Black Marxism: an incorporated analytical framework for rethinking Chinese labour in South African historiography

Abstract

In recent years, the perceived threat of China has been uncritically conflated with the activities of various Chinese actors, including laborers and migrants, in the African continent. Characterizations of Chinese people resonate with that of the late 1800s and early 1900s and continue to displace them from the history of specific African countries. This is especially true in South Africa, where there is little memory of how indentured Chinese laborers were imported to help revitalize the gold mines after the Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902). In the paper, I offer an analysis of two dominant strands of historical writings about South Africa, aiming to show how the ways in which history were conceived at particular political junctures was largely responsible for the absence of the Chinese laborers. Importantly, I discuss how Robinson's challenges to Marxism and its theory of history in Black Marxism provide a space to unthink notions of capital, labor, and race. In the paper, I further explore how the dialectical, multi-temporal, and multi-spatial view of history that he puts forth already envisioned the presence of and included theses laborers who were brought into the European capitalist world-economy on a large scale by the latter half of the nineteenth century.