Choreographing “ChinAfrica” through Transnational

Encounter
Jingqiu Guan, University of California, Los Angeles

Abstract
A dance film made by two Belgian directors collaborating with Guangdong Modern
Dance Company, An African Walk in the Land of China (2015) attempts to explore the
encounter of an African woman with Chinese workers in urban China in the age of
“ChinAfrica.” In this work, the co-directors create a “duet” between an ensemble of
Chinese dancers portrayed as blue-collar workers and a black female dancer depicted
as a woman from an unspecified country in Africa. In my analysis, I juxtapose
choreographic and cinematic representations of the African woman and Chinese
workers with the complex social reality of their diverse experiences of encounters.
Resisting any singular reading, the dance film provokes questions and stirs up
reflections about the ever-intensifying interactions between Chinese and Africans at
economic, political and cultural levels operating under global capitalism. This
seemingly detached approach, while offering opportunities for multiple readings of the
film, also glosses over the complexity of the very ideas of Africans and Chinese as well
as their transnational encounters. The gap between the filmic representation and reality
unveils the directors’ reductionistic approach to representing ethnic figures and their
experiences of each other on screen, indicating a persistent but well-masked colonial
gaze.

Keywords: screendance, Africa, China, gaze

Introduction
The advent of the 21st century has witnessed increasingly more intimate relations
between China and countries in the African continent. The Forum for Africa-China
Cooperation created in 2000 as well as China’s accession to the World Trade
Organization (WTO) in 2001 promoted the flow of capital, labor, and natural resources
between these two parts of the world.1 With substantial investment from China, the
African continent, particularly sub-Saharan Africa, has experienced the influx of over
two million Chinese workers and a growing range of Chinese activities.2 Reciprocally,
hundreds of thousands of Africans have also embarked on journeys to China to seek
new opportunities. The ever-intensifying economic relationships between China and
countries in Africa have led to increased people-to-people interactions between
The International Journal of Screendance 9 (2018).
© 2018 Guan. This article is published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
(https:/creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)
GUAN: CHOREOGRAPHING “CHINAFRICA” 119

Chinese and Africans. As a result, there also appears an increasing number of media
productions, particularly documentaries and fictional films, that engage with stories
about their encounters, explore the Chinese diaspora in Africa or the African diaspora
in China, and offer various perspectives on China-Africa relations.3 Shot in the city of
Guangzhou, the most popular destination for African migrants in China, “An African
Walk in the Land of China” (2015, 14min) is the first internationally circulating
experimental dance film that addresses this interracial and transnational encounter in a
Chinese urban space.

Commissioned by the City Contemporary Dance Company in Hong Kong and

premiered at Jumping Frames International Video Dance Festival, this film is a
transnational collaboration between Guangdong Modern Dance Company and two
Belgian directors, Pierre Larauza and Emmanuelle Vincent. In this work, the co-directors
create a “duet” between an ensemble of Chinese dancers portrayed as blue-collar
workers and a black female dancer depicted as a woman from an unspecified country
in Africa. Analyzing this work in light of recent economic and sociocultural activities
between China and various African nations, I ask the following questions: how does this
film imagine the encounter between an African woman with Chinese in this urban
space? How do choreographic and cinematic elements work together to depict their
encounter, and why are these choices made? What kind of social reality is evoked
through these artistic expressions? And does the film project a particular stance on
Africans’ experiences in China or comment on China-Africa relations?

In this article, I engage with theories of transnationalism and sociological studies on

Africans in China. First, I will first probe the term “ChinAfrica” used by the directors in
the synopsis of the film to provide the larger historical and social context that sets the
stage for this work.4 Then, I will perform two rounds of readings of this film: a close
textual analysis that derives an understanding of the dance film from its choreographic
and cinematic elements, followed by an over-reading of the work that attempts to
unpack several recurring signs appearing in the film through its wider social context.5
Finally, alluding to some ambiguity in the film that resists easy conclusion and value
judgment, I will offer several possible and even contrasting readings of the work.

Contextualizing “ChinAfrica”
The co-directors provide the following synopsis (with some grammatical issues): “In the
contemporary labor China, an African young woman roams in streets in search of a
meeting. She crosses workers in her wandering. How will they welcome mutually at the
age of”ChinAfrica?“6 This statement reveals the historical context of this film - the age
of”ChinAfrica.“7 I define”ChinAfrica" as a transnational and translocal space where
Africans and Chinese interact at economic, political and cultural levels. These intimate
connections between China and many countries in Africa exhibit multiple dimensions
GUAN: CHOREOGRAPHING “CHINAFRICA” 120

of global cultural flow as articulated by Arjun Appadurai’s notion of -scapes.8 These -

scapes are manifested as the following: the unprecedented numbers of migrants to
both the African continent and China as part of the ethnoscapes;9 China’s involvement
in media production in Africa,10 forming part of the mediascapes; China’s act of
providing loans for many African countries in finanscapes;11 the proliferation of the
Confucius Institute in Africa as well as the increasing number of African students
studying abroad in China as components of ideoscapes;12 and finally, China’s
investment in the telecommunication industry in many countries in Africa as a
manifestation of technoscapes.13

These dimensions of interrelations also led to inventions of new rural and urban space
in both China and countries in Africa. According to Henry Lefebvre, space produces and
is produced through relations of production.14 In other words, space sets conditions of
possibility and is generated through the interaction of everything in it, such as human
activities. Lefebvre’s theory of space offers an explanation for the transformation seen
in neighborhoods in Chinese cities as well as many places in African countries where
demographic shifts and new human activities resulting from cross-continental
migration have reconfigured rural and urban spaces. The city of Guangzhou, where this
film takes place, is a case in point. The rise of diasporic African communities has brought
into the city new restaurants, shops, and other types of businesses. The districts where
they tend to congregate have gained new names such as “Chocolate City,” “Little
Africa,” and “Guangzhou’s Harlem.”15

This multidimensional global flow that transforms both space is never inherently
neutral but motivated by different objectives. The ever-intensifying China-Africa
relations have received much scrutiny from a wide range of perspectives. The Western
press and some scholarly writings denounce Chinese engagement with Africa as a form
of neocolonialism through the expansion of soft power.16 However, a number of
scholars recognize the much more complex dynamics at work that resist being
explained through paradigms of neocolonialism.17 The idea of “ChinAfrica” points to a
wide range of heated debates surrounding the economic and political relationships
between China and Africa and their implications for the world order. While Chinese
activities in Africa have gained spotlights in both academic and non-academic press,
stories of Africans in China have received much less attention. “An African Walk in the
Land of China” sheds light on interpersonal transnational encounter only made possible
as a result of this large-scale phenomenon. Rather than focusing on Chinese in Africa,
the film explores an African’s experience in China. In what follows, I attempt two
different ways of reading the film to understand how the co-directors portray this
encounter.
GUAN: CHOREOGRAPHING “CHINAFRICA” 121

Attempt #1: A Close Reading of the Film

This is how I first experienced the film as a viewer who did not have much knowledge
about the large presence of Africans in various Chinese cities, particularly in Guangzhou.
Scene 1. The film opens with a panning wide shot that gradually reveals ten Chinese
workers. Dressed in identical blue uniforms and wearing anti-pollution masks, they lie
on their stomachs with their heads turned to the side near a waterfront. Behind them
the faintly visible skyline of the hyper-industrialized city of Guangzhou appears across
the Pearl River under the dark gloomy sky. Cut. A still shot of the interior of a
construction site piled with debris of shattered bricks. A grey mouse is scurrying around.
Cut. Two adjacent shots of the exterior of the construction site. The demolished low
rises pale against a high rise that is under construction. Cut. Underneath the inner-city
highway that flies over the city, ten Chinese workers lie on their sides in front of a
woman dressed in a bright patterned dress that is often associated with an African-style
garb. She plants her body firmly on a pedestrian bridge, center framed. The camera
slowly dollies in towards them, creating smooth motion that disrupts their silencing
stillness. Her upright body contrasts sharply with their collective horizontal body spread
out on the ground, suggesting that they are in separate worlds though sharing the same
space. These carefully constructed shots work together as a grand establishing shot that
frames the encounter between an African woman and Chinese workers in a hyper-
modern city that undergoes continuous renewal.

Scene 2. On the same pedestrian bridge, she holds still, her body upright, fixing her eyes
straight ahead. They crowd around her, pushing her forward in tiny but speedy steps.
They direct their heads toward her but do not directly gaze at her. Cut. The camera
dollies in as she reaches her arms into the sky and then stretches them behind her, lifting
her shoulder blades and undulating her entire back. She smiles. Like her guards, they
hold their bodies in absolute stillness and alertness, lining up in two rows of five on each
side of her. They wear no expressions on their faces. The dolly effect of the camera
creates an illusion of movement, as if they are transporting her forward on a vehicle, this
time, with no need to directly contact her body. These two types of bodies, with their
gazes never crossing paths, share the same space in close proximity but not yet
encountering.

Scene 3. She slowly wanders through a busy street, passing by pedestrians who simply
walk past her without acknowledging her presence. Her well-put-together outfit that
signifies her Africanness makes her highly visible on the street and exaggerates her
foreignness in this land. They, individually or in a group, push against a wall, sit in a
restaurant, crawl on the back along a grocery aisle, and spin around near a staircase,
implying that they are actively engaging in their mundane daily activities, eating,
working and resting. Cut. Positioned in the center of the frame, she fixes her body in
front of a gigantic excavator digging and flipping the soil among a thick pile of debris.
GUAN: CHOREOGRAPHING “CHINAFRICA” 122

They, however, playfully interact with various objects at this construction site, sitting on
a coil of metal, tip-toeing on a manhole, and crawling out of a pipe. They line up,
congregate tightly and then dash out into the space, jumping and spinning. Situated
amongst them, she acts as a detached observer quietly taking in all of these actions. She
and they not only occupy a different kind of space but also demonstrate a different
relationship to space. Their more intimate interaction with various sites imply a sense of
familiarity with the space, sharply contrasting with the African woman’s explorative
relationship to space that signifies her position as an outsider.

The choreography of the camera implements distinct techniques and reinforces the
construction of the African woman as someone who sees, while the Chinese workers
are being seen. Dynamically situating the camera amongst their bodies presents close-
up shots of a “de-territorialized choreography.”18 By not including their gaze in the
frame, these shots imply that the Chinese workers are immersed in their own activities,
not aware of being seen. Contrarily, when filming her, the camera consistently presents
either a center-framed wide shot or medium shot of her body, revealing her uptight
posture and active gaze in search of something. At times, the camera follows her from
behind, granting viewers an almost embodied perspective of her visual field. This
position of the camera emphasizes her point of view instead of theirs.

Scene 4. The relationship between the African woman and Chinese workers takes a
dramatic turn in the next scene from indirect engagement to face-to-face interaction.
Alone in a deserted building, she folds a red doormat in front of her waist. The very
instant when she opens it up, the workers appear on screen from behind the columns
at the site, dashing towards her. They turn their bodies, toss their arms, kick their legs,
and bend their hands. She looks forward quietly without engaging in eye contact with
them, holding a red doormat that says, “Welcome” in both English and Chinese. It is not
clear whether she is welcoming them into her space or if she is seeking welcome from
them. Point-of-view shots of her and them are both inserted in this sequence, revealing
their experiences of each other from both of their perspectives. Cut. They carry her
around and position her on the red mat. She obeys. They look at her while she gazes
straight forward, still avoiding any direct eye contact with them. Cut. They walk away
while leaving one of them to share the empty space with her. One of them pushes her
shoulder. She responds by moving her spine. Sharing an intimate space of a tiny
rectangular doormat, she and one of them converse through their distinct movement
languages, her movement indicating African aesthetics and theirs an unmarked
postmodern dance. With little eye contact and only occasional physical touch
throughout the scene, she and they seem to just happen to share the same space but
fail to communicate with one another.

Scene 5. The last scene lasts for more than one third of the entire film. On a rooftop,
against the skyline of the modern city of Guangzhou, in extreme slow motion, she runs
towards the red doormat while they leap, turn, and twirl from outside the frame to land
GUAN: CHOREOGRAPHING “CHINAFRICA” 123

inside until eventually they collapse onto the floor, recalling the opening scene of the
film when they were also lying on the ground. She lifts up her dress to reveal her bare
feet. Bending her elbow, she moves her shoulder blades forward and back. Looking
straight ahead and wearing a gentle smile, she looks forward into the camera, again
center framed. The screen gradually fades out into black.

She and they, traditional and modern, outsider and local, single and ensemble: these
are sets of binaries that the dance film establishes. Through the costume choices,
choreography, the performers’ intersubjective relationship embodied on screen, and
cinematography, Larauza and Vincent dramatize the differences between the African
woman and Chinese workers, portraying them as personae who share little in common
except for being present in the same temporal space. Dressed in garb of vibrant colors
and intricate patterns, her dark skin stands out amongst the collective body of Chinese
workers who dress in plain blue uniform. While they blend together multiple movement
styles, at times pedestrian, at times theatrical, at times a fusion of all kinds of gestures,
and at times with a twist of Chinese martial art influence, she performs Africanist
movement, popping her chest, undulating her back, and throwing her arms forward
and backward with a controlled looseness. Although there are instances when she looks
at them and they look at her, their gazes never land on each other simultaneously. This
consistent absence of mutual gaze further suggests a failed encounter between them.
The choreography of the camera approaches filming the African woman and Chinese
workers in distinct ways. The African woman is mostly situated in the center of the
frame, gazing into the camera as if she is performing for the camera. Chinese workers,
on the other hand, never stare directly into the camera. They are portrayed as natives
who only mind their own business, trapped within the hyper-production of capitalist
modernity.

Attempt #2: An Over-reading of the Film

This is how I experienced the film by reading into three recurrent representational signs,
namely, the hyper-modern cityscape of Guangzhou, an African woman, and Chinese
workers, against accounts from the body of recent literature on Africans in China.
The hyper-modern city of Guangzhou, traversed by highways, spiked by skyscrapers,
and overwhelmed by omnipresent construction sites, sets the stage for the encounter
between the African woman and Chinese workers. This backdrop is not merely an
imaginary construction of space achieved through careful selection of the sites, camera
framing and composition. Instead, it provides a realistic documentation of the rapidly
changing landscape of the city at the moment of this film production. Positioning the
African woman and Chinese workers in the dance film against the realistic backdrop of
the city, the dance film summons the viewers to read their representations as
embodying the lived experiences of Africans and Chinese in this transnational city.
GUAN: CHOREOGRAPHING “CHINAFRICA” 124

With its rapid economic development, China has been frequently framed in many
Africans’ imagination as “a new land of opportunities,” attracting hundreds of
thousands of migrants (men and women alike) to set their foot on this land and chase
“gold.”19 Since the end of the 20th century, Guangdong, a province in the southeast
corner of China, has become the major trading site for industrial goods in China with a
strong labor-intensive manufacturing economy, even acquiring the reputation of the
“world factory.”20 Guangzhou, the capital city of Guangdong Province, immediately
became the most popular destination for African traders who would travel to the city to
purchase Chinese manufactured goods in bulk for resale in their home countries. Since
early 2000s, the number of Africans visiting or living in Guangzhou has reached an
unparalleled high in the history of the region.21 These migrants have tended to cluster
in the same neighborhoods in the city, leading to a change of their demographic
composition in various districts such as Sanyuanli and Xiaobei.22 Most of the scenes in
the film were taken place in Xiaobei, the so-called “Little Africa.” This deliberate location
choice evokes this social process of migration and place-making.

The appearance of the gigantic excavator on the street of Xiaobei in one of the scenes
also invokes the urban renewal project taken place in 2014 in this neighborhood as part
of a larger initiative that aims to create a “clean, safe, and orderly” Guangzhou.23 “An
African Walk in the Land of China” was made at the beginning stage of this project that
eventually drove out many African populations and the businesses they had
established. While the Western press critiques the anti-black racism that prompted this
project,24 Wilczak challenges this common assumption, arguing that this special
transformation should also be understood in the context of Guangzhou’s efforts to
become a competitive “global” city through neoliberal restructuring.25 Who is this
woman? What does she think of this urban renewal project and its entangled
relationship with the Chinese discourse of race? Is she confused? Is she angry? Is she
amazed? Does she care? The dance film does not provide any answer. In front of the
excavator, the African woman simply looks around, observing the space without giving
away any visible hint of her emotional state.

A large amount of literature on Africans in China zoom in on traders from sub-Saharan

Africa who represent the largest African population in China.26 These traders actively
participate in the non-hegemonic world economy of “globalization from below.”27
Robert Castillo, however, problematizes this narrow understanding of Africans’
experiences in Chinese cities.28 He underscores the complex and diverse trajectories of
these individuals from various countries in Africa who are driven into transnational
mobilities between their countries of origin and Guangzhou for a wide range of reasons
and purposes. Some intend to stay in Guangzhou; some recurrently visit the city; and
some others only pass through Guangzhou in order to go elsewhere. This view
challenges the common misconception that regards Africans as a homogenous
population.
GUAN: CHOREOGRAPHING “CHINAFRICA” 125

How does the African woman, as the protagonist of the film, fit into the multifaceted
experiences of African migrants in this city? Who is this woman? Which African country
is she from? Is she a trader, am exchange student, a tourist who happens to pass through
Guangzhou, or a college graduate who is exploring new life opportunities? Rather than
specifying and locating the African woman, the dance film offers little sign that indicates
her identities. With quite a stretch, one may be able to argue that her outfit suggests
that she is of middle class background.29 This possible indication would be consistent
with demographic studies of Africans in China who tend to be well educated and of
higher socioeconomic class compared to African migrants in European countries and
Chinese internal migrants.30 In this case, this portrayal of an African woman would have
countered the dominant representation of a black woman as backward, poor, and of
low socioeconomic class in Western media. However, by offering very little information
that helps the audience understand who this African woman is, the directors provide a
highly abstracted depiction of a much more diverse and heterogeneous population. In
this representation the absence of details about her mark her within a colonialist gaze
where her (generalized) African subjectivity is never fully interrogated or represented.
She becomes an uncontested sign that represents “an African” and perhaps also “Africa”
confronted with Chinese modernity.

While the dance film portrays the African woman as an outsider exploring a new urban
space, the Chinese workers are presented as locals who are familiar with their
environment. Roberto Castillo problematizes the rhetoric employed in scholarship that
frames Africans’ presence in the city simply as a binary of foreigners vs. a “fixed” Chinese
local population.31 He argues that “rather than a group of foreign migrants
encountering a settled local population, Africans in the city mainly intersect and interact
with ‘Chinese’ individuals on the move: ‘internal migrants’ of different ethnicities.”32
Zhou, Xu and Shenasi affirm Castillo’s argument by noting that the majority of Chinese
with whom Africans interact tend to be internal migrants who share the similar
experience of precarity and transiency.33 Thus, the choice of portraying the Chinese as
a collective ensemble of workers who are dressed in uniforms that resembles the Mao
Suit, a symbol often associated with socialist modernity,34 seem to stand at odds with
this capitalistic heterogeneous space.

The intersubjective relationship between the African woman and Chinese workers in
this dance film alludes to inter-racial interaction between Chinese and Africans in this
city. Zhou, Xu and Shenasi point out that for self-made African entrepreneurs and
traders, they have developed an interdependent economic relationship with Chinese
entrepreneurs.35 Though frictions do arise due to their cultural differences, their
economically interdependent relationships “create room for cooperation that
transcends race, class and migrant status.”36 To facilitate this interdependency, they also
find various tactics to overcome language barriers, for instance, through using a
calculator, performing basic body gestures, and learning to speak simple words in each
GUAN: CHOREOGRAPHING “CHINAFRICA” 126

other’s languages.37 In contrast, many other accounts of their interracial interaction

focus on African migrants’ experiences with local authorities who frequently carry out
immigration raids and random visa checks, especially when major international events
are taking place in Guangzhou.38 While some Africans feel unwelcomed and
discriminated against, some also express that they are treated with much more respect
than if they were in a European country.39 The literature highlights that there is no one
single narrative regarding how the Chinese and Africans interact.

In this dance film, the African woman and Chinese workers dance out an ambiguous
power relationship. It is not confrontational, not cooperative, not one-sided, nor is it
discriminatory in any obvious way. Despite having some face-to-face interactions, the
African woman and Chinese workers are portrayed as disinterested in each other.
Associating these recurring signs in this film with the social reality of Africans’
experiences in Guangzhou, I find the dance film too elusive to comprehend. Who are
these people? On the one hand, the co-directors appear to be making a connection to
the lived experiences of an African visitor in Guangzhou by situating her in the
neighborhood where African migrants populate. On the other hand, they also seem to
be unconcerned about making any references to their wide-ranging experiences in the
city. Without adding much specificity about the African woman, the Chinese workers,
and their relationship with each other and to the sites, the dance film projects a
generalized narrative onto a complex social, cultural, and economic landscape. Thus, in
its reliance on certain aesthetic juxtapositions (e.g., Chinese, African, traditional,
modern), it falls short in complicating the socio-economic realities of these two
communities living next to one another in contemporary Guangzhou.

Conclusion: Artistic Abstraction or Essentialist Reduction?

Approaching this dance film based on its filmic and choreographic texts and re-
examining it as an artistic rendition of a social phenomenon, I have generated different
perspectives towards this work. Its many layers of ambiguity due to its lack of specificity
render multiple readings. On the one hand, I applaud the film for engaging in the
exploration of an inter-racial relationship beyond the classic black-white dichotomy. Its
lack of specificities in the portrayal of their relationship may be seen as an artistic choice
for opening up interpretation of the power dynamic between the racialized subjects,
rather than situating them into a fixed category of domination and subjugation. By
invoking the Chinese workers and African woman in a dynamic city space that is going
through reconstruction, the dance film invites us to reflect on the role of neoliberal
global capitalism that brings people together across the continent for the purpose of
serving the very machine of capitalism, rather than encountering each other in an
intimate or empathetic level. On the other hand, while the directors attempt a detached
and neutral gaze as outsiders trying to make sense of their experiences of encounters,
they have also taken on a reductionist approach that glosses over a rather complex
GUAN: CHOREOGRAPHING “CHINAFRICA” 127

social reality. For instance, literature on Africans in Guangzhou stresses that there is not
a single narrative that can sum up their experiences. Their lives in Guangzhou exhibit
multiple trajectories, diverse experiences, and various strategies of place-making. Their
inter-racial interaction with Chinese people also demonstrates a level of complexity in
which cooperation and friction co-exist. The film collapses this much more dynamic
social reality into a singular representation: an impossibility or unwillingness of their
encounter. The film exaggerates their differences instead of acknowledging any of their
shared experiences.

Moreover, the directors also abstract and essentialize the woman from Africa and the
Chinese working class. Africans who go to Guangzhou come from a wide range of
countries in Africa and for different purposes. Chinese people in Guangzhou are also
composed of diverse populations, of which a large number are internal migrants rather
than locals. They experience similar conditions of transience and precarity as
international migrants. The film generalizes these populations and reinforces a binary
that portrays their encounters as that between foreigners and locals. All of these issues
may be due to the mismatch between what the directors set out to do and what the
film accomplishes. While the directors attempted to depict an African’s experience in
China and titled the film “An African Walk in the Land of China,” this scope is too large
for a dance film of this length to address, which leads to generalizations, stereotyping,
and a lack of specificity. This attempt is associated with a persistent colonial gaze on
ethnic figures who are fetishized on screen, not accurately represented or understood.

Biography
Jingqiu Guan is a PhD student in Culture and Performance at the Department of World
Arts and Cultures/Dance at UCLA. Her research explores how dance film in China
addresses experiences of Chinese modernities.

Email: jguan030@gmail.com
Website: www.jingqiuguan.com

Notes
1
Bodomo, Africans in China 13-14, 225-226.
GUAN: CHOREOGRAPHING “CHINAFRICA” 128

2
Ibid., 13.
3
For example, Guangzhou Dream Factory (2017) is a recent documentary film about
African migrants’ experience in Guangzhou. When China Met Africa (2010) is a
documentary film that follows the lives of a Chinese road builder in Ethiopia and a
trader and a farmer in Zambia.
4
IMDb, “An African.”
5
Martin, 178. Martin defines “over-reading” as a method of dance analysis that goes
beyond the dance itself and reads the context where the dance takes place. This
approach “[reads] through and past the dance to the point where it meets its own
exterior or context” (178).
6
IMDb, “An African.”
7
Curious about its meaning, I put this term in the Google search engine. The results
pages were inundated with news articles that commented upon Chinese engagement
in Africa and African migrants in China. However, few used the term “ChinAfrica,”
except for two sources: an article published in The Economist in 2007, titled “Laboring
in ChinAfrica,” and a monthly magazine called ChinAfrica, published by Chinese
government-affiliated CHINAFRICA Media and Publishing Ltd in South Africa. This
magazine focuses on news and policy analyses regarding China-Africa relations.
Published in both English and French, it mainly targets readers from Africa. For more
information, see Hanauer and Morris, 76.
8
Appadurai, Modernity at Large, 33.
9
Bodomo, 13.
10
Li, Mediatized China-Africa Relations, 8.
11
French, China’s Second Continent, 12.
12
See King, China’s Aid and Soft Power in Africa.
13
Li, 8.
14
Lefevre, The Production of Space, 32-33.
15
Yang, Globalization from Below, 154.
16
Langan, Neo-Colonialism and the Poverty of “Development” in Africa, 95.
17
See Brautigam, The Dragon’s Gift; Rotberg, China into Africa; Kachiga, China in Africa;
and Rich and Recker, “Understanding Sino-African Relation.”
18
Brannigan, Dancefilm, 43-44.
GUAN: CHOREOGRAPHING “CHINAFRICA” 129

19
Huynh, “A ‘Wild West’ of Trade?,” 503; Castillo, “Feeling at Home,” 235.
20
Yang, 154.
21
Castillo, 287.
22
Yang, 154.
23
Marsh, “The African Migrants.”
24
Ibid.
25
Wilczak, “‘Clean, Safe, and Orderly,’” 73.
26
See Huyn; Yang; Müller and Wehrhahn, “Transnational Business Networks”; and Lan,
“Transnational Business and Family Strategies.”
27
Mathews and Vega, “Introduction,” 1.
28
Castillo, 288.
29
This inference is made based on my consultation with Al Roberts and Polly Roberts,
scholars who study visual arts and cultures in African countries, regarding this
costume.
30
Zhou et al., “Entrepreneurship and Interracial Dynamics,” 1573. See also Bodomo.
31
Castillo, 291.
32
Ibid., 291.
33
Zhou et al., 1571.
34
Metzger, Chinese Looks, 142.
35
Zhou et al., 1581.
36
Ibid.
37
Bodomo, 43-44.
38
Yang, 168. See also Castillo, 294.
39
Lyon et al., “In the Dragon’s Den,” 882.
GUAN: CHOREOGRAPHING “CHINAFRICA” 130

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