Abstract:
Based on one of the central chapters of my book manuscript Yellow Peril Revisited: Mutations, Reactions, and Reinventions, this talk focuses on the experiences of the Chinese South African communities during apartheid presented in locally published memoirs. Situating these experiences in the long history of Chinese migration and localization in South Africa dating back to at least the mid-19th century, it organizes them into three analytical categories: everyday encounters of institutional racism, preservation of Chineseness, and associations with other non-white groups.

I argue that contrary to the political and psychological struggles of postcolonial trauma that often characterize post-apartheid South African literature, Chinese South African life writing exhibits a kind of pragmatism, with which the material and emotional effects of institutional and casual racism have been constantly negotiated. This pragmatism not only demonstrates the agency of the diasporic Chinese vis-à-vis the overarching white supremacist sociopolitical structure but also reveals the communities’ complicity with the anti-black governmentality at the core of the racist governance of South African society for most of the 20th century.

As such, I note that yellowness in the special context of apartheid was constructed in relation to multiple racial Others, including the oppressive “white”, the disenfranchised “black”, Japanese who were granted certain privileges as “Honorary Whites”, as well as “the new Yellow Peril” of recent immigrants from mainland China. Ultimately, these initial attempts at making a Chinese South African literary history also offer alternative lens of seeing “Africanity”, which, like yellowness and Chineseness, is both transnational and situated and open to interpretations beyond straightforward racial, linguistic, and national identifications.

Biography:

Flair Donglai SHI is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature based at the School of Humanities, Shanghai Jiao Tong University. He holds a PhD in English from Oxford University and works as Associate Tutor in Translation Studies at Warwick University. His research areas include world literature theory, race and postcolonial studies, Sinophone Studies, and China-Africa cultural relations. He has published an edited book, World Literature in Motion, and many articles in international journals like Critical Comparative Studies, Translation & Literature, and Comparative Literature Studies, and on media platforms like Sixth Tone and Journal of Literature. He is currently working on his monograph entitled Yellow Peril Revisited while furthering his research on the interracial politics represented in contemporary China-Africa cultural products.