This essay problematizes the place of “culture” in Africa-China studies whereby culture is often sidelined as the devalued supplement to political-economic data. Instead, cultural narratives and processes are inseparable from how knowledge and Africa-China relationality are made. We consider how multi-directional reflexivity about the production of a knowledge object (“Africa-China/China-Africa”) intervenes in both outdated forms of Cold War-inflected area studies and emergent hawkish nationalist scholarship. This essay considers Africa-China as method, an approach based in transregional theorizing and relational analysis that attends to the politics of knowledge production and resists instrumentalization of scholarly findings by imperialist or ethnonationalist agendas.

Transnational cultural encounters between Africa and China, such as Chinese artist Pu Yingwei’s exploration of Kenya’s dam infrastructure and the reception of French-Senegalese director Mati Diop’s film Dahomey on African artifact repatriation among Chinese youth, generate new sites of knowledge circulation and epistemic inquiry. These exchanges exemplify an approach of “reflexivity,” which emphasizes critical reflection on one’s own positionality, research processes, and the broader conditions shaping knowledge production. Oriented toward mutual reference and epistemic affinity between Asia and Africa, this approach promotes a relational mode of knowledge-making attentive to both shared historical legacies and existing structural disparities.

This article offers new insights on Africa-China relations and discourses of authenticity and intellectual property by examining the trade and consumption of Chinese-made fashion goods in Mozambique from an ethics perspective. Ethnographic fieldwork in southern Mozambique between 2017 and 2024 shows that many traders and consumers see Chinese counterfeits as beneficial and desirable, enabling them to participate in fashion systems from which they have long been excluded. For traders and consumers in Mozambique, it is ethically right to supply and purchase functional, adequate-quality, and aesthetically pleasing counterfeits. These goods are evaluated less in terms of legality than through pragmatic, everyday judgments about quality, care, and access. The Mozambican case complicates dominant narratives of Chinese-African trade and global intellectual property governance, showing how ethics of access and quality shape everyday globalization.

Studies on Chinese cultural and religious engagement abroad are often framed through the lens of state-driven soft power. Drawing on the case study of the Zambia Shaolin Cultural Center (ZSSC), I challenge this state-centric interpretation, emphasizing the collaborative, relational, and fluid nature of China–Africa cultural and religious encounters. Inspired by “assemblage thinking” and based on fieldwork observation and interviews, I examine the heterogeneity, fluidity, and adaptability of Shaolin’s operations in Zambia. I argue that ZSCC should be viewed as an evolving assemblage where diverse actors and elements interact and co-create meaning through adaptation and negotiation.

Drawing on the dynamic and historically layered relationships among Africa, China, and the West, a “triangular system” serves as an analytical framework for understanding the evolution of studies of African literature in China. Tracing a four-stage periodization reveals how Western epistemologies have shaped Chinese interpretations of African literature. At the same time, it also illuminates China’s efforts to assert intellectual autonomy. A fluid, geometry-based triangulation model that accommodates multiplicity, foregrounds African agency, and fosters direct Afro-Chinese literary engagement is essential for meaningful South-South collaboration in literary studies, which must resist epistemic dependency and nationalist instrumentalization, and instead emphasize mutual learning and structural transformation.

Over the past decade, an increasing number of athletes of mixed Chinese and Black/African heritage have become public figures, often labeled as the “hope for the nation” by online Chinese media. By collating and analyzing online media discourses on the best-known figures among them, this paper attempts to theorize the Chinese term, “zhongfeihunxue (literally ‘China-Africa mixed blood’).” It demonstrates that underneath the seemingly positive affect of hope, the racial niche carved out for these mixed athletes by such discourses is underpinned by a complex form of Chinese racial nationalism characterized by heightened expectations, reinforced stereotypes, and intersectional anxieties.

African cities are sites of intense contrast and contradiction. For urban residents, they are defined by opportunity and desperation, mobility and immobility, poverty and wealth, history and innovation, organization and disorder. For those who navigate these complexities on a daily basis the contradiction is often the rule. It doesn’t necessarily exclude or separate; it often enables in ways that defy the planning logics, development models, and academic theories of Western observers, international organizations, or bilateral donors. For those who live at the extremes, it seems like these contradictions represent “two worlds”—a physical manifestation of the extreme income inequality in which residents at different ends of the socioeconomic spectrum operate in spheres completely distinct from one another. If the poorest urban residents cannot afford to or don’t feel comfortable in elite spaces, the wealthiest can easily find themselves insulated from the realities of the streets, separated by a pane of glass, the comfort of air conditioning, and the sound of a radio or TV.

In 1948, the Nationalist Party of South Africa implemented apartheid, a policy of strict racial segregation that governed the country for forty-six years until 1994. Apartheid’s proponents legislated several measures to entrench racial separation under the direction of its proclaimed architect Hendrik Verwoerd. This included passing the Group Areas Act, which set aside enclaves for different racial groups, and the Population Registration Act which required every citizen to declare a racial category in 1950. These promulgations further enforced the 1945 Groups Areas Act. Passed during the segregation era from 1910 to 1948, this law determined where Africans could live, work, and travel within the metropolitan spaces.