This fall 2011, the RSP collective teams up with Center for African and African American Research (CAAAR) to host a working/reading group on the role of the Chinese in Africa and the African Diaspora from a global perspective. We seek to begin a discussion and later host a symposium about the differences in hegemony posed by the rise of China as one of, if not the most pivotal leader of the world economy, that will include investigating China’s Asian and general American (as in the Americas) relationships.
In other words, we are interested in what forms of newness and/or continuity are emergent in this moment of epochal change. How have the people in the Global South in particular been responding to new matrices of power registered, for example, in new waves of migrant Chinese labor? How are these relationships expressed in and shaped by visual art, film, and literature (both fictional and nonficitional)? Above for example, is the Trinidadian artist Richard Rawlings’ artistic rendition of the Chinese worker in the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago. Enjoy. We will post updates as this project gets underway.
Essays on Global Blackness & Questions of Freedom 