The foreign and the familiar: Reading the China bag in South Africa

Abstract

This article explores the China bag, the iconic red-white-blue plaid bag, as a global commodity, material object, and art object in the context of racialized xenophobia in South Africa. With multiple meanings, the bag is simultaneously familiar and foreign, ubiquitous in its circulation and associated with migration. I consider the ways it is imbued with xenophobic sentiment and its agential capacity for marking racialized bodies as foreign. Through close readings of artworks by Nobukho Nqaba, Dan Halter, and Ronald Muchatuta, I show how artists deploy the China bag to critique xenophobia, and in so doing, make visible its agency.