chin-a-frica

[chin-a-frica]

@atsanyuanli, one of the largest volunteer groups (organized on wechat with operational team in Guangzhou and globally dispersed volunteers) providing food, translation assistance, and legal help to Africans in Guangzhou have published two easy-to-navigate manuals on how to register in the Suikang code system, one of the many province based health codes deployed to track and manage the covid-19 pandemic (and those who are infected/affected; the biopilitics of this is admittedly fraught). They also publish daily news updates such as this one: https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/v-6xrAEYOV00wN4-7PomNw

https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/v-6xrAEYOV00wN4-7PomNw

[chin-a-frica]

“Sunu Jappo / 手拉手 / Hand in Hand is a video-poem made by the artist Ming Wong from a two week sojourn in Dakar, the capital city of Senegal.

Senegal was the first West African country to join the Chinese government’s global development strategy – the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) – and was the first stop for President Xi Jinping’s tour of Africa in 2018. Ahead of his state visit, a signed article by the Chinese president, entitled SUNU JAPPO, China and Senegal! was published in the mainstream Senegalese newspaper Le Soleil. As a gesture of ‘friendship and cooperation’, the Chinese government has in recent years sponsored the building of iconic cultural infrastructures in Dakar such as the country’s first National Wrestling Arena, the Grand National Theatre and the Museum of Black Civilisations – a powerful symbol of decoloniality – which was first proposed 53 years ago as a vision for a post-colonial Africa by Senegal’s first president, the poet Leopold Sedar Senghor.

In this work we follow the artist as he visits the sites of Sino-Senegalese ‘friendship’, in the guise of a “cultural ambassador”. As an ethnic chinese artist/filmmaker collecting moving images and sounds in the Senegalese capital, the work recalls the role and the legacy of the ethnographic filmmaker, and questions the ramification of Chinese soft power on the African continent.

http://www.mingwong.org/sunu-jappo-%E6%89%8B%E6%8B%89%E6%89%8B-hand-in-hand

[chin-a-frica]

https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/african-footballers-stranded-world-crushed-dreams-190822123359028.html

[chin-a-frica]

“Afri3005 Africa-China Relations is an introductory course to the contemporary political, cultural & economic engagements going on between African countries and China offered by the African Studies Programme at The University of Hong Kong.”

https://africansinchina.net/2016/01/24/course-outline-afri3005-africa-china-relations/

[chin-a-frica]

https://hyperallergic.com/520162/how-socialism-shaped-africa-between-independence-and-the-end-of-the-cold-war/

[chin-a-frica]

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3009174/chinese-engineer-made-nigerian-tribal-chief

[chin-a-frica]

I’m truly at loss of critical discourse to unpack this.

“The trend features African children holding up message blackboards to tout products, or repeating phrases and commercial slogans on video. It has appeared across Chinese social media in recent weeks, according to People’s Daily and other Chinese media outlets.”

https://africatimes.com/2017/08/14/online-chinese-ad-fad-that-uses-african-children-sparks-ethical-debate/

[chin-a-frica]

Edson Chagas, OIKONOMOS, 2011, Digital print

“Each bag in the series has symbols and logos on them that are foreign to Angola, perhaps most poignantly a label declaring America to be the Land of Hope. These traces of foreign lands and ideals, or, as he puts it, “detritus of popular culture”, stand in for the unobtainable, conglomerate-controlled dreams that are of no importance to Chagas and the people of Angola. And yet, still, they find themselves awash in it all.”

http://www.gupmagazine.com/articles/a-sensitive-protest-oikonomos-by-edson-chagas

[chin-a-frica]

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/2133558/racist-chinese-spring-festival-gala-tv-show-causes-consternation

[chin-a-frica]

Samuel Fosso, Emperors of Africa: Self-portrait as Mao, 2013

[chin-a-frica]

A prompt to think about blackness and black memes in Chinese cyberspace

Alongside the rise of the meme in internet culture, we have witnessed black-user-produced content drift toward center stage. Not only is blackness broadly attracted to the internet, technology, and the future at large — exemplified by the rich traditions of Afrofuturist literature, house music, hip-hop videos, and more — but the internet is a prime condition for black culture to thrive.

https://reallifemag.com/poor-meme-rich-meme/

[chin-a-frica]

chinafrica, never a dull discourse.

“Spread over an area of 14,000 m2 with a capacity of 18,000 pieces of art, the Museum of Black Civilizations, which will be used for the conservation of cultural values of the black people and for the presentation of Africa to the world, was built thanks to a donation from China amounting to $34.6 million, according to officials.”

https://howafrica.com/after-52-years-of-waiting-senegal-opens-the-worlds-largest-museum-of-black-civilisations-with-chinas-help/

[chin-a-frica]

Starting with some gems courtesy of the Kenyan artist Michael Soi.