Reconfiguring Racial Capitalism: South Africa in the Chinese Century

This event took place on March 20th, 2025 and was hosted in person at Georgetown University’s McGhee Library.

Join the Africa-China Initiative for a book talk with author Mingwei Huang on her recently published book, Reconfiguring Racial Capitalism: South Africa in the Chinese Century. Anita Plummer and Christopher J. Lee serve as discussants.

In Reconfiguring Racial Capitalism, Mingwei Huang traces the development of new forms of racial capitalism in the twenty-first century. Through fieldwork in one of the “China malls” that has emerged along Johannesburg’s former mining belt, Huang identifies everyday relations of power and difference between Chinese entrepreneurs and African migrant workers in these wholesale shops. These relations, Huang contends, replicate and perpetuate global structures of white supremacy, anti-Blackness, capitalism, and colonialism, even when whiteness is not present. Huang argues that this dynamic reflects the sedimented legacies and continued operation of white supremacy and colonialism, which have been transformed in the shift of capitalism’s center of gravity toward China and the Global South. These new forms of racial capitalism and empire layer onto and extend histories of exploitation and racialization in South Africa. Taking a palimpsestic approach, Huang offers tools for understanding this shift and decentering contemporary Western conceptions of race, empire, and racial capitalism in the Chinese Century.

This event was co-sponsored by Georgetown University’s Africa-China Initiative and Initiative for U.S.-China Dialogue on Global Issues.

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Mingwei Huang (Author) is an Assistant Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Dartmouth College. She is the author of Reconfiguring Racial Capitalism: South Africa in the Chinese Century (Duke University Press, 2024). An interdisciplinary scholar of Afro-Asia/Africa-China, she holds a PhD in American Studies from the University of Minnesota. Previously, she was affiliated with the Centre for Indian Studies in Africa at the University of Witwatersrand. Her research appears in Scholar & Feminist Online, Radical History Review, Public Culture, Verge, and Made in China.

Anita Plummer (Discussant) is an Associate Professor of African Studies at Howard University. Currently, she is the Associate Director of Research and Faculty Engagement at the Center for Women, Gender, and Global Leadership. She is a co-convenor for the Africa-China Initiative’s Research Working Group titled “Demand, Disruption, and Transformation: African Agency in Digital Geopolitics.” Her research and teaching focus on African political economy, transnationalism, public diplomacy, and Sino-African relations.

Christopher J. Lee (Discussant) has held academic appointments at institutions in Africa, Asia, and North America. He recently served as Professor of African History, World History, and African Literature at The Africa Institute, Sharjah, UAE. He currently teaches with the Bard Prison Initiative. He is also a Non-Resident Fellow of the W. E. B. Du Bois Research Institute at the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research, Harvard University. He has previously taught at Stanford, Harvard, Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania, and the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.