Angloscene

Front matter

if E ash ~g TR Fae

C aa a e, v ee a i SIR a ARA PRY ORISI E ;

ON a BR N a:

Introduction

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

PART II. COMPROMISE 4. How Paper Tigers Kill 5. Ubuntu/Guanxi and the Pragmatics of Translation

Notes Bibliography General Index xii

109 130

173 187

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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 professionalism 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 sections 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 University 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 Seminar; #RhodesMustFall; #FeesMustFall; the Society for Linguistic Anthropology (SLA); Media For Justice; Southwestern Minzu University Department of Anthropology; 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 generously 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 Goodman 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 during 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.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Revolutionary Friendship Is as Deep as the Ocean 6

Bus route in Beijing 113

Three receptional dimensions of translation 117

Semantically relative associations of hei 121

Yao Ming studying English 125

Cowboy-themed ad for English and standardized test prep instruction Racial arbitrariness 164

Infrastructural racism 164

Mirroring pragmatic stratifications of English and whiteness 165 Mirroring relativist ideologies of race and language 166

BRICS CCTB CFL

CI

CPS EFL FOCAC GRE Hanban

HSK RP

ACRONYMS AND ABBREVIATIONS

Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa

Central Compilation and Translation Bureau (Zhongyang Bianyi Ju) Chinese as a Foreign Language

Confucius Institute

Central Party School (Zhonggong Zhongyang Dangxiao)

English as a Foreign Language

Forum on China—Africa Cooperation

Graduate Record Examination

Office of Chinese Language Council International (Guojia Hanyu Guoji Tuiguang Lingdao Xiaozu Bangongshi)

Hanyu Shuiping Kaoshi (Standard Test of Chinese Proficiency) 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 unprecedented 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 blackface 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.’

To contextualize this description, it is useful to understand that the Spring Gala concert is watched, actively or passively, in almost every Chinese home, forming 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 undertakes through mass-mediated spectacle. For many outside viewers, the content 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 inclusion of Africa and Africans, an inclusion that also should have prompted epistemic 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 reorder 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 latter case, commentary was often voiced in English—“this is racism’—or mediated through the Chinese gloss, zhongzuqishi.”

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 unnecessary 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 colonialism (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 transfigured 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 associations 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 western media and its presumed audience seemed to reveal a familiar sleight of hand 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 students’ 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 reorderings—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 relationship 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 throughout the course of the following chapters address two primary concerns. The first is an analysis of how current Sino-African encounters contest or recontextualize, perpetuate or fetishize the persistence of Anglocentrism, cosmopolitanism, and whiteness as historically imbricated manifestations of western hegemony.’ 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.* Thus, this manuscript grounds its methodological approach in the study of interactions—considered as dialectically contingent on, and constitutive of, the historical and material conditions of their contextualization. What follows undertakes a critical semiotics of postcolonial translation at an important breakdown point of both western liberal postracialism and its identitarian radical antagonists—the Afro-Chinese encounter.

FROM HAIDIAN TO JOHANNESBURG AND BACK

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 African 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 children 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, teaching a course called English for Medical Purposes at the University of the Witwatersrand 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 professionals 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 opportunities 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 academically talented African students’ relatively easy passage into Chinese university programs. 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 African Africans being killed on the streets of Johannesburg with little consequence. Almost anywhere would have been better for an “other-African” educational 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 continent 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 situations” in their home countries. While many were longing for a better tomorrow, some had learned that the memorization of one particular phrase became necessary 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” universities. This phrase was disanshijie datuanjie: “third-world solidarity.” When strategically 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 conference. 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 underdevelopment in area studies and the development-oriented social sciences. This shift from horizontal to vertical meanings of third worldness owes much to the writing and institutional labor of American intellectuals like Walter Rostow, Melville Herskovits, and Wilbur Schramm, all of whom devoted their careers to producing conceptual alternatives in development, area, and communication studies that

Sm RETR MS

FIGURE 1. Revolutionary Friendship Is as Deep as the Ocean, Stefan Landsberger Collection, International Institute of Social History (ISH), Amsterdam.

could counter the appeal of communism in China and other newly decolonizing countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.° 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 cultivation 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 mediated through the politically correct prose of a persistent, global Anglocentrism? Are many of Beijings 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 university residence. I found out, through the course of my fieldwork, that it had, in fact, 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 awareness 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 initial compromises and contradictions, I encountered a “point of breakdown” or “friction” at the edge of a substantial social problem: a counterintuitive contradiction 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, isnt 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 purported victories of cultural relativism, global anti-racism, and liberalism as internalized, 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.° In light of such contradictions, it remains surprising how often Euro-American intellectuals who are concerned with decolonization frequently fail to discuss the broader intellectual 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 commonsense 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 encompassment 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 uncompelling 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 preferred. 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 undergraduate 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 contributed significantly to the establishment of Marxism as a methodological perspective in American social sciences training.

The stratifying contours of biopolitics, empire, multitudes, expulsions, cruel optimism, cultural capital, and intersectionality as key terms, which many contemporary 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 revolutionary and decolonial theorist, Frantz Fanon.’ All revealed the empirical dimensions of what these keywords would later depict. Fundamentally developing their own respective genealogies, they made their political and intellectual projects 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?

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 sanctions 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 consumption 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 awakening of a global imaginaire—what he terms a “constructed landscape of collective 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 globalization 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 globalization’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 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 cosmopolitan 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 ideologically and discursively stratifies all non-heteronormative, non-white subjects in ultimately unequal ways, even within a non-western encounter.

ENGLISH AND WHITENESS

The ethnography that follows will show that the experience and recruitment of English and whiteness in interactions among African students and their Chinese interlocutors 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 Boiss 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 participant 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 limited 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 transnational 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 informants, though coming from different national and linguistic backgrounds, shared 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, engendering 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.