Every year, tens of thousands of West African and South Korean migrants settle in the city of Guangzhou and collaborate with Chinese rural migrants as they collectively forge the transnational supply chains for fast fashion. These migrants have crossed national boundaries and rural-urban divides to escape poverty, wage work, and unemployment. In her forthcoming book Precarious Accumulation, Nellie Chu follows in the passages of Chinese, West African, and South Korean migrants as they refashion themselves into self-enterprising figures of capitalist accumulation. In their efforts, they transform the urban topographies of labor exploitation, racialized policing, real estate speculation, divine wealth, debt, and diaspora.

About the Speaker:

Nellie Chu is Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Duke Kunshan University, China. She has published in several prominent journals and magazines, including positions: east asia critique; Modern Asian Studies; Culture, Theory, and Critique; Journal of Modern Craft; Noema; and University of Nottingham's China Policy Institute Blog.