“Reconfiguring Racial Capitalism is a tour de force in terms of its original and nuanced theoretical interventions into scholarship on racial capitalism. Its originality lies in its move beyond reliance on the binaries of the West and the rest, first world/third world, or a generic Global South. Instead, Mingwei Huang challenges the widespread, reductive debate about whether China is merely replicating Western imperialism. She offers an incredibly insightful analysis of how racial capitalism works in a south-south relationship where the superiority of Euro-American whiteness is not at the center but nonetheless lingers. This is one of the most important books on racial capitalism I’ve read in a long time.” - Lisa Rofel, author of Desiring China: Experiments in Neoliberalism, Sexuality, and Public Culture
“Mingwei Huang significantly challenges the representation of China’s capitalist ventures as distinct and unbridled. She shows that we cannot understand Chinese capitalism without recognizing its deep imbrication in the global racial hierarchy that was established through European expansion and the emergence of white supremacy over the past five centuries. A timely, smart, innovative, and important book.” - Jemima Pierre, author of The Predicament of Blackness: Postcolonial Ghana and the Politics of Race
"This thoughtful, densely analytical study of racial capitalism in South Africa is based on 18 months of the author's ethnographic research at China City, one of a number of wholesale shopping centers along Johannesburg’s old mining belt featuring low-cost goods from China. Huang focuses on the Chinese merchants who work at China City, whom she refers to as “sojourner colonizers,” and their interactions with their Black shop workers, most of whom are migrants from Malawi and Zimbabwe. . . . Recommended." - J. O. Gump, Choice
"The author’s theoretical perspective is both innovative and profound. . . . Reconfiguring Racial Capitalism offers a novel perspective for comprehending global capitalism and racial inequality, particularly providing significant insights into the economic interactions between China and Africa, with a focus on South Africa." - Yuan Huang, African Studies Quarterly
"Huang’s Reconfiguring Racial Capitalism offers a timely critique of how race, capitalism, and power continue to shape global dynamics, particularly in the context of Sino-African relations. . . . The book serves as a critical reminder that addressing systemic inequalities requires not just economic reforms but also a profound transformation in how global partnerships are conceived and enacted. Reconfiguring Racial Capitalism is an essential resource for understanding these complexities in the current era." - Mega Fatimah, Meiliani & Rahma Febrianti, African Identities
“The monograph is at its strongest when it tackles the thorny question of how contemporary interactions between Africans and Chinese produce new dynamics. . . . [Huang’s] ethnography captures the footloose, even hustling aspect to the dynamic that blurs the boundary between legal and extralegal, between formal and informal.”
- Duncan M. Yoon,
African Studies Review
"An excellent and ethnographically rich update to theories of contemporary racial capitalism." - Amanda Kaminsky, Journal of Development Studies
"For geographers interested in place-based reworkings of capitalism, how race travels and mutates, and how the afterlives of empire persist in the present, Reconfiguring Racial Capitalism is essential reading." - Anshul Rai Sharma, AAG Review of Books
"The book is a compelling narrative that blends history, storytelling, and diverse and heterogeneously positioned voices in the racial and power configurations within the landscape of Chinese capital." - Elijah Doro, Journal of Anthropological Research
"An important intervention. . . . The book provides profound theoretical insights supported by rich ethnographic evidence." - Cleo Qin, Anthropology Southern Africa
