A literary approach to Afro-Sino relations: Ufrieda Ho’s Paper Sons and Daughters: Growing Up Chinese in South Africa and Ken N. Kamoche’s Black Ghosts

Abstract

The Afro-Sino engagement supports the study of international relations beyond the framework of a West-centric narrative. Ken Kamoche’s fictionalisation of African immigrants in China, and Ufrieda Ho’s narration of the vicissitudes of Chinese communities in South Africa, contemplate the consequence of the Africa–Asia engagement on the human condition. While the attendant political apparatuses in the African continent and China laud the mutual benefits of engagement, Kamoche and Ho, by focusing on issues of transmigration, displacement and belonging, identity-formation, and so forth expose the acute Sinocentrism and Afrocentrism that impede the seamless establishment of migrant communities in both geopolitical spaces. The principal objectives of this essay involve a close reading of Kamoche and Ho’s novels to focus on the non-state participants of the Afro-Sino relations, and to discuss the emerging transnational, migrant literature that is at once African and Chinese. Ultimately, this essay suggests the formulation of a literary subgenre to embrace the Afro-Sino literary imagination.

Keywords:

• Literature
• Africa
• China
• migration
• immigrant
• inclusion
• identity-formation

Notes

1. Learning To Live Together. http://www.unesco.org/new/en/social-and-human-sciences/themes/international-migration/glossary/migrant/

2. In their study in which they attempt to interlace international relations theory and postcolonialism, Darby and Paolini (2017, 373) highlight the definition of international relations as an assembly of “power, order, states.”

3. Sartre, “What is Literature?”, 38.

4. “Chinua Achebe, the Art of Fiction No. 139: An Interview.” The Paris Review 133, Winter 1994. https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/1720/chinua-achebe-the-art-of-fiction-no-139-chinua-achebe

5. “Chinua Achebe, the Art of Fiction No. 139: An Interview.” The Paris Review 133, Winter 1994. https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/1720/chinua-achebe-the-art-of-fiction-no-139-chinua-achebe

6. Ho, Paper Sons and Daughters, 219.

7. Sartre, “What is Literature?”, 38.

8. Kamoche, Black Ghosts.

9. Ho, Paper Sons and Daughters, 2.

10. Ibid., 178.

11. Ho, Paper Sons and Daughters, 2.

12. Ibid., 204.

13. Ibid., 184.

14. Ibid., 4.

15. Ho, Paper Sons and Daughters, 218.

16. Kamoche, Black Ghosts, 4458.

17. Ho, Paper Sons and Daughters, 214.

18. Ibid., 215.

19. Ho, Paper Sons and Daughters, 215.

20. Kamoche, Black Ghosts, 1283.

21. Kamoche, Black Ghosts, 70.

22. Ibid., 1020.

23. Kamoche, Black Ghosts, 616.

24. Barthes. Mythologies, 110.

25. Kamoche, Black Ghosts, 71.

26. Park, “Living in Between.”

27. Ibid.

28. Bodomo, Africans in China, 8.

29. Kamoche, Black Ghosts, 74.

30. Bodomo, Africans in China, 17.

31. Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back, 9.

32. Kamoche, Black Ghosts, 33.

33. Kamoche, Black Ghosts, 3310.

34. Said, Orientalism, 33.

35. Kamoche, Black Ghosts, 3929.

36. Ho, Paper Sons and Daughters, 213.

37. Kamoche, Black Ghosts, 6800.