Precarious Accumulation

“Precarious Accumulation is a rich ethnography and analytically sharp book that outlines the aspirational dimensions of entrepreneurial efforts at accumulation and the ways these aspirations chafe against everyday structural constraints. Nellie Chu’s examination of the struggles of different migrant entrepreneurs who gather at a central hub of the ‘fast fashion’ global supply chain is intimate and eye-opening.” - Julie Y. Chu, author of Cosmologies of Credit: Transnational Mobility and the Politics of Destination in China

“Through her ethnography of small-scale subcontractors in Guangzhou, Chu shows how the manufacturing of fast fashion in China after the postsocialist transformation has produced a distinct form of precarity. Her analysis of entrepreneurs’ attempts to move from the precariousness of wage labor to the precarious accumulation of capital makes an important contribution to scholarship on precarity, the anthropology of supply-chain capitalism, and postsocialist China.” - Sylvia J. Yanagisako, coauthor of Fabricating Transnational Capitalism: A Collaborative Ethnography of Italian-Chinese Global Fashion

"This book is essential reading for sociologists, anthropologists and geographers of globalization, labor, migration, and supply chain capitalism. It offers future researchers a roadmap for doing ethnography of supply chain from below." - Ian Liujia Tian, Critical Sociology