What kind of racial specters haunt the media archive of global China? How does Blackness articulate the contested impulses of Chinese modernity? Drawing on the speaker’s current book project, this talk analyzes the transmedia formation of racial Blackness in Chinese cultural imaginaries of the long twentieth century. It identifies key figures and narratives at major historical junctures—from the liberation struggle of the enslaved in the late Qing to infrastructure projects in the Belt-and-Road age—that rendered Africa and the African diaspora legible and indispensable to the shifting visions of global China.

The works of Chinese thinkers, writers, and artists became implicated in antiblackness even—or precisely—as they sought to challenge existing orders. The disavowed entanglements between Chinese modernity and global racial formations show why race theory needs China, and why Chinese Studies needs race theory.