The contributors to New World Orderings demonstrate that China’s twenty-first-century rise occurs not only through economics and state politics but equally through the mutual entanglements of overlapping social, economic, and cultural worlds in Southeast Asia, Africa, and Latin America. They show how the Chinese state has sought to reconfigure the nation’s position in the world and the centrality of trade, labor, religion, migration, gender, race, and literature to this reconfiguration. Among other topics, the contributors examine China’s post-Bandung cultural diplomacy with African nations, how West African “pastor-entrepreneurs” in China interpreted and preached the prosperity doctrine, the diversity of Chinese-Argentine social relations in the soy supply chain, and the ties between China and India within the complex history of inter-Asian exchange and Chinese migration to Southeast Asia. By examining China’s long historical relationship with the Global South, this volume presents a non-state-centric history of China that foregrounds the importance of transnational communicative and imaginative worldmaking processes and interactions.
Contributors. Andrea Bachner, Luciano DamiÁn Bolinaga, Nellie Chu, Rachel Cypher, Mingwei Huang, T. Tu Huynh, Yu-lin Lee, Ng Kim Chew, Lisa Rofel, Carlos Rojas, Shuang Shen, Derek Sheridan, Nicolai Volland
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction: Contact, Communication, Imagination, and Strategies of Worldmaking / Carlos Rojas and Lisa Rofel 1
Part I. Geopolitics and Discourse
1. Turning the Tables on the Global North: China, Afro-Asia, and Cold War Cultural Diplomacy / Nicolai Volland 21
2. From the Washington Consensus to the Beijing Consensus: Latin America Facing the Rise of China as a Great Power / Luciano DamiÁn Bolinaga 38
3. Prehistories of China-Tanzania: Intermediaries, Subempires, and the Use of Abuse of Comparison / Derek Sheridan 58
4. A World Republic of Southern Letters / Ng Kim Chew 75
Part II. Labor and Exchange
5. New Livelihood Strategies and Ways of Being for African Women and Men in China's Workshop of the World / T. Tu Huynh 95
6. Prophetic Becoming: The Prosperity Doctrine in Guangzhou, China / Nellie Chu 113
7. Soy Makes Us Friends . . . or Not: Negotiating the “Chinese Landing“ in Argentina’s Contact Zone / Rachel Cypher and Lisa Rofel 131
8. Displacing Labor: China, Argentina, and the Work of Globalization / Andrea Bachner 149
Part III. Mobility and Displacement
9. Global South Frontiers: Chinese Worldmaking and Racial Imaginaries of Johannesburg / Mingwei Huang 169
10. A Cultural Cartography of the Sinophone Diaspora in Southeast Asia: The Cinema of Midi Z / Yu-Lin Lee 187
11. Writing South: Narratives of Homeland and Diaspora in Southeast Asia / Carlos Rojas 204
12. The Chinese Literary Imaginary and the Global South in Deep Time / Shuang Shen 222
Works Cited 241
Contributors 261
Index 265
Lisa Rofel is Professor Emerita of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and author of Desiring China: Experiments in Neoliberalism, Sexuality, and Public Culture, also published by Duke University Press.
Carlos Rojas is Professor of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at Duke University and author of Homesickness: Culture, Contagion, and National Transformation in Modern China.
