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E-book Angloscene : Compromised Personhood in Afro-Chinese Translations

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Penilaian

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In this sense, the February 2018 broadcast should have stood out for its inclu-sion of Africa and Africans, an inclusion that also should have prompted epis-temic 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 reor-der 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 lat-ter case, commentary was often voiced in English—“this is racism”—or mediated through the Chinese gloss, zhongzuqishi.2Both 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 unnec-essary 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 colonial-ism (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 trans-figured 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 asso-ciations 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 west-ern 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 stu-dents’ 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 reorder-ings—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 rela-tionship 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 through-out the course of the following chapters address two primary concerns. The first is an analysis of how current Sino-African encounters contest or recontextual-ize, perpetuate or fetishize the persistence of Anglocentrism, cosmopolitanism, and whiteness as historically imbricated manifestations of western hegemony.3The 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.4 Thus, this manuscript grounds its methodological approach in the study of interactions—considered as dialectically contingent on, and constitu-tive of, the historical and material conditions of their contextualization. What follows undertakes a critical semiotics of postcolonial translation at an impor-tant breakdown point of both western liberal postracialism and its identitarian radical antagonists—the Afro-Chinese encounter.

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Ketersediaan

Informasi Detail

Judul Seri

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No. Panggil

378.1 KES a

Penerbit

USA : University of California Press., 2023

Deskripsi Fisik

212 hlm

Bahasa

English

ISBN/ISSN

9780520389823

Klasifikasi

378.1

Tipe Isi

text

Tipe Media

computer

Tipe Pembawa

online resource

Edisi

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Subjek

Organization and Activities in Higher Education

Info Detail Spesifik

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Pernyataan Tanggungjawab

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Versi lain/terkait

Lampiran Berkas

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