Criminal Obsessions and Racial Fictions

Chapter 5, “Criminal Obsessions and Racial Fictions,” gives an ethnographic account of Chinese racial formations and anti-Blackness. It does so through the everyday talk of crime that relationally constructs Chinese migrants and property as the victims of Black crime and legitimates racial profiling and surveillance. These contemporary racial relations between Chinese and Black southern Africans refashion white racial paternalism toward Black South Africans. The chapter also attends to the transnational aspects of racial formation by tracing how language, stereotypes, and imaginaries—Black labor, Black criminality, and racial nationalism—shape meanings of Blackness and Chineseness as they circulate between China and South Africa.