Organisers:
Nicholas McGee nicholas.mcgee@durham.ac.uk
Yaru Yang yaru.yang-2@postgrad.manchester.ac.uk
The contemporary relationship between African nations and China has caught the world’s attention. The ever-increasing presence of Chinese capital, goods, projects, and migrants on the African continent, and the reciprocal presence of Africa and Africans in China, is transforming economics, ecologies, and everyday lives. These dynamics raise new challenges and questions in the present and open up opportunities to re-assert history and re-imagine the future. Our stream seeks to think from, not merely think of, Africa-China encounters, through collective and critical endeavours to address, reflect on, and theorise the problems emerging in new historical terrains. It examines multiple layers at which these connections are being forged and contested, both macro-level interactions between states, corporations, institutions, and policies, and micro-level interactions shaping personhood, lifestyle, morality, sociality against the backdrop of wider structures of mistrust, difference, and inequality.
This stream is affiliated by the vibrant China in Africa/Africans in China research network, with members across the world. Bringing scholars working on Africa-China across different backgrounds aims to break out the extant disciplinary frameworks and encourage intersectional thinking and critical dialogues. Moreover, it helps to create a more holistic picture of the diversity of these connections and emphasize their collective significance to both China and Africa. Consequently, this stream welcomes scholars from any discipline, especially those in the social sciences and humanities, who are conducting rigorous research on the ground with African and Chinese actors and primary sources. We are particularly interested in researchers exploring the complex dynamics of race, inequality, intimacy, and solidarity in Sino-African encounters. Together, we hope this stream will broaden understandings of the increasingly significant linkages between African nations and China, and enable scholars to think from this relationship as a site of intellectual and theoretical inspiration.
