Layered Histories

Chapter 1, “Palimpsest City,” provides a layered history of contemporary Chinese world making. The chapter is based in two sites in Johannesburg: the “mining belt mall,” a symbol of post-2000 Chinese developments along the old mining belt, and the city’s two Chinatowns, which illustrate the multiplicity of Chinese diasporic communities over time. Through its palimpsestic reading of the mall, the chapter provides historical and methodological context for the chapters that follow.

Chapter 2, “Sojourner Colonialism,” offers a critical analysis of Chinese entrepreneurial migration to South Africa as an unsettler colonial project with distinct spatial and temporal logics. It begins with an overview of dominant Western depictions of the Chinese migrant in Africa as a neocolonial pioneer and a discussion of Asian settler colonialism to lay out the stakes of Chinese migration to the settler colony of South Africa. Departing from this macroexamination, the chapter tells the stories of Chinese migrants’ lives and migratory routes to South Africa. These stories reflect the contradictory transformations of economic reform that produced the Chinese Century and propelled many to the Global South to catch up to the promise of a rising China. Chinese migrants’ trajectories and worldviews offer a glimpse of Sinocentric imaginaries of a changing global hierarchy.