Sojourner Colonialism
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Published:December 2024
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.
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