MCLC Resource Center is pleasesd to announce publication of Ruodi Duan’s review of Angloscene: Compromised Personhood in Afro-Chinese Translations, by Jay Ke-Schutte. The review appears below and at its online home: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/ruodi-duan/. My thanks to Michael Gibbs Hill, our translations/translation studies book review editor, for ushering the review to publication.
Kirk Denton, MCLC
Angloscene: Compromised Personhood
in Afro-Chinese Translations
By Jay Ke-Schutte
Reviewed by Ruodi Duan
MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright May, 2024)
Jay Ke-Schutte, Angloscene: Compromised Personhood in Afro-Chinese Translations Berkeley: University of California Press, 2023. 219 pp. ISBN: 9780520389816 (paperback); 9780520389823 (ebook).
New approaches to China-Africa studies that center the mediating role of race remain greatly needed. Jay Ke-Schutte’s Angloscene: Compromised Personhood in Afro-Chinese Translations, which is available for free in electronic format from Luminosa, takes on this call. Through an ethnography conducted in the 2010s of the relationships and micro-interactions between Chinese and African students in Beijing, Ke-Schutte argues that these encounters are continually articulated through the vectors of whiteness, cosmopolitanism, and use of the English language. This landscape, Ke-Schutte argues, comprises the “Angloscene,” which is constituted through acts of interpersonal and intercultural translation.
I appreciate many aspects of the book. The ethnographic descriptions are rich and well-composed. Ke-Schutte accords much-deserved attention to how the dynamic afterlives of Third World unity still manifest in current-day grassroots exchanges, such as when an African student implores a Chinese street vendor to “help out a Third World brother!” (5). Relatedly, I find very provocative the connections that Ke-Schutte highlights between labor migrancy in apartheid-era South Africa and the aspirations of female rural-to-urban migrant workers in contemporary Beijing (72-75). Ke-Schutte’s willingness to tackle some of the most impossible questions in the articulation and reception of Black identities in modern Chinese society (i.e., who can be a racist?) leads to unanticipated and deeply insightful observations. For one, I am intrigued by the global reach of “white political correctness” as a register of the civilizational expectations that govern subaltern subjects (89). The exchanges between Adam, a Zimbabwean student, and his Chinese ex-girlfriend Lili at a costume party capture this dynamic. Adam and Lili found themselves trapped in an impossible bind given their use of English language as the vehicle for communication, unable to escape the racialized positions and aspirations that elevate Tim, Lili’s new white boyfriend, to relative unassailability and authority.
When I teach “China and Africa” to undergraduates, singular episodes of anti-Black racism in postsocialist China become preternaturally engaging topics of discussion, from imaginations of the African continent in Wolf Warrior II (dir. Wu Jing, 2017) to COVID-era evictions of Africans from their housing in Guangzhou. I see the book as a timely reminder of the importance in continuing to question the colonial structures of knowledge that, visibly or not, animates many conversations about race in China-Africa encounters. In other words, we can all do more to reflect on China-Africa studies as a subject and container for intellectual inquiry within the American university, including in classroom spaces. As Ke-Schutte compellingly asks, “Is the Sino-African encounter—an object of analysis to the western media and academic Anglosphere—merely a potential staging ground for Eurocentric multicultural fantasies, or when they fail, racist dystopias?” (148-149)
I would like to offer a few questions for further consideration. First of all: How might we understand these Afro-Chinese relationships in context of the paths trodden by earlier generations of African students in and beyond China? The first African students who arrived in Chinese cities did so in the late 1950s, and although their enrollments plummeted during the Cultural Revolution, they would number in the hundreds again by the 1970s, increasing rapidly in the decades since. The foreign students of the 1960s, in particular, came to China at a moment when socialist and Third World cosmopolitanism served as the backdrop to their transnational mobilities. Are there potential resonances between the vision of anticolonial internationalism that undergirded their travels—which carried, of course, its own sets of contradictions and liabilities—and the deeply capitalist and high-modernist one of our times?
On a second note, I would like to probe the uneasy equivalency sometimes drawn between Africans in China and China’s own ethnic minority populations, one which Angloscene first alludes to in the context of the 2018 New Year Gala controversy. Ke-Schutte asks: “Are Africans now Chinese ethnic minorities? How would such a framing reorder China’s spatialization on the one hand, and Han ethno-nationalism on the other?” (2) In 2015, Ke-Schutte invited Malagasy student Rousseau Asara to dinner with Anne West, identified as a “feminist and ethnic minority activist” and the economist Liu Xiaoming at a restaurant in Beijing. Their awkward banter, in which West complimented Asara’s “cosmopolitanism” and equated African mobilities in China to Chinese mobilities in Tibet, marked a curious episode indeed (156-158). Is it always Westerners like West who author or instrumentalize this peculiar parallel of subaltern experiences? Does this trend draw on historical precedents or traditions? I suspect that there is more to this story.
Thirdly, the concept of authenticity and inauthenticity recurs in these ethnographic encounters. Chinese parents paying for college application bootcamps that prepare students to apply to U.S. institutions seek “authentic” white foreigners (61). Meanwhile, African students balance ideals and expectations of conversing in “Model C English,” or English spoken without noticeable African intonations (95). In another example, we have the infamous Chinese laundry detergent commercial from 2016, which was heavily criticized for its use of racial stereotyping, but was actually an “inauthentic” reproduction of an Italian one that aired ten years previously (93). As a white South African researcher, Ke-Schutte notes a difficult self-positioning as an “authenticator” (151). In this landscape governed by colonial rules of language and behavior, what is the role of “authenticity” in defining the norms of Afro-Chinese encounters? What relationship does it bear to race and its translation?
Lastly, as a historian, I wonder about how the significant diversity and divergence in the nation-specific twentieth-century histories of China-Africa relations might mediate the Angloscene. The African students in this study seem to hail from various places, including countries once more hostile to the project of international socialism (i.e., Botswana) and those long considered allies of the People’s Republic of China (e.g., Madagascar or Zimbabwe). Zimbabwean student Fidel Mapfumo, who hung a 1970s poster proclaiming revolutionary friendship between China and Africa in his bedroom, bears a name that viscerally recalls a bygone era of Cold War solidarities (7). Are such Zimbabwean student experiences affected by the particular contours to China-Zimbabwean history?
As a final note, with the caveat that I am not a specialist in linguistic anthropology, I found Angloscene dense and, at times, inaccessible. It would be a difficult text to assign in undergraduate classrooms. While Ke-Schutte’s descriptive writing is vivid, I struggled to comprehend the analytical sections ascribing theoretical meaning to these micro-level encounters. The arguments are hard to distill from the jargon, and a definition of certain terms would be useful. For instance, what does it mean, in practice, for cosmopolitanism, whiteness, modernity, or the pursuit of these objectives to be “unmarked” (7)? Ultimately, I find Ke-Schutte’s observations on race, relationality, and language in China-Africa relations to be of immense significance. For just this reason, I wish he had shared them in a way that a wider audience can more easily understand.
Ruodi Duan
Haverford College