Date: Monday April 7, 2025

Time: 1:00 -2:30 PM

Venue: LIB 1111

Speaker:Prof. Flair Donglai Shi Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies, School of Humanities, Shanghai Jiao Tong University

Abstract

The past two decades have seen China-Africa ties grow closer than ever on political and economic fronts, and yet the sociocultural impacts of intensified China-Africa exchange on people’s lives and mutual perceptions in fields such as literature, film, and social media have only started to attract scholarly attention. The appearances of Yellow/Black Peril discourses in public discussions about China-Africa engagement constitutes an influential part of South-South relations that is often neglected or avoided due to postcolonial sensitivities around issues of racism on one hand and preconceived value positions associated with terms like “the Global South” on the other.

Against the backdrop of growing diversity in China-Africa cultural production, this talk focuses on the role of race in the historical development and contemporary representation of China-Africa relations. It examines a range of cultural texts, including novels, films, and media images, to highlight the need for racial and cultural literacy in interpreting the cultural dimension of contemporary China-Africa interactions. The second half of the talk will feature a screening of Irish-Lesotho director Carl Houston McMillan’s short film Laisuotuo (2016) as an artistic attempt to humanise interracial relations between Chinese and Africans in different diasporic conditions. By analysing this short film in the context of the long history of Chinese racial perceptions of Africa and contemporary China-Lesotho relations, the speaker argues that Laisuotuo constitutes a meaningful first step towards a more engaging humanistic approach to understanding and discussing China-Africa relations that is both contextually specific and methodologically explorative.

Speaker Biography

Flair Donglai SHI is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies at the School of Humanities, Shanghai Jiao Tong University. He holds a PhD in English from Oxford University and is a commissioning editor for the A&HCI journal Literature Compass and a core member of CASIN (China-Africa Shanghai International Network). His research areas include world literature theory, race and postcolonial studies, transnational Sinophone cinema, and China-Africa cultural relations. He has published an edited book, World Literature in Motion, and many articles in international journals. His first monograph, Yellow Peril Revisited, will be published soon and his current research project focuses on the interracial politics represented in contemporary China-Africa cultural products.