Thinking China from Africa: Encounter with the Other Other

ABSTRACT

This roundtable on China–Africa “position and positionality”1 was produced during the first half of 2020, a time of isolation, dislocation and loneliness for many of us. The contributions have been written in a space and time which has given us new insights into how power and location shape our relationship to knowledge production, and how the work we do is enabled, or made impossible, by the infrastructures to which we have access because of our passports, our institutional affiliations and the strength and reliability of our internet signal. The impetus for the roundtable was a one-day conference held at SOAS, University of London, in January 2020 – as the Covid-19 virus was already reconfiguring mobility and sociality.