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ID:
143105
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| Summary/Abstract |
This article begins by asking how African traders learn to adjust to the foreign world of Guangzhou, China, and suggests that African logistics agents and middlemen serve as cultural brokers for these traders. After defining “cultural broker” and discussing why these brokers are not usually Chinese, it explores this role as played by ten logistics agents/middlemen from Kenya, Nigeria, Ghana and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. As logistics agents, these people help their customers in practically adjusting to Chinese life, and as middlemen they serve to grease the wheels of commerce between African customers and Chinese suppliers. This is despite their own ambivalent views of China as a place to live. They play an essential role in enabling harmonious relations between Africans and Chinese in Guangzhou, even though they see themselves not as cultural brokers but simply as businessmen.
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| 2 |
ID:
173173
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| Summary/Abstract |
This paper first outlines a brief history of the African presence in China since the Tang era, indicating that Africans have mostly lived on the margins of the Chinese society. It then highlights the contemporary presence of Africans in China since the turn of the Millennium, showing that while African traders and students have demonstrated a lot of resilience, the story of Africans living at the margins of the Chinese society has not changed much. As a case study, insights are drawn from research conducted in Guangzhou showing the marked inequalities Africans living there face in regards to access to health care. Some of the many barriers creating inequality of access to health care include affordability, legal issues, and language barriers. Finally, the paper proposes a theory of resilience to explain the attempt by Africans in China to cope with this situation of inequality and well-being.
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| 3 |
ID:
143104
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| Summary/Abstract |
This article is an exploration into the personal aspirations that converge in Guangzhou’s African music scene. I argue that despite being often traversed, articulated, fuelled, and constrained by economies and economic discourses, aspirations are not necessarily economic or rational calculations. I contend that the overarching trading narrative about “Africans in Guangzhou” has left little space for issues of agency, emotion, and aspiration to be considered in their own right. Drawing on a year of continuous ethnographic fieldwork, I show how aspirations are crucial arenas where the rationales behind transnational mobility are developed, reproduced, and transmitted. Indeed, aspirations can be thought of as “navigational devices” (Appadurai 2004) that help certain individuals reach for their dreams. By bringing the analysis of aspirations to the fore, I intend to provide a more complex and nuanced landscape of the multiple rationales behind African presence in Southern China; promote a better understanding (both conceptually and empirically) of how individuals navigate their social spaces and guide their transnational journeys; and draw attention to the incessant frictions and negotiations between individual aspirations while on the move and the constraints imposed by more structural imperatives.
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