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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]

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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]

In this article we present results of a qualitative study of Africans in Macau, as part of the general phenomenon of African migration into China in the 21st century. We focus on the African community from Portuguese-speaking countries in Macau, outlining its internal organisation, memberships, objectives, and activities. The results of this study indicate that this African community is the most established and the best organised African community in China. We argue that the common linguistic identity between members of this community and with other Portuguese speakers is a major factor in its relative success. This argumentation is anchored in our cross-cultural theory of community identity building, where factors such as commonality of language, food, and music play important roles in community bonding and community identity building among migrant groupings in cross-linguistic and cross-cultural settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Yiwu, known as the largest commodities market in China and in the world, is becoming the destination of choice for Africans doing business in China. In this article we compare how Africans are received in Yiwu and Guangzhou, home to the largest community of Africans in China. We argue that the relatively negative reception of Africans in Guangzhou, compared to the more efficient and civil treatment of Africans in Yiwu, is one reason why Yiwu is eclipsing Guangzhou. How the state interfaces with Africans on migration matters has consequences for broader Africa-China relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]