested as a self-satisfied narcissism that would shame those who spoke of race
or racism, and would school us for thinking that postcolonialism was anything
but dead, out-of-date, and “obviously structuralist.” Rather than a frothing asser-
tion of ethnocentric pride (the kind I knew far better), whiteness manifested in
an unmarked horizon of endless possibilities, basking in liberalism’s total victory
over oppressions of all kinds. Any complaints to the contrary were dismissed as a
misrecognition of “more complex” realities. As suggested earlier, this position was
not only perpetuated by white teachers and colleagues in the American academy,
but by elite former subalterns who had joined their ranks in the previous decades.
However, in the months following Donald Trump’s presidency, it became appar-
ent that both impeccably political, liberal elitism and frothing white supremacist
rage ultimately masked the same deep insecurity: a dependency on whiteness as
either fetishized or unmarked. Being a “waste of a white skin” is a fear that drives
many poor white Americans who imagine themselves to have no other currency,
while pretending that race, and therefore whiteness, does not exist has become
a pervasive liberal elite strategy for coping with various strata of privilege, even
among elite non-whites. This is not a new argument, nor one situated in the liberal
intellectual enclaves of the Euro-American academic Anglosphere. Many move-
ments and intellectuals, including the most recent critiques by Black Lives Matter
160    Chapter 6

in the United States, and #FeesMustFall in South Africa, have already suggested
that this increasingly explicit anxiety among both liberal and racist whites con-
stitutes only a symptom, rather than the engine, of both pervasive and persistent
investments in whiteness. From the perspective of a third-world outsider, this is
just a quintessentially American expression of the systemic contradictions of white
liberalism once revealed by Steve Biko ([1978] 2002), and what might productively
be called a liberal-racism complex.
At present, it appears that both American liberals and racists are locked in a
frantic battle of self-discovery. On one side are those wildly brandishing heir-
looms of mostly imagined ancestors they’ve never encountered or bothered to
fully understand; on the other are those (safety-)pinning an identity—based on
guilt, but framed in sanctimony—onto people paternalistically being recruited to
be retrospective victims in the making of white saviors. But we must ask: Who is
to blame for the loss of identity experienced by whites in America, even though
countless non-whites, in non-western places, are (often literally) drowning in
white hegemony? How did so many working-class white bodies remain unmarked
up until the early hours of November 8, 2016?
Cowardice is an analytically important vector from which to conceptualize a
great deal of white supremacist activity in a post-Trump world, not only because
so many white supremacists lack the courage to openly address the people they
often threaten outside of their communities, often opting for clandestine acts, like
vandalism or anonymous cyberterrorism, intimidation, and harassment. Cowardice
is indeed more manifest in the obvious lack of impetus to address inequalities
among white supremacists themselves—since this is supposedly what their “strug-
gle” (or Kampf) is about. White supremacists in America and Africa alike have
always failed to erase structural inequalities in their own self-designated interest
groups. In this regard, poor whites fundamentally trouble master-race arguments,
whether these are made in America or have been enacted in apartheid South
Africa. One neo-Nazi slogan that stood during a number of post-Trump vandal-
ism campaigns was: “No Degeneracy, No Tolerance, Hail Victory.”
This slogan was suggestive of the ways in which a certain kind of tolerance
was precisely at issue in the post-Trump world, since it is tolerance—of the equal
opportunity variety—that has the tendency to oppress. The equal capacity to con-
test one’s conditions of being has been a keystone in the liberal rhetoric of toler-
ance in America, a stance that has marginalized its working class, people of color,
women, non-Christians, and queer communities in unequal but related ways.
With the exportation of American-style values of liberal freedom underpinning
the expansion of neoliberal globalization in a post–Cold War world, this contra-
dictory pattern has also emerged elsewhere: from the respective class-shaming lib-
eral environmentalism and Han-centric ethnonationalism that has characterized
the simultaneous rise of these opposing elements within the Chinese middle and
upper classes to the failure of liberal African governments to erase inequalities
 Liberal-Racisms and Invisible Orders     161

within a global economic system that ultimately still favors the widening of plan-
etary social inequality and the maintenance of Africa as its dysfunctional space
of exception. This is because of the ways in which “tolerance”—manifesting as
equal treatment of unequal people—has always reinforced, rather than alleviated,
inequality regardless of where it has been applied. Once again, this point has been
made over and over again within America, and by many of its greatest think-
ers—most of them black intellectuals (Du Bois [1903] 1994; Lorde [1984] 2007;
Robinson 1983; hooks 1992). Finally, it is also tolerance that has allowed America’s
home-grown racism to ferment into the ways we see it manifested now.
The United States, followed by other influential governments like those of
BRICS nations, continues to tolerate elite profit over general education—a pattern
that many liberal political leaders have perpetuated through their own rational
economic divestment from educational equity and social welfare. In this regard,
it is ironic that—in the aftermath of November 8, 2016—the United States’ lib-
eral elites are somehow shocked that marked white entitlement is threatening
unmarked white privilege. In response, many of the American white, educated
elite began wearing safety pins that were supposed to symbolize safety to those
marginalized by white supremacists. The arguments made in the preceding chap-
ters suggest that however well-intentioned such actions might be, they merely
enshrine the unassailability of whiteness through positing the white savior as the
only figure that can vanquish the white supremacist. This is a problematic analog
to another liberal delusion: that white genocide is the dystopian solution to racism.
Not only is this an astoundingly arrogant and racist assumption—that only whites
are powerful (or capable) enough to end the problem of whiteness through their
own suicide—it also fundamentally underestimates whiteness as a horizon of aspi-
ration that can, as I have demonstrated, operate efficiently without a Caucasian in
sight. Whiteness, in the ways I have demonstrated, does not need white bodies.
Herein, perhaps, lies the misunderstood precarity of the world’s poor whites—
the subconscious realization that whiteness doesn’t need them, and is perfectly
willing to leave them behind. There is, in the Angloscene and its white space-time,
no available category for white failure other than white trash, and this is a far from
sympathetic category of personhood. The usual PC rules do not apply, because
white, liberal elitism enshrines the rules around whiteness’s unmarked unassail-
ability. If one has ever tried racially insulting a white person, one will quickly come
to the realization that the only attack that has any effect is the accusation: racist.
Bottom-feeding white supremacists who will attempt to get poor whites to buy
into hate know this at some level. They have used, and will continue to use, this
knowledge to recruit people who feel like white “deplorables” have been branded
as such by white elite liberals. In doing so, their victims feel vulnerable, as though a
cabal of big white men are the only ones who can preserve a whiteness imagined to
be under threat. Such patriarchs of global white supremacy, however, have a fatal
flaw: they commit to whiteness not because whiteness is threatened, but because
162    Chapter 6

they don’t feel white enough. It should be obvious to even the most casual observer
that chasing supremacist whiteness is neither transgressive nor empowering
since it ultimately undermines the unassailable privileges of unmarked whiteness
in the first place. Such flawed commitments to supremacist whiteness, however,
have a propensity to anesthetize a far more pervasive ordering of the white liberal-
supremacy complex.
A clue as to the ordering of the liberal-supremacy complex may productively
emerge through a contemporary recontextualization and exegesis of and postco-
lonial analytic: subaltern. My use of subaltern (in this book and elsewhere) is pre-
cisely not an invocation of a cover-all term. I am not expanding the capaciousness
of the term to account for all subjects of discrimination for all time. Instead, draw-
ing on Gayatri Spivak’s ([1988] 2010) original invocation of this concept (often
misappropriated and misunderstood), my voicing tries to account for its chimeric
dimension: the simultaneity of subalternity’s both perspectival emergence and
structural stratification. This simultaneity frequently emerges in questions like:
How do rarified Chinese and African educational elites appropriate English,
whiteness, and cosmopolitan mobility in their interactions with one another and
yet come to compromise themselves by virtue of never being able to live up to the
ideal subject of these appropriations? I understand subaltern in such settings of
inquiry as a relational concept.
One is not a subaltern because everyone is potentially a subaltern, nor because
certain subjects are intrinsic subalterns of colonial and decolonizing projects.
Instead, I argue that subjects become subalterns precisely by virtue of the strat-
ifying terms of commensuration they invoke vis-à-vis one another—terms of
commensuration, which by virtue of being less easy to appropriate for some than
others, ultimately reveal the limits of a subject’s aspirations and their situated-
ness within an inescapable ideological order of stratification. This is also why I
have been concerned throughout with the dynamics of interaction in intersec-
tional (gender, race, class), interlinguistic, and transnational encounters. While
intersectionality has traditionally been studied in English-speaking and/or set-
tler colonial societies, such encounters, under conditions where Anglocentric
whiteness may seem absent, precisely explicate the contradictory formation
of subalternity.
Non-western encounters reveal how whiteness and Englishness—despite their
seemingly absent embodiments—persistently come to manifest in perspectival
yet always stratifying ways. This is the case for both those seeking refuge through
unmarked whiteness, as well as for those seeking refuge from hegemonic white-
ness. It is in this way, I have shown, that African and Chinese actors who attempt
to pursue a novel cosmopolitan mobility have little choice but to appropriate signs
that compromise this pursuit—where would-be translators, using the master units
of commensuration, become the others of their own translation.
 Liberal-Racisms and Invisible Orders     163

In studying the race-language tensions that imbricate Chinese and African

interactions, the preceding chapters have demonstrated the enduring relevance of
critical and postcolonial theories in unpacking the contradictory conditions that
often generate intersectional vectors between inequalities of language, race, gender,
sexuality, class, and mobility. Here, translation emerged as an intersubjective, inter-
actional, and dialectical process—apparent in the ways ideological formations like
whiteness, English, and cosmopolitan mobility are commensurated into subcatego-
ries of broader racial or mobility types. This commensuration is certainly attempted
by various culture industries not only in China, but also the postcolonial contexts
African students in Beijing arrive from (Africa), as well as the centers many of their
Chinese interlocutors aspire to go to (Europe or America). Here, typifications like
race, language, and mobility enable a great deal of alienating institutional labor in
relation to their subtypes—whiteness, English, and cosmopolitanism.
In the example of race, a liberal educational discourse (particularly in the
settler-colonial west) would insist on the vulgar color differences between white,
black, brown, beige, and various other racialized phenotypes as being of an arbi-
trary nature. In doing so, additional colors are often thrown in for rhetorical effect:
blue, green, and so on. For an example, consider sentences like: “I don’t care if you
are black, white, blue, or purple.” In this liberal western educational schema, rac-
ism emerges as irrational and therefore unthinkable. The force of this argument
stems from ignorantly motivating the equality or equivalence between subtypes of
race via the broader type of Race. This generates a familiar deductive logic:
If races are arbitrarily equivalent, then race as a measure of alterity does not
(or should not) exist.
And therefore:
If race is not real, then racism cannot (or must not) exist.

In an imagined transnational, cosmopolitan space-time, the deductive circuit of

race often diagrams a kind of liberal nonracialist ideology:
This schema is internalized by not only liberal whites in the west, but also elite,
or aspirationally elite, Chinese and African subjects in Beijing, who would align
themselves to this logic of racial arbitrariness. What this kind of diagramming
suggests is a common sense within which white bodies predominate as protago-
nists on advertising billboards in China, Africa, and other non-western countries,
but then become rationalized as arbitrary, because it could always have been some-
body else: an arbitrary body or skin. Yet, what this reasoning also allows is for a
white body to become the unmarked, default inhabitant of an aspirational cosmo-
politan, transglobal social landscape. For many African and Chinese subjects in
Beijing, this liberal nonracial common sense also allows different experiences of
stratification to be—temporarily—elided or concealed until they emerge as expe-
riences of infrastructural racism.
164    Chapter 6

??(RACE)??

White Yellow Red Brown Black

Figure 7. Racial arbitrariness.

Whiteness

White

Red Yellow Brown

Black
Figure 8. Infrastructural racism.

Figure 8 contrasts the previous liberal aspirational ideal of racial arbitrariness

with the experienced dimensions of a global infrastructural racism that was prev-
alent among variously stratified informants. For them, and many others in the
decolonizing world, it is whiteness—as an aspirational horizon—rather than race
that mediates racism. It is perhaps an understatement to suggest that there is a
significant experiential, and thus material, gap between figures 7 and 8. Indeed, the
obvious semantic and logical concerns with these propositions have been explored
and problematized at length in the work of Charles Mills (1997, 1998) and Kwame
Appiah (1989, 1992). Recasting their concerns, this book has explored the prag-
matic and performative consequences of these ideas in non-western social interac-
tions that are presumed to be decolonized.
At this point I wish to draw attention to a more general semiotic contingency
that underpins this gap between rational arbitrariness and the social stratifications
it enables in the postcolonial politics of race, one that is also mirrored in the poli-
tics of language. As the political stratifications of whiteness are occluded by rela-
tivizing race, so too the material and cultural inequalities imbricated by English
are enabled by relativizing language. In the contemporary settler colonial world,
 Liberal-Racisms and Invisible Orders     165

English 11

English 2

K’iche’ Chinese Hindi

Swahili/''Black''English
Swahili/''Black'' English

Whiteness

White

Red Yellow Brown

Black
Black

Figure 9. Mirroring pragmatic stratifications of English and whiteness.

the arbitrariness of language has been easier to accept than the political arbitrari-
ness of race—even though disciplines like cultural anthropology have long played
a considerable role in advocating the relativism of language and race through
the analytic of culture (Trouillot 2003, 100; Baker 1998). In China and much of the
decolonizing world, the picture is somewhat different: that the racial, in itself,
often seems an arbitrary consideration compared to other modalities of differ-
entiation—primary among these is the politics of language and ideas (Vukovich
2019; Ngũgĩ 1994; Spivak 1993). My goal, throughout, is to draw attention to a
broader pragmatics of stratification that mutually encompasses language and race,
while drawing attention to what language and race occlude. I reveal this pragmat-
ics by disconnecting the relationship between type and subtype in the respective
schemas of English as a subtype of language and whiteness as a subtype of race. In
doing so, I suggest that English and whiteness transcend their typifications as lan-
guage and race, mutually constituting an imbricated and encompassing horizon of
aspiration—an Angloscene—that comes to compromise the very subjects seeking
to exploit their associated signs of symbolic value and cultural capital. Consider
the following juxtaposition of the pragmatic stratifications of English and white-
ness (fig. 9), with the respective relativistic ideologies of race and language (fig. 10).
The disjuncture between figures 9 and 10 is apparent in the outrage over racial
discrimination that was boiling over on at least three continents at the time of
writing: riots against a racist American president, protests against white monopoly
capital in South Africa, and claims of China’s increasingly racist treatment of its
166    Chapter 6

??(RACE)??

White Yellow Red Brown Black

??(Language)??

English Chinese K’iche’ Hindi

Swahili/''Black''
English

Figure 10. Mirroring relativist ideologies of race and language.

ethnic minority or black others. However, one of the ways in which this tension
between racial arbitrariness and liberalism manifests across these different con-
texts—albeit in different ways—forms an important component of the arguments
made throughout: if all these tokens of race have a genuine sameness, insofar
as they are culturally relative or linguistically arbitrary, then why is the broader
type—race—not obviated, given that race is the unit of commensuration through
which its own iconicity and alterity is translated? Thus, if race is discursively arbi-
trary: why does it pragmatically exist, how is it felt intimately as well as discrimi-
nately, and how does it differentially stratify all those produced or occluded by
its gaze? These questions remain unsolved and will likely haunt Afro-Chinese,
Afro-Asian, and third-worldist encounters in the turbulent decades to come. How-
ever, it is my hope that the preceding chapters and interactions provide a starting
point for undertaking an honest postcolonial discussion about race and language
in the non-western conversations, interactions, and encounters that will neces-
sarily define the twenty-first century. To this end, Audre Lorde left us a profound
injunction as a productive point of departure: “Advocating the mere tolerance of
difference . . . is the grossest reformism. It is a total denial of the creative function
of difference in our lives. Difference must be not merely tolerated, but seen as a
fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic.
Only then does the necessity for interdependency become unthreatening.”1
 Note s

I N T R O DU C T IO N

1.  “Lunar New Year: Chinese TV gala includes ‘racist blackface’ sketch,” BBC World,
February 16, 2018. www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-43081218.
2.  For many, zhongzuqishi translates as “racial discrimination,” but may also be inter-
preted as “ethnocentric discrimination.”
3.  In bringing together Anglocentrism, cosmopolitanism, and whiteness I take a num-
ber of contemporary ethnographic texts as inspiration (Pennycook 2007; Blommaert 2014;
Mbembe and Nuttall 2008; Rofel 2007; Appadurai 2011; Gilroy 1993; Hage 2000; La Dousa
2014; Nakassis 2016a), however most of these works focus on one or two of the vectors
I attempt to connect.
4.  Here I am thinking of literatures in postcolonial and critical race theory that have
attempted to voice a relationship between discursive forces and social inequality at a
“micro-interactional” level (Lorde [1984] 2007; Crenshaw 1991; Butler 1999; Robinson 1983;
Mbembe 2001; Fanon 1963, [1952] 2008; Said [1977] 2003; Derrida 1976; Foucault [1966]
2002; hooks 1981; Spivak 1976; Bhabha 1994).
5.  Walter Rostow, famous for his The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist
Manifesto (1960) in many ways laid down a conceptual apparatus bookended by Melville
Herskovits’s institutional deployments of Boasian cultural relativism in African (Area)
Studies and Wilbur Schramm’s expansion of developmentalism in the founding of com-
munication studies as a strategically funded soft power discipline. Schramm’s Mass Media
and National Development: The Role of Information in the Developing Countries (1964) and
his founding of the discipline of communication studies were explicitly aligned with the
promotion of western democratic developmentalism as a counter to socialist and third-
worldist internationalism in the Global South. In fact, Schramm’s classic text opens with a
criticism of African socialists for committing to anti-technological backwardness in their

167
168    Notes

rejection of communicative development initiatives promised by NATO countries and the

UN in favor of accepting support from China and the Soviet Union in the wake of
the decolonization sweeping the African continent after 1945. For his part, Herskovits,
though publicly critical of treating newly decolonized African states as Cold War proxies,
supplied one of the key arguments for depoliticizing black internationalism in general and
black radicalism in the US in particular, by deploying cultural relativism in the service of
advocating for originary African subjectivity in black American experience (Gershenhorn
2007)—a move that ultimately delegitimized (then) contemporary struggles for political
equality vis-à-vis white Americans who noticeably were not saddled with the same delegiti-
mizing “cultural” baggage as unhyphenated “Americans” (Smith et al. 2009). I would argue
that, in retrospectively placing black Americans in Africa—by endowing black Americans
with cultural authenticities that are withheld from American whites—Herskovits was ulti-
mately engaging in the apartheid equivalent of creating intellectual Bantustans—distant
spaces where one could claim that cultural sovereignty resides, while denying local sov-
ereign rights of mobility to black subjects on the basis of their “authentic” inhabitance of
retrospectively reimagined distant spaces. Furthermore, Herskovits and others’ deployment
of cultural relativism, in an elective affinity with Weber’s intellectual recruitment to devel-
opmentalism, remains traceable in the institutional templates and funding structures that
still maintain area studies disciplines, often in the face of extreme political abuses of this
weaponization of “culture.”
6.  In distinguishing between rational and irrational, I am being critical of rational actor
theory as a specter that still haunts the social sciences in general and the undergraduate
classroom in particular.
7.  See the excellent translations and exploration of He Zhen’s genealogy in Lydia Liu,
Rebecca Karl, and Dorothy Ko’s excellent volume (2013).
8.  This is (or should be) as apparent to linguistic anthropologists (M. Silverstein 2003b;
Agha 2003) as it is to critical race theorists concerned with intersectionality’s conceptual
underpinnings (Crenshaw 1991; Lorde [1984] 2007).
9. Patrice Lumumba was a central figure in African decolonial struggle history. He
was also president of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Lumumba was assassi-
nated through a coordinated effort on the part of a number of political opponents, both at
home and abroad. The US sanctioned the assassination; Belgium helped organize it
(De Witte 2001).
10.  I am referring here to the historical theorist and methodologist, Leopold von Ranke
(2011).
11.  My emphasis.
12.  My emphasis.

1. CHRONOTOPES OF THE ANGLOSCENE

1.  A version of this chapter appeared in positions: asia critique as “Made in Others’
Wor(l)ds: Personhood and the Angloscene in Afro-Chinese Beijing,” and appears courtesy
of their afforded permissions. See Ke-Schutte (forthcoming). All rights reserved. Repub-
lished by permission of the copyright holder and the Publisher, Duke University Press.
www.dukeupress.edu.
 Notes    169

2.  One thinks here of the work of Brian Larking (2008), Aihwa Ong (1999), Arjun
Appadurai (1996), and Julie Chu (2010) all of whom suggest contrapuntal complexity but
where mobility, mediation, and semiotics/language are somewhat segmented.
3.  I am thinking here not only of Bourdieu’s (1986) ”forms of capital,” but of the intel-
lectual legacy that has come to use this term as a shorthand.
4.  This incorporates a significant cross section of ethnographic work including, but cer-
tainly not limited to: H. Wu (1998), James Farrer (2002), Lisa Rofel (2007), Julie Chu (2010),
Judith Farquhar and Qicheng Zhang (2012), as well as John Osburg (2013).
5.  While these paradoxical tropes are fairly pervasive, a neat distillation emerges in
journalist Bill Hayton’s popular book The Invention of China (2020).
6.  In the context of language, this kind of discursive domination is evocatively explored
in Maurice Olender’s Languages of Paradise (2009)—an enormously underrated survey of
philological history and early linguistics.
7.  To be sure, all repetition is difference, but it would be important to recall that Deleuze
([1968] 1994) also asserted the inverse.
8. David Borenstein, “Rent-a-Foreigner in China,” New York Times, April 28, 2015,
www.nytimes.com/video/opinion/100000003652442/rent-a-foreigner-in-china.html.
9.  Tongue, an emphasis, is added to the end of a sentence to express annoyance and is
a borrowing from Southern African languages that use “clicks.” They are also a widely used
interlinguistic phenomenon, even being used by many white English and Afrikaans speak-
ers to express extreme annoyance.
10.  See Bourdieu ([1986] 2011), Ngũgĩ (1994), Cohn (1996, 1987), and Errington (2008).

2 . T H E P U R P L E C OW PA R A D OX

1.  In language (Spivak [1988] 2010; Butler 1999; Gal 1991), in mobility (Parreñas 2001;
Morokvasic 2014; Ehrenreich and Hochschild 2004; Sassen 2003), and in race (Crenshaw
1991; hooks 1981; Lorde [1984] 2007; Puar 2007).
2.  See Michel Foucault (2007, 1982) and Kimberlé Crenshaw’s (1991) respective argu-
ments that deploy the analytic of micro-interactions at fairly different sociohistorical scales.
3. Particularly as Bakhtin’s ideas are expressed in Dialogic Imagination (1981) and
Toward a Philosophy of the Act (1993, with M. Holquist).
4.  Current citation around the concept points to a convergence of texts (Agha 2003,
2005; M. Silverstein 1976, 2003b). My use throughout mostly draws on Agha’s formula-
tion, but I am indebted to both genealogies in considering enregisterment’s place within the
broader semiotic frameworks of linguistic anthropology.
5.  John and Jean Comaroff ’s (1993, 2009) pieces capture the dialectical tension that
emerges between the seemingly contradictory horizons of cosmopolitan modernity and
revolutionary consciousness in postcolonial settings.
6.  Here I am referencing Weber’s (2002) formulation as a concept, horizon, object, or
figure of personhood that is nameable and referable, and yet never fully attainable or per-
ceivable in its totality.
7.  WeChat is a Chinese social networking platform that plays a key role in mediating
urban and social life in China. Access to western social media platforms, like Twitter and
WhatsApp, is made possible by installing a VPN to bypass the Chinese firewall.
170    Notes

8.  See Mahajan (2009); Mbembe (2014); Kamanzi (2015); and Naiker (2016).
9.  See Erving Goffman’s (1981) summary of the concept as well as Asif Agha (2005) and
my own (Ke-Schutte 2019) different deployments of “footing.”
10.  The advantage of this technique, drawing on the use of “pair-part” notation in more
conventional sociolinguistic analyses, is that it attempts to represent the overlapping of
multiple voices in their temporal sequence. In doing so, I take inspiration from an ethno-
musicological transcription technique, called “pulse notation,” developed by ethnomusicol-
ogist Andrew Tracey (1970). I have also included other auxiliary speech events—marked by
square brackets [ ]—that unfold during the interaction. My goal in using this graphic mode
of representation is to capture moments during an interaction when actors voice—through
vocalization, focus, or gesture—ideological alignment or disalignment with a main speaker,
but through this process subordinate themselves.
11.  In the Gramscian sense (Gramsci 1975).

3 . W HO C A N B E A R AC I ST ? O R , HOW T O D O T H I N G S W I T H P E R S O N HO O D

1.  Lisa Rofel’s (2007) evocative work captures this intersectional relationship between
gender, class, youth, and constrained mobility extremely well.
2.  Here I am thinking in particular of Crenshaw’s (1991) and hooks’s (1981, 1992) inspir-
ing work.
3.  James Griffiths and Shen Lu, “Outrage Erupts over ‘Racist Detergent Ad,” CNN, May
28, 2016, www.cnn.com/2016/05/27/asia/chinese-racist-detergent-ad.
4.  Francis Scott, “You Thought the Chinese Advert Was Racist . . . Wait until You See
the Italian Commercial That Inspired It,” Daily Mail, May 28, 2016, www.dailymail.co.uk
/news/article-3614152/You-thought-Chinese-advert-racist-wait-Italian-advert-inspired-it
.html.
5.  Euphonik, “ziRight iGals [Official Video] ft. Bekzin Terris, Khaya Dlanga,” YouTube,
May 3, 2016, www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpylxEJfGq0.
6.  Trevor Noah, “‘Surfing AIDS’—Trevor Noah—(That’s Racist) LONGER RE-RELEASE,”
YouTube, June 6, 2019, www.youtube.com/watch?v=BMf5—QPyNw.
7.  For an expended deployment of dynamic figuration, see Michael Silverstein’s (2004)
framing of the term.
8.  Trevor Noah, “Trevor Noah: Daywalker 2.0—Oprah’s School in South Africa,” You-
Tube, March 19, 2012, www.youtube.com/watch?v=YcyuIKzpYJQ.
9.  Noah, “Trevor Noah: Daywalker 2.0.”
10.  This term was initially used to define the mixed-raced descendants of Dutch colo-
nialists, slaves, and Khoisan people in what was called the “Cape region” of South Africa
during the Dutch occupation. It later became used under British colonial conditions and
within the apartheid state to classify any communities or individuals that could fit into
neither white nor black categories as defined within the rubric of the apartheid-colonial
matrix (Saul and Bond 2014).

4 . HOW PA P E R T IG E R S K I L L

1.  Mao Zedong, “On The Question of Whether Imperialism and All Reactionaries Are
Real Tigers,” Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1958). www
.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selectedworks.
 Notes    171

2. Laura Zhou, “Woman in Serious Condition after Tiger Attack Kills Mother in
Beijing Wildlife Park,” South China Morning Post, July 25, 2016, www.scmp.com/news/china
/society/article/1994494/woman-serious-condition-after-tiger-attack-kills-mother-beijing.
3.  I am thinking in particular of Wang Mingming’s brilliant work exploring Occidental-
ist biases in Sinology.
4.  Cited from Michael Sullivan’s excellent exploration of racial nationalist dimensions
of anti-African protests in late 1980s China.
5.  See Zheng Churan’s excellent article, “China Has no Problem with Racism, and That’s
a Problem,” Supchina, February 23, 2018, https://supchina.com/2018/02/23/china-has-no
-problem-with-racism-and-thats-a-problem.
6.  My emphasis.

5 . U BU N T U / G UA N X I A N D T H E P R AG M AT IC S O F T R A N SL AT IO N

1. A version of this chapter (Ke-Schutte 2022) appeared in the collection Changing
Theory: Concepts from the Global South, edited by Dilip Menon, and appears courtesy of
permissions afforded by Routledge.
2.  As with the preceding chapters, the names of the subjects represented have been
anonymized. However, given that certain naming practices for socialist families of African
subjects constitute an important aspect of the analysis, I chose names in this particular
chapter that mirrored this practice of diagramming historical socialist alignments. Fortu-
nately, such alignments are so prominent in Afro-Chinese histories of nonalignment that
finding similarly glossing alternatives did not prove difficult.

6 . L I B E R A L - R AC I SM S A N D I N V I SI B L E O R D E R S

1.  From Audre Lorde’s classic essay, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Mas-
ter’s House,” in Sister Outsider (Lorde [1984] 2007), 111.
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 Ge ne ral i nde x

Achebe, Chinua: “The African Writer and the Afro-Asian internationalism, 6

English Language” (essay), 17–19 Afrocentrism, 43
actor-network theory, 115 Agamben, Giorgio, 151
Adorno, Theodor, 8, 151 Agha, Asif, 57, 65, 70, 90, 169n4
aesthetics, 12 alterity, 111, 130; asymmetrical, 50; iconicity and,
affect: in contemporary Sino-African 78, 81, 85, 166; racialized, 24; signs of, 150
encounters, 126–27; Fanon’s theory of Althusser, Louis, 14
affectivity, 124, 126–27; historical-materialist American Dreams in China (Chinese film), 13
framing of, 123; nationalist, 1 Anderson, Benedict, 33
Africa: Chinese-sponsored educational Anglocentrism, 3; global, 6; white, 89. See also
endeavors in, 49; Chinese traders whiteness
in, 73; as eternally colonized, 154; Anglo-medicalization, 13
industrializing urban centers of, 74; liberal Angloscene, 3, 6, 30, 123, 146–47, 161; affectivities
governments of, 160–61; troubles in, 18, 155. of the Afro-Chinese, 124–28; chronotopes
See also Africans; Botswana; South Africa; of the, 29–51; horizons of aspiration
Zimbabwe of the, 24, 165; matrix of the transhistorical,
African educational migrants, 3–6, 10–13, 85; orbit of the, 101; personhood as
20–25, 32, 38–39, 43–45, 50–51, 65–66, 95, generated in the, 38–39; pragmatic
102, 119, 148; Francophone, 124; gay, 48; dimensions of the, 23; Sino-Afropolitan
media performances shared among, 102; ethnoscape and its limited contextualization
quarantining of, 79; Southern African, 22–23, within the, 101. See also Anglosphere;
47–48, 65; unprecedented number of, 43. English; whiteness
See also Africans; migrants Anglosphere: academic, 32, 149, 151–53, 159;
African National Congress (ANC), 9. See also aspirational landscape of the white, 91;
South Africa Chinese influence in the media and
Africans: black, 98–101; xenophobic violence disciplinary theaters of the, 49; media,
in South Africa against, 4. See also Africa; 49–50; racio-linguistic worlds of the, 33–34;
African educational migrants regime of political correctness of the, 89.
African University Student League, 97 See also Angloscene; English; whiteness
Afrikaners, 22, 151. See also South Africa Angola, 4

187
188    General index

Anthropocene: contemporary anthropologies Biko, Steve, 50–51, 85, 100, 160; critique of white
of the, 29; cultural diversity of the, 153; liberal participation in black liberation
destructive modernity of the, 109 movements of, 85
anthropology, 137, 143, 146, 151–54, 165; colonial black feminist theory, 24, 90. See also blackness;
impetus of, 128; contemporary American, feminism
132, 152; decolonization of, 153; linguistic, Black Lives Matter, 159–60
19, 24, 84, 111, 168n8; posthuman, 112; blackness, 10–11; Anglo-racial, 123; black
representation as translational practice in, 83. consciousness, 58–59, 85; in China, 119;
See also ethnography as liability, 48, 150; of nature, 123. See also
anti-imperialism, 7–8, 105, 137 black feminist theory; race
apartheid, 51, 159–60; conditions of industrial Borenstein, David, 44
colonialism and, 74; illegality of interracial Botswana, 55, 66, 75, 97. See also Africa
relations under the conditions of, 104; legacy Bourdieu, Pierre, 44, 133, 169n3
of, 72; matrix of, 85. See also South Africa BRICS, 49, 161
Appadurai, Arjun, 9 British Empire, 85
Appiah, Kwame, 164 Brown, Wendy, 150
Ashforth, Adam, 134; Madumo: A Man Bucholtz, Mary, 84
Bewitched, 135 Buck-Morss, Susan, 117, 124, 127
Austin, John, 137 Burke, Timothy, 62
Australia, 73 Butler, Judith, 44, 56, 64, 150
Azanian Achievers China (AAC), 58, 62, 65–69,
72, 76, 78, 99 Caihong Qiao (“Rainbow Bridge”), 56, 60–63,
Azanian Students in China (ASIC), 46, 98, 101 70, 72, 76, 78
capitalism: and colonialism, 10, 127; “equal
Bakgatla, Miriam, 58–60, 62, 65, 68–74, 76, 99 opportunity” promise of free market, 56–57;
Bakhtin, Mikhail, 23, 42, 55; chronotopes of, 70; global racial, 7, 63. See also globalization
formalist theory of language of, 41; Forms Carr, Summerson, 19, 141
of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel, CCTV, 1–2, 21. See also media
35–36; insistence on the unfinalizability of censorship, 46
persons and personhood of, 70; metaphor of Central Compilation and Translation Bureau
“voicing” of, 65; view that media reception (CCTB), 37
constitutes a socially contingent subject Central Party School (CPS), 37
formation like that of personhood of, 70 Chengdu, 123
Ballantine, Christopher, 74–75 Chigumadzi, Panashe, 95–96
Bandung Conference (1954–55), 5, 8, 12, 18 Chimakonam, J. O., 134
Bassnett, Susan: Postcolonial Translation: China, 3, 13; African traders in, 43, 73;
Theory and Practice (introduction), 82 anti-corruption campaigns of, 135, 137;
Bateson, Gregory, 111 aspirationally liberal and ambitiously
Beijing, 3–6, 10–15, 20–23, 46, 91–92; black nationalist “middle classes” of, 9–10;
South African community in, 22–23, 94–96; constraining economic conditions in rural,
Bus route in, 113–14, 113fig.; cosmopolitan 54; contemporary engagement with Africa
aspirations of African students in, 29–60; of, 154–55; entrenched inequality in, 158;
cosmopolitan aspirations of Chinese ethnic minorities of, 156–57; ethnographies
students in, 91–92; elite Anglophone African of contemporary, 31; families from small
students in, 65–68, 96; Lama Temple in towns in northeastern, 89; Han, 31, 156–57;
central, 60; marginalizing concerns in human rights record of, 46; immigration
contemporary, 24, 52–54; police officers in, laws of, 48–49; investment potential of,
52; San Li Tun district in, 65, 67, 86. See also 155; Maoist, 5, 22; Ming dynasty of, 59;
China; Haidian networking in, 132; Pan-Africanist initiatives
Benjamin, Walter, 8, 93 of, 9, 43; real estate in, 44; soft power of, 4,
Berlant, Lauren, 9, 50 34, 42–43, 49–50, 58, 85; workers of, 7.
Berlin Wall, 9 See also Beijing; Chinese; Communist Party;
Bhabha, Homi, 148–49 Hong Kong; Sichuan; Sino-exceptionalism;
Bieber, Justin, 46–48 Sinosphere
 General index    189

China-Africa studies, 16, 142 41–43, 55–59, 157; English-inflected, 43–44,

China Exploratorium, 34, 36. See also Hanban 60, 89; equal opportunity, 69; horizon
(Guojia Hanyu Guoji Tuiguang Lingdao of expectation of Chinese, 44, 63–64, 89,
Xiaozu Bangongshi) 123–24; limits of cosmopolitan aspiration,
China Photographic Publishing House, 123 23, 88, 124, 127; political economy of, 23, 75;
Chinese: African students speaking, 47, 57; racialized signs of, 77; shared, 138; third-
classes in Beijing universities in, 39–40; world, 42, 59, 105, 147, 158; unmarked, 7, 10,
Mandarin, 34; private language education 23, 34, 50, 63, 69, 147. See also chronotopes;
company for teaching, 40, 47. See also China mobility; modernity; personhood
Chinese educational migrants, 12 Côte d’Ivoire, 97
Chinese feminism, 56. See also feminism counterfeiting, 52–54
Chinese Foreign Language (CFL), 40 Crenshaw, Kimberlé, 56, 63–64, 169n2
Chinese LGBTQ community, 48, 61–63; activism critical race theory, 3, 7–8, 25, 93, 128, 163, 167n4
of the, 60; organizations of the, 56, 64 Cuba, 4
Chinese Students Association (CSA), 122 cultural relativism, 7, 130–31, 167n5
chronotopes, 29–51, 70, 130, 146; Angloscene, Cultural Revolution, 18, 142
124; cosmopolitan, 63; enregisterment in an
interactional space-time of, 65, 70; mass- Daily Mail, 93
mediated, 57; mediating the tension between, decolonization, 5–8, 14–19, 51, 71, 85, 146; of
105; pluralistic cosmopolitan diasporic, 60; African nations, 18, 168n5; colonization
of race relations, 122; seeming persistence of and, 152; educational, 51; history of global
colonial, 71; third-world, 63; trans-historical, class consciousness and, 11; intellectual,
71; white and black, 75. See also 10; language and, 19; politics of revolution
cosmopolitanism; enregisterment and, 150; postwar global, 8; as a pragmatic
Chu, Julie, 72 translational process, 82; transformation
Clifford, James: Writing Culture, 83, 143, 151 from colonization to, 82; violence of, 82, 152.
Clooney, George, 45 See also colonization
CNN, 92–93. See also media deconstructionism, 3
Cold War, 9, 168n5; geopolitics of the, 16; Dengism, 37
ideological shift at end of the, 9 Deng Xiaoping, 37
Cole, Jennifer, 53 Derrida, Jacques, 149
colonial-apartheid complex, 100. See also developmentalism, 16–17
colonialism Dewey, John, 137
colonialism, 16–18, 20; capitalism and, 10; dialectical materialism, 15
Euro-American, 34; French, 83; historical disanshijie datuanjie (third-world solidarity),
and material afterlife of, 33; narratives of, 5–6, 87
16; racial, 2, 34. See also colonial-apartheid Dixon, Kerryn, 95
complex; postcolonialism Dlanga, Khaya, 97
colonization, 149; and decolonization, 152; drug trafficking, 46
languages of, 19; subjects of, 51, 126; dualisms, 29
transformation to decolonization from, 82. DuBois, W. E. B., 8, 10, 13, 137
See also decolonization Durkheim, Emile, 115
Color Line, 10–11
Comaroff, Jean, 38, 135, 169n5 Ebola virus, 79
Comaroff, John, 38, 135, 169n5 education: Chinese-language, 21; of foreign
“common person” (putong ren), 135 student community of Haidian district
communication: nonverbal, 42; practices of, 29. universities, 22, 39–43; immersive experience
See also language of, 43; international, 41–42; language
Communist Party, 37. See also China education and ideological and cultural
Confucius: The Analects, 137 exchange, 35, 43–45; Maoist centralization
Confucius Institute (CI), 4, 20–22, 35–36 of Chinese, 22; mass, 40–42; misguided
cosmopolitanism, 3–4, 163; aspirational commitment to western, 48; Sino-African
archetypes of, 54–55, 88, 100; Chinese cooperation in, 58; western liberal, 103–4.
and African educational, 21–23, 30, 32–34, See also global knowledge industry; Haidian
190    General index

English, 12–19, 22–23, 31–34, 48, 82, 153, 163; Foucault, Michel, 54, 149–51, 169n2
affectivity and, 128; arbitrary presence Frankfurt School, 117
in East Asia of, 16; black vernacular, freedom, 157–58; liberal, 160
95–96; Chinese universities of Beijing offer Frekko, Susan, 90
classes in, 22, 40; Cowboy-themed ad for fubai (corruption), 135–37
instruction in, 125fig.; cultural capital of,
25, 39, 49; as default pedagogical language, Galloway, Alexander: The Exploit: A Theory
40–41; as discursive unit of ideological of Networks, 116
commensuration in Sino-South encounters, Geertz, Clifford, 83, 136
12, 32–34, 41–48; entextualization and gender, 24; gender equality, 56, 69;
contextualization of, 41; globalization of, 16, interactional dynamics of, 68; possibilities
19, 32–34; mirroring pragmatic stratifications of cosmopolitan emancipation of, 72;
of, 165fig.; model C, 94–96, 98–99, stratification of, 54, 69. See also sexuality
102–5; neutrality of, 7, 33, 70; raciolinguistic Germany, 44
stratification of, 94; and whiteness, 10–12, 23, Gershon, Ilana, 62
25, 33, 42–44, 94, 165. See also Angloscene; Gerth, Hans, 137
Anglosphere; language; whiteness Gilley, Bruce: “The Case for Colonialism,” 84–85
English as a Foreign Language (EFL), 32, 40 Gilroy, Paul, 100
English as a Second Language (ESL), 4, 16 global citizens, 29
enregisterment, 56, 64–66, 69, 86; gendered, 76; globalization, 9; alternative Sino-African, 4,
of Model C English, 94–96, 98; race and, 30, 32, 48; “equal opportunity” logics of,
90–95. See also chronotopes; race; whiteness 55; linguistic, 17; neoliberal, 160; utopian
environmentalism, 160 imaginaire of, 9–10. See also capitalism;
epistemology: ethno-racial, 2; historical, 17; as neoliberalism
“structures of aspiration,” 112 global knowledge industry, 153. See also
ethics: interactional basis of intersubjective, education
136–37; research, 131. See also guanxi Global North, 8–9, 144
(social relations) Global South, 5, 145, 167n5; Chinese investments
ethnic minorities (shaoshu minzu), 2 in the, 34; dynamic interaction of China with
ethnography, 11, 111–12, 131–32, 154, 167n3; the, 32; politically black genealogies of the,
American, 152; chronotope of an, 151. 120; socialist movements in the, 9
See also anthropology Godin, Seth: Purple Cow: Transform Your
Eurocentrism, 8, 32, 149 Business by Being Remarkable, 55–59
Goethe Institute, 36
Fanon, Frantz, 8, 15, 19, 29, 38, 51, 81–82, 85, Goffman, Erving, 14, 19, 38, 149–50, 154
91–94, 100, 105, 150–53; Black Skin, White Griffith, James, 92
Masks, 71, 83, 91–92; Wretched of the Earth, guanxi (social relations), 24–25, 69, 130–45;
82, 123–24, 126–27 dark side of, 135; dualistic dimensions
Farquhar, Judith, 133 of, 136; instrumentality of making, 140;
Farred, Grant: “Not the Moment After, But the translatability of, 142. See also ethics
Moment Of ” (essay), 15 Guo Hongwo: “Revolutionary Friendship Is as
#FeesMustFall, 160 Deep as the Ocean,” 6–7, 6fig.
Fei Xiaotong, 136–37
feminism, 56, 155. See also black feminist theory; Hage, Ghassan, 73
Chinese feminism; women Haidian, 3–4, 52, 138, 157; bureaucracy of, 45–46;
Fields, Barbara, 2, 79 English as dominant language of African
Fields, Karen, 2, 79 students in, 21–22, 39; infrastructure of, 45;
50 Successful Harvard Application Essays: What police of, 53; universities of, 5, 21–23, 39–43,
Worked for Them Can Help You Get into the 52–54. See also Beijing; education
College of Your Choice, 61 Hanban (Guojia Hanyu Guoji Tuiguang Lingdao
“fighting the tiger” (dalaohu) campaign, 135 Xiaozu Bangongshi), 21, 35–36. See also
Forum on China–Africa Cooperation (FOCAC), China Exploratorium
12, 32, 49 Hangzhou, 48
 General index    191

Hani, Chris, 9 James, William, 137

Harvard University, 61 Jobs, Steve, 45
Hegelian thought, 37 Johannesburg, 4, 74–75, 94. See also South Africa
hei (blackness/darkness), 120–23, 121fig.
heishili (dark forces), 135 Kai-Fu Lee, 45
Helmreich, Stefan, 144 King, Kenneth, 142
Herskovits, Melville, 5–6, 167n5 Kipnis, Andrew, 132–33
heteroglossia, 35–37; postcolonial, 47 Kwame Appiah, Anthony, 100
He Zhen (He-Yin Zhen), 8 Kwindingwi, Wenceslaus, 134
history: dialectical nature of, 15; dominant
China-Africa narrations of, 59; of global language: African, 43; arbitrariness of, 165;
class consciousness and decolonization, 11; Bakhtin’s understanding of language as a
socialist internationalist, 15; social labor of, musical metaphor, 65; Chinese, 112;
56–57 cryptotypic articulations of, 121–22; and
Hong Kong, 60. See also China decolonization, 19; as element of personhood’s
hooks, bell, 62, 76 semiotic infrastructure, 29; as ethnographic
Hubbert, Jennifer, 36 dimension, 30, 110; formalist theory of, 41;
hukou (residence permits), 52–54 indexicalities of, 23; as intimate teleportation
Hunter, Mark, 53, 75 device, 35; material historical conditions of,
23; and mediation, 12; and meta-linguistics,
identity: “cosmopolitan” African, 102–3; 15, 90; mirroring relativist ideologies of,
Euro-American identity branding, 63; loss 166fig.; paradoxes of, 56; politically correct,
of white, 160; negotiated Afro-Chinese, 87–89; politics of, 32, 164; primary metaphors
25; racialized, 102; signs of, 148; and value of, 65; and race, 10, 87–89, 165; reflexivity
distinctions as integrated social phenomena immanent in, 33; Southern African, 169n9;
in political economy of mobility, 54. See also of universalism and relativism, 3; western
identity politics; personhood Sinology on, 120. See also communication;
identity politics: easy readings of, 71; English; media
equal-opportunity assumption of, 63; Laozi: Dao De Jing, 137
micro-political contradictions of, 24. Latin America, 18
See also identity Latour, Bruno, 115–16, 144, 151
ideology: Andersonian language, 143; capitalist Lempert, Michael, 19
ideologies of value, 62; cultural, 131; folk, Lenin, Vladimir, 15
110; liberal, 121, 128, 163; persistence of, 61; liberalism, 7, 153; racial arbitrariness and, 166;
racist, 51, 115; and stratification of gender and unmarked, 159; white, 3, 85, 100, 150, 159–60.
sexuality, 54; Žižek on, 98 See also liberal-racism complex
imperialism: academic defenses of historical, liberal-racism complex, 25, 85, 162–66.
84–85; Anglo-, 17; danger for, 15; Mao See also liberalism; racism
Zedong on, 109; nuclear, 13; white, 85, 153 Lin, Justin, 154–55
Indonesia, 55 literary theory, 143
inequality, 158, 160–61; material and cultural, 164 Liu Xiaoming, 155–58
internet, 13 Longmore, Laura, 74–75
intersectionalities, 54–55, 63–64, 76–77, 146; Lorde, Audre, 9, 24, 56, 166
black feminist theories of race and gender, Lumumba, Patrice, 15, 168n9
90; critical theorizing of, 54, 64; interactional
manifestations of, 64–65, 86; stratification of, Machel, Samora, 9
54, 86; violence of, 64 Mackenzie, Adrian, 144
intersubjectivity: of ideological constructions, Madagascar, 97
16, 24, 65; institutionalized labor as, 37; of mafan (troubled, inconvenient), 87–89
meanings that accrue around signs, 41–42; Mandela, Nelson, 9, 135
personhood and, 39, 70; as social practice, 134 Mannoni, Octave: Prospero and Caliban:
iPhone, 124 The Psychology of Colonization, 71
Ivy League, 4, 12, 34 Maoism: Little Red Book of, 109; reform in, 37
192    General index

Mao Zedong, 8, 37, 150; death of, 18; of intersectionality and, 159; transhistorical
thought of, 109 contextualization of the hierarchies of,
Marcus, George: Writing Culture, 83 72–74; unmarked social, 147. See also
marginalization, 20, 54; queer identity as, 64; cosmopolitanism; personhood
systematic, 63 modernity: anomic, 123; Chinese postsocialist,
Marx, Karl, 8, 33, 115, 128 31, 118, 133–34; colonial, 74–75; cosmopolitan,
Marxism, 8, 37; Asian, African, and Latin 7, 118; global, 3; industrial, 117, 124;
American, 8; ideological centrality of the postcolonial, 133. See also cosmopolitanism
sensorium for, 128; postcolonial, 24. modernization theory, 15
See also socialism monolingualism, 32–34
Matolino, Bernard, 134 Mozambique, 4
Mauss, Marcel, 38 Mugabe, President Robert, 58
Mbembe, Achille, 9, 100, 150 multiculturalism, 130, 149
McKaiser, Eusebius, 95–96; “The Unbearable multilingualism, 50, 144
Whiteness of Being,” 95–96 Munn, Nancy, 39
meaning, 81. See also pragmatist semiotics; Mwepikeni, Peter, 141
semantic relativism
media, 1–2, 35, 102–3, 110–12; African and Nakassis, Constantine, 147
race politics in the South African, 46; nationalism, 1–2; African, 18; Chinese, 9–10;
Anglo-centric mass, 153; Chinese influence Han ethno-centric, 2, 160
in the, 49; as element of personhood’s nature, 109–10, 118, 120; Anglo-racial blackness
semiotic infrastructure, 29; landscapes and, 123
of, 29; linguistic anthropologists of, 117; Neo-Confucianism, 137
multifaceted assemblage of, 45; objects of neoliberalism, 14, 59, 116, 135, 141, 160.
the, 7; propinquity of, 30; representations See also globalization
of black subjects in China in the, 93; South New Oriental (Xindongfang), 45, 89
African, 103; translation as a general trope New York Times, 44
of mediation in theory of, 110; western, 2–3, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, 17–19
50, 100; white liberal position in the British, Niranjana, Tejaswini, 137
100. See also CCTV; CNN; language; media Nixon, Richard, 9
theory; social media Nkrumah, Kwame, 9, 18
media theory, 111–12; postmodern, 115. Noah, Trevor, 86, 99–105, 147; The Daywalker
See also media (comedy show), 103–5
Mencius, 136; The Mencius, 137 nonalignment, 8; third worldism and, 14
Mendoza-Denton, Norma, 83–84 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO),
meta-pragmatics, 12 9, 18
meta-translators, 151
Metz, Thaddeus, 134 Obama, Barack, 159
migrants, 29, 52–54, 73; black labor, 75; Occidentalism, 31, 120
contemporary Fuzhounese, 72–73; October Revolution, 15
educational, 73, 147; futurity of, 54; labor, 53, Ogude, James, 134
72–75. See also African educational migrants; Orientalism, 44, 120, 133, 144; internal, 31;
refugees western, 31, 50, 112. See also Sinology
Mills, Charles, 100, 137, 164 Oxbridge, 4, 12, 34
Mingming Wang, 31–32
mobility: conditions of, 29–30, 41, 73, 148–49; Pakistan, 4
constrained, 53; contemporary logics of, 62; Pan-African congresses, 8
and cosmopolitan aspiration, 12, 14, 53, 94, Pan-Africanism, 11, 18, 21, 43
147; educational, 54; existential, 73; failures paper tigers (zhi laohu), 109–29
of, 73, 124; hierarchies of race and, 60, 94; Peirce, Charles Sanders, 78, 81, 137, 141
intersectional, 55–57; late capitalist, 73; mass, Pennycook, Alastair: Global Englishes and
12; non-white immigrant, 73; stratification Transcultural Flows, 16–17, 19
 General index    193

performativity, 64–65; dialectical manifestation provider love, 53, 75

in mass-mediated ethnographic contexts of, Purple Cow, 55–77, 99, 101, 147; “equal
65; language, 64 opportunity” logic of the, 76; female
personhood: as analytical proposition, 29; members of, 75–76; limitations of the dream
Angloscene as material and ideological of the, 69; male members of, 72
affordance for generating conditions of, 38;
archetypes of cosmopolitan, 34, 62–63, race: in Afro-Chinese encounters, 24, 86–89,
100–101; Black Consciousness as a conduit 122–23; and cosmopolitan mobility, 23, 60;
for achieving full, 50; commonality of, 135; and enregisterment, 90–95; hierarchies of,
crises of, 12; definition of, 30; dreams of 54, 60, 85; language and, 10, 13, 87–89, 165;
efficacious, 29; as fundamental discursive liberal educational discourse on, 91, 163;
battleground in Sino-African postsocialist mirroring relativist ideologies of, 166fig.;
and postcolonial translations, 23, 38–39; postcolonial politics of, 164; pragmatics of,
icons of, 73, 98–101, 147–48; intersubjective 81; racial arbitrariness, 164, 164fig. See also
emergence of, 70, 142; linguistic blackness; enregisterment; racism; whiteness
anthropological framings of spatiotemporally racism: American, 159–60; Anglo racist
contingent, 55; performative theories of, tropes, 123; Biko’s view of the origins of,
43–44; “politically correct,” 86, 100–101; 51; in Chinese advertising, 92–93; forms
possibilities of, 20, 39, 54, 129; postcolonial, of Chinese, 79, 86–89, 92–93, 99, 118–19,
7, 38; postintersectional, 72; practice-based 122; global inequality and, 144; ideological
theories of, 43–44; pragmatist and critical manifestation of, 118; infrastructural,
theoretical genealogies in contemporary 163–64, 164fig.; institutional, 89; liberal,
anthropologies of, 30; racism and, 78; 81, 91, 160, 163; and personhood, 78; as
Sino-African postcolonial, 24; stereotypes racial essentialism, 81, 105, 121; and racial
and figures of, 65; unfinalizability of, ideology, 115, 121; settler colonial, 80, 105;
150; unidirectional relationship between South African, 95; structural and other forms
signs and, 44. See also cosmopolitanism; of, 94; urban racial profiling, 80. See also
identity; mobility; semiotic infrastructures; liberal-racism complex; race; violence; white
subjectivity; translation supremacy
Pines, Jim, 100 Rainbow Bridge. See Caihong Qiao
Pingguo University, 55 (“Rainbow Bridge”)
Pleco, 114, 124 Rainbow Nationalism, 141
poetics: canonic, 63–69; micro-interactional, 55 refugees, 29. See also migrants
political correctness, 86–89, 98; abandonment renqing (intersocial ties), 72, 132–33
of, 88; Anglosphere’s regime of, 89, 105; revolution, anti-imperialist, 15
language of, 87–89; register of, 88; Robinson, Cedric, 62
western-centric white, 100 Rofel, Lisa, 73, 270n1
popular culture, 13, 104, 135 Rosa, Jonathan, 84
postcolonialism, 3, 33–34, 159; personhood of, Rostow, Walter, 5–6; The Stages of Economic
7, 38; politics of, 72–74. See also colonialism; Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto, 16
postcolonial theory Russia, 44
postcolonial theory, 19, 25, 29, 91, 111, 127, 163, Rwanda, 4
167n4; genealogy of, 33, 149; resistance to,
84–85; translation as the primary analytic of, Said, Edward, 82, 150, 153
149. See also postcolonialism Sandberg, Sheryl, 147; Lean In: Women, Work,
posthumanism, critique of, 123 and the Will to Lead, 56–57, 62, 70–73, 76
postmodernism, 19–20, 115, 130 sangoma (witch), 69
Povinelli, Elizabeth, 150 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 81
pragmatist semiotics, 19, 25. See also meaning; Schmitz, Cheryl, 135
semiotic infrastructures Schramm, Wilbur, 5–6, 167n5
primitivism, 44, 144 Second World War, 7
prostitution, 52–54, 75 Sékou Touré, Ahmed, 9, 18
194    General index

semantic relativism, 120, 122. See also meaning Soviet Union, 139
semiotic infrastructures, 29. See also personhood; Spain, 44
pragmatist semiotics speech acts, 146
Senegal, 4, 97 Spivak, Gayatri, 82, 143, 149–50, 162
Senghor, Léopold Sédar, 9 Spring Gala, 1–2
sensorium, 128–29, 146–47 Spring Festival, 1
sexual economy, 52–53 “squashing the flies altogether” (dahu paiying)
sexuality, 24; gay, 48; queer, 63–64; Sino-African, campaign, 135
87–89; stratification of, 54. See also gender structuralism, postmodern accusation of, 20
shanshui (poetic expression of nature-feeling), subaltern, 13, 17, 20, 24, 59, 89, 128, 154–59, 162
120, 122–23 subjectivity: compromised, 29; imagined, 34;
Shen Lu, 93 persistent historical precarity of postcolonial,
Sichuan, 53. See also China 33; pragmatic effects of historically plural,
Silverstein, Michael, 134, 143 34; stratifying, 153; white, 90. See also
Sino-exceptionalism, 31–32. See also China personhood
Sinology, 119–20; Chinese, 120, 135; “universal” Sullivan, Michael, 122
archive of, 32; western, 31, 120, 135–36. superdiversity, 17
See also Orientialism Sweden, 49, 55
Sinosphere, 31, 119–20. See also China
socialism, 8, 15; aesthetic and linguistic registers Tanzania, 155
of, 37; African, 18; socialism and third-world Thacker, Eugene: The Exploit: A Theory of
solidarity, 22, 139–40, 144–45; socialist Networks, 116
internationalism, 14, 22; socialist movements third worldism, 5–6, 11, 137; and cosmopolitan
in the Global South, 9. See also Marxism double-consciousness, 10; and
social labor, 20 nonalignment, 14; revolutionary, 9; solidarity
social media, 41, 59; Anglophone African, 96; of, 7, 18; southern global front of, 8
Chinese, 43, 45, 123; liberal narrative of the Third World Quarterly, 84–85
emancipatory possibilities of information Tiananmen protests (1989), 9
technology and, 113; memes of, 96–98; South tigers, 110–12
African, 96–98; student social media groups, Tracey, Andrew, 170n10
51; western, 169n7. See also media; WeChat translation, 116, 146, 163; Angloscene as a zone
(Weixin); Weibo of, 23–24, 45–46, 50; arbitrary theater of
social reform, 90 postcolonial, 50; compromised units of, 24;
social sciences, 115, 149 decolonization as a semantic process of, 82;
solipsism, 149 of iconicity and alterity, 81; means of, 128–29;
South Africa, 9, 22, 46, 96–100, 156; Black men metaphor of, 33; postcolonial, 148–49, 151;
of, 74; corruption discourse of, 137; emerging as practice of “commensurating meaning”
cosmopolitan class in, 22; inequality in, 159; between languages, 143; pragmatics of, 24,
inter-African xenophobia in, 94; linguistic 33–34, 111–12, 127, 130–45, 147; racialized
registers of, 94; pass-laws of, 74–75; post- infrastructures and translational labor,
apartheid reconstruction and reconciliation 79–86; Sino-African, 25, 45, 59, 110; Three
in, 67; prison-mine complex in, 74; private receptional dimensions of, 117fig. See also
girls’ high school in, 55; protests against personhood
white monopoly capital in, 165; universities transnationalism, 14; twenty-first-century, 29
of, 4, 22, 36, 138. See also Africa; African Trivedi, Harish: Postcolonial Translation: Theory
National Congress (ANC); Afrikaners; and Practice (introduction), 82
apartheid; Johannesburg Trotsky, Leon, 15
South China Morning Post, 110 Trouillot, Michel-Rolph, 83
Southern African Development Community Trump, Donald, 159
(SADC), 101 Tutu, Desmond, 135
South Korean national museum, 36 Twitter, 60, 169n7
 General index    195

Ubuntu, 24–25, 130–45; translatability of, 142. unmarked, 128, 161–62. See also Angloscene;
See also witchcraft Anglosphere; English; enregisterment;
United States, 9, 150, 159–61; cosmopolitan liberalism; race; white supremacy
Chinese graduate students in the, 148; white supremacy, 85, 159–62; American, 159–60;
information technology and software patriarchs of global, 161; racism of, 105.
monopolies of the, 13; media of the, 100; See also racism; whiteness
minority communities in the, 84; as paper Whorf, Benjamin, 121–22
tiger, 109; racism in the, 159; soft power of Winfrey, Oprah, 86, 98–101, 103–5, 147
the, 34; universities of the, 22, 159; values witchcraft, 69, 134–35, 137, 140. See also Ubuntu
of the, 62 women: Black South African, 74, 97–98;
Urban, Greg, 143 cosmopolitan black, 98; “equal opportunity”
promise of free-market capitalism as a path
van Onselen, Charles, 74–75 to personal empowerment and gender
violence: anthropological, 152; of decolonization, equality for Chinese, 56; young black women
82, 152; Euro-American racio-colonial, 2; and the obstacles of patriarchy for, 68–69.
genocide and other forms of identity-based, See also feminism
94; intersectional, 80; xenophobic, 4. Woolard, Kathryn, 90
See also racism World Bank, 154
Vukovich, Daniel: Illiberal China, 33 World War II, 13

Wall Street English, 47 Xi Jinping, 37

Wang Yuejun, 123 Xu, Vivian, 56, 60–63, 70–74, 76
Weber, Max, 115, 168n5, 169n6
WeChat (Weixin), 43, 46, 60, 92, 99, 114, 117, 156, Yao Ming, 45, 125fig.
169n7. See also social media YouTube, 102
Weibo, 92, 110. See also social media Yu Huiping: This Is Africa
West, Anne, 155–58 (photographic series), 123
WhatsApp, 60, 169n7
whiteness, 3, 7, 14, 82, 163; as aspirational Zhao Yixin, 123
horizon, 14, 161, 164; English and, 10–12, Zheng He, Admiral, 59
23, 25, 33, 42–44, 94, 165; French and, Zimbabwe, 22–23, 53, 75, 79–80, 86, 89, 94,
83; hegemonic, 162; ideological gravity 97, 138; Chimurenga music of, 53; hygiene
of, 146–47, 150–51; ideological vectors of commodities in, 62; ZANU-PF party of, 58.
cosmopolitan desire and, 33, 92; mirroring See also Africa
pragmatic stratifications of, 165fig.; ziran (Linnaean biological segmentation), 120,
political correctness and, 92; political 122–23
stratifications of, 164; racial capital of, Ziright iGirls, 96–98
85–86, 92–94; raciolinguistic horizons of, 84; Žižek, Slavoj, 61, 98
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 6 × 9  SPINE: 0.485  FLAPS: 0

A ngloscene examines Afro-Chinese interactions within Beijing’s aspirationally cos-

Ke-Schutte
mopolitan student class. Jay Ke-Schutte explores the ways in which many contem-
porary interactions between Chinese and African university students are mediated
through complex intersectional relationships with whiteness, the English language, and
cosmopolitan aspiration. At the heart of these tensions, a question persistently emerges:
How does English become more than a language—and whiteness more than a race?
Engaging in this inquiry, Ke-Schutte explores twenty-first century Afro-Chinese encoun-
ters as translational events that diagram the discursive contours of a changing transna-

ANGLOSCENE
tional political order—one that will certainly be shaped by African and Chinese relations.

“A tremendously nuanced book that moves beyond the verities of postcolonial theory
as much as liberal illusions of postracialism in the academy. The ethnographic richness
of Angloscene in its expositions of tropes and situated encounters is remarkable and
pointed—even poignant.”—DILIP M. MENON, editor of Changing Theory: Concepts from
the Global South

Compromised Personhood in Afro-Chinese Translations

“Reflecting a critical sensibility from the Global South, Jay Ke-Schutte’s book defies Euro-
American-centric perspectives on language, race, and colonialism. The innovative concept

ANGLOSCENE
of the Angloscene offers an imaginative way to unpack the transnational power matrix
that conditions Afro-Chinese encounters.”—FAN YANG, author of Faked in China: Nation
Branding, Counterfeit Culture, and Globalization

“This book reveals the manner in which talk about signs of race and the racialization of
those engaged in talk readily emerge hand in hand within social encounters, so that to iso-
late them from each other is to lose sight of the processes through which inequity persists
in social life even when it is abjured.”—ASIF AGHA, Francis E. Johnston Term Professor of
Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania, and Editor-in-Chief, Signs and Society

JAY KE-SCHUTTE is a linguistic anthropologist and interdisciplinary

ethnographer in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at
Zhejiang University in Hangzhou.

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

www.ucpress.edu

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos,

University of California Press’s Open Access publishing pro-
gram. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more.

Cover design: Michelle Black Compromised Personhood in Afro-Chinese Translations

Cover illustration: Still from Notes Towards a Model
Opera (2015), courtesy of the William Kentridge Studio Jay Ke-Schutte