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This paper first outlines a brief history of the African presence in China since the Tang era, indicating that Africans have mostly lived on the margins of the Chinese society. It then highlights the contemporary presence of Africans in China since the turn of the Millennium, showing that while African traders and students have demonstrated a lot of resilience, the story of Africans living at the margins of the Chinese society has not changed much. As a case study, insights are drawn from research conducted in Guangzhou showing the marked inequalities Africans living there face in regards to access to health care. Some of the many barriers creating inequality of access to health care include affordability, legal issues, and language barriers. Finally, the paper proposes a theory of resilience to explain the attempt by Africans in China to cope with this situation of inequality and well-being. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do African migrants become stuck-in-place and experience stuckedness in China? This article interrogates the concepts of stuckedness and social navigation to examine what it means to be 'stuck-in-place' using the stories of four Nigerians—a woman and three men—in Guangzhou City. Two modes of stuckedness were observed: 'truncational stuckedness' and 'identity stuckedness'. While the former resulted from being spatially stuck in Guangzhou on their way to South Korea and Hong Kong, the latter was a product of identity appropriation, where a migrant uses the passport of another country. Despite the constraint of stuckedness and the precarity that those without valid immigration papers faced, migrants managed to reinterpret their situations and stayed put while being opened to emplacement in Guangzhou—albeit a transitory kind. In calibrating their practice of 'moving on' in Guangzhou, however, economic integration, the local and transnational networks of migrants, hope, prolonging one's stay and management of micro-mobilities of the everyday were deployed singly or in combination with one another. The article advances debates in China-African relations and Afro-mobilities in East Asia while also contributing to discourses on migrant trajectories, stuckedness, and mobilities studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers how African student migrants negotiate life in China through gastronomic practices and cultures. African migration to Chinese cities such as Guangzhou and Wuhan is part of internationalization processes that are transforming cities. A thoroughfare in Guangzhou known as Xiaobei is associated with the visible urban presence of African migration because of the ethnic restaurants and shops there. Such typecasting, however, masks more complex food practices that illuminate the social stratification contained within the category popularly referred to as “African.” Food practices also direct attention to migrants’ social interactions with Chinese residents in cities. This paper first highlights the impact of African migration on urban space in China and the social anxieties arising on the part of the Chinese state and residents. Second, the paper argues that even though the African students consume Chinese food as part of their lifestyle routines in China or African food that remind them of home, they also seek out “Western” food as a symbol of cosmopolitan identity to counter racialization in China. Their accounts of food signal colonial and postcolonial negotiations toward the wider global geographies of power in which African countries and the student migrants are situated. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The presence of Africans in Chinese cities has made their healthcare-related issues an expanding area of interest. However, previous studies have not thoroughly explored how Africans live through health problems. This article explores the taken for granted aspect using the analytical frameworks of migration as a social determinant of health and phenomenological sociology. Based on interviews with 37 Nigerians in Guangzhou city, it describes how health and illnesses are lived and the ways that language barrier, cost of health care, immigration status and racism and discrimination intertwine with quotidian occurrences to shape the experiences of health challenges. Migrant networks and community structure provided critical assistance, but the context of labour circumstances and undocumentedness can overstretch these critical sources of support. The article exposes how the broader context of being and living in China determine how Africans experience health challenges in Chinese cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This article begins by asking how African traders learn to adjust to the foreign world of Guangzhou, China, and suggests that African logistics agents and middlemen serve as cultural brokers for these traders. After defining "cultural broker" and discussing why these brokers are not usually Chinese, it explores this role as played by ten logistics agents/middlemen from Kenya, Nigeria, Ghana and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. As logistics agents, these people help their customers in practically adjusting to Chinese life, and as middlemen they serve to grease the wheels of commerce between African customers and Chinese suppliers. This is despite their own ambivalent views of China as a place to live. They play an essential role in enabling harmonious relations between Africans and Chinese in Guangzhou, even though they see themselves not as cultural brokers but simply as businessmen. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is an exploration into the personal aspirations that converge in Guangzhou's African music scene. I argue that despite being often traversed, articulated, fuelled, and constrained by economies and economic discourses, aspirations are not necessarily economic or rational calculations. I contend that the overarching trading narrative about "Africans in Guangzhou" has left little space for issues of agency, emotion, and aspiration to be considered in their own right. Drawing on a year of continuous ethnographic fieldwork, I show how aspirations are crucial arenas where the rationales behind transnational mobility are developed, reproduced, and transmitted. Indeed, aspirations can be thought of as "navigational devices" (Appadurai 2004) that help certain individuals reach for their dreams. By bringing the analysis of aspirations to the fore, I intend to provide a more complex and nuanced landscape of the multiple rationales behind African presence in Southern China; promote a better understanding (both conceptually and empirically) of how individuals navigate their social spaces and guide their transnational journeys; and draw attention to the incessant frictions and negotiations between individual aspirations while on the move and the constraints imposed by more structural imperatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]