Disorienting Politics: Chimerican Media and Transpacific Entanglements (University of Michigan Press, 2024) mines twenty-first-century media artefacts to make visible the economic, cultural, political, and ecological entanglements of China and the United States. Originating in the United States but circulati…

In Reconfiguring Racial Capitalism: South Africa in the Chinese Century (Duke University Press, 2024), Mingwei Huang traces the transformation of global capitalism and its racial configurations at Johannesburg’s Chinese wholesale malls, also known as ‘China Malls’. Facilitated by the ongoing southward moveme…

Collaborative Damage: An Experimental Ethnography of Chinese Globalization (Cornell University Press, 2022) is the outcome of a collaborative project conducted by three Danish anthropologists on China’s global impact and involvement in Mongolia and Mozambique. In the field, the anthropologists started to arg…

While China’s engagement in Africa’s infrastructure sector has generated a burgeoning scholarship, fieldwork-based, full-length monographs with a comparative perspective remain few. The Railpolitik: Leadership and Agency in Sino-African Infrastructure Development (Oxford University Press, 2023) falls into th…

In Chinese Espresso: Contested Race and Convivial Space in Contemporary Italy (Princeton University Press, 2024), Grazia Ting Deng analyses one of the most characteristic Italian places: the coffee bar. Drawing from long-term ethnographic research, including some months of work as an informal and unpaid appr…

Touching, absorbing, and, at times, hilarious, the 2023 documentary Eat Bitter reveals the human face of Chinese involvement in Africa. Set in Bangui, the capital of the Central African Republic, the film follows Thomas Boa and Jianmin Luan, two men whose lives are intertwined by sand. Thomas dives for sand…