Event
The growing economic and political relationships between China and the African continent in the past two decades are well documented in social science and policy studies. As Chinese President Xi Jinping’s Belt-and-Road initiative continues to expand China’ global reach, pushback has resulted from the spread of Covid-19 and African governments’ increasing debt to the Chinese government. These developments raise new geopolitical questions now that other parts of the world and China are “decoupling.” State actors continue to occupy analytical mindsets.
Siu complicates the land-based, state-centered conceptual frameworks by highlighting the historical legacies and contemporary fluidities that make up the life worlds of multi-ethnic stakeholders who have long traversed the continental divides. Based on ethnographic trips in Tanzania, the Gulf Region, South and Southeast Asia, Guangdong and Hong Kong, Siu uncovers crucial layers of maritime connections and explores how diverse human encounters, their nuanced cultural meanings and intense powerplay are expressed.
Helen F. Siu is a professor of anthropology at Yale University and a former chair of the Council on East Asian Studies. She has conducted decades of fieldwork in Southern China, exploring agrarian change and the nature of the socialist state. Her recent focus has been on rural-urban interface in China, inter-Asian connections, China-Africa encounters, popular culture and new political space in Hong Kong.
Siu founded the Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Hong Kong to promote inter-disciplinary and inter-regional research. She has served on funding and research assessment committees in the United States, Europe, and Asia. Her recent publications include a three-volume study Asia Inside Out (Harvard U Press, 2015, 2019) and Tracing China: A Forty-year Ethnographic Journey (Hong Kong U Press, 2016), and articles “China-Africa Encounters: Historical Legacies and Contemporary Realities,” in Annual Review of Anthropology 46 (Nov 2017), and “Financing China’s Engagements in Africa: New State Spaces along a Variegated Landscape,” in Africa 89 (4), 2019. Siu is also the executive producer of a documentary film on a Cantopop diva and Hong Kong political activist Denise Ho, entitled “Denise Ho: Becoming the Song” (Kino Lorber 2020).
This event is cosponsored with the Center for Africana Studies