Creative Crossings: Sino-African Encounters in Fashion and Literature
4 - Cash in on the "African Superstar" Tupac: African-Chinese Co-Creation via Misunderstanding, Misinterpretation, and Racialization
Friday, June 13, 2025
16:15 - 18:00 GMT
Location: LOS-115
Presenter(s)
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Wei Jupiter Wang
University of Amsterdam, Netherlands
Presentation Abstract A growing number of Africans started to move to Guangzhou, China’s first commercial hub opening to the world in the late Qing Dynasty, for business opportunities around 2008. Since then, Guangzhou has hosted tens of thousands of African traders, dubbed the “Capital of the Third World.” Currently still, Guangzhou remains the most studied site for African-Chinese interactions, where the largest group of these traders engage in fashion-related business, including but not limited to garments, shoes, bags, and wigs. The “Made in China” products are often regarded as cheap, low quality, and tacky, and they are thought to match the African markets with low purchasing power. Compared to numerous reports and research focusing on migration, trading, racism, and other issues produced by such human mobility flows, the prototype-making and pattern designs of these affordable fashion goods have barely been explored and thus explained by either media or scholars. Reminiscent of previous scholarship on creativity and creative practices in non-Western contexts, this study demonstrates how creativity is practiced through co-creation between African and Chinese traders who meet among different garment markets and/or digital spaces. More importantly, these creative practices are (ill)informed via misunderstanding, misinterpretation, and racialization in an informal business setting where the accumulation of cultural capital, which is regarded as a specific knowledge production and reproduction process, is achieved primarily through the transformation of social capital instead of economic capital.
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