Shanshan Lan, “Researching race, migration, and the transnational circulation of racial knowledge: On Chinese migrants in Chicago, on African migrants in Guangzhou, and on the reconfiguration of whiteness in China”. Interview by Dominique Vidal and Si

Abstract

Shanshan Lan is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam. She has been conducting researches for nearly twenty years on Chinese migration to the United States, on Africans in the Chinese metropolis of Guangzhou and on whiteness in China. In the following interview, Shanshan Lan introduces her biographical and scholarly background, her training as an anthropologist in the United States and her distanced use of Western social sciences. She also discusses several concepts that she has developed from empirical investigations: “racial knowledge”, “overlapping racialization”, “grassroots interracial interaction”, and the difference she makes between “white privilege” and “white skin privilege”.