Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Kultur-, Sozial- und Bildungswissenschaftliche Fakultät - Institut für Asien- und Afrikawissenschaften

Abstract: 

In this talk, Hongwei Bao will introduce the conception, structure and editing processes of the book Entanglements and Ambivalences: Africa and China Encounters in Media and Culture (co-edited by Hongwei Bao and Daniel H. Mutibwa, Routledge 2025). He will specifically introduce his chapter in the book, titled ‘The Queer Global South: Transnational Video Activism between China and Africa’. The chapter examines grassroots cinematic connections and video activism between China and Africa by taking the Queer University Video Capacity Building Training Programme (2017–2019) as a case study. Drawing on Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih's critical term ‘minor transnationalism’, the case study sheds light on the hopes, frustrations and promises of people-to-people exchanges taking place in the Global South, illustrating the ‘entanglements and ambivalences’ that characterise Africa and China encounters in media and culture today. 

Bio: 

Dr. Hongwei Bao is Associate Professor in Media Studies at the University of Nottingham, UK. He is the author of Queer Comrades (NIAS Press, 2018), Queer China (Routledge, 2020), Queer Media in China (Routledge, 2021), Contemporary Chinese Queer Performance (Routledge, 2022) and Queering Asian Diaspora (Sage, 2024). He is co-editor of Contemporary Queer Chinese Art (Bloomsbury, 2023), Queer Literature in the Sinosphere (Bloomsbury, 2024), Routledge Handbook of Chinese Gender and Sexuality (Routledge, 2024), and Entanglements and Ambivalences: Africa and China Encounters in Media and Culture (Routledge, 2025). He coedits the Bloomsbury book series ‘Queering China: Transnational Genders and Sexualities’ and De Gruyter book series ‘Oyster: Feminist and Queer Approaches to Arts, Cultures, and Genders’. 

Comment: John Njenga Karugia, PhD

John Njenga Karugia, PhD, is a scholar of Transregional Memory Studies, Indian Ocean Studies, Africa-China Relations and Area Studies. He is a member of the Frankfurt Memory Studies Platform with a focus on memory politics, memory ethics and responsible cosmopolitanism. His current research project analyzes transregional memory politics, memory ethics and the political economy of the Belt and Road Initiative at the De:Link // Re:Link research project sponsored by the German Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), based at the Institute for Asian and African Studies at the Humboldt Universität zu Berlin. He previously researched and lectured at the Institute of Political Science and at the Institute of English and American Studies at Goethe University Frankfurt and at the Institute of African Studies at the University of Leipzig. He was a visiting scholar at Duke University, Shanghai Maritime University, University of Mumbai and Quaid-e-Azam University Islamabad. Kenyatta University (in the proximity of Githurai) was his alma mater.

Moderation: Prof. Dr. Sarah Eaton

Sarah Eaton is Professor of Transregional China Studies at Humboldt University Berlin and co-founder of the Berlin Contemporary China Network (BCCN). She is interested in the study of contemporary Chinese politics and political economy from comparative and transregional perspectives. A major focus of her current research is the politics of standardization governance, for which she has received funding from the German Research Foundation as well as the European Research Council.

This lecture is part of this spring term's BCCN Lecture Series: China in the Global Political Economy.

‘Security first’ has increasingly come to define Chinese economic governance, seemingly reversing decades of economic policy that placed ‘development first’ through export trade promotion, negotiated openness to foreign direct investment and socialization within a US-led liberal economic order that has been developmentally successful and a cornerstone of regime legitimacy. In this talk, Liu problematizes the great power security competition thinking that has been much attributed to these developments, adopting instead a Gramscian political economy that takes seriously the domestic and transnational sources of state authority to make sense of the national security turn in China and indeed of the broader security turn sweeping across national capitals. 

Driven by crisis-prone conditions of escalating US-China rivalry, intra-state factional stalemates over China’s industrial overcapacity, and deepening societal inequality, Liu argues that a Xi Jinping-led national security faction has sought to recalibrate the Chinese hegemonic project not wholly in response to inter-state security competition but as a means to further extract the latent growth potential from China’s development model and consolidate the position of Chinese state actors and of China between a US-led Global North and China-led Global South.

Bio:

Imogen Liu is an an Assistant Professor of International Political Economy at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Her current research is animated by questions surrounding the politics and governance of finance, production and energy systems under conditions of heightened geopolitical competition. A consistent theme in her work is the role of transnational firms in shaping divergent trajectories of industrial development between Global North and South. Her research has been featured in journals including New Political Economy, Geopolitics, Journal of Economic Geography, Dialogues in Human Geography and Development and Change. She is co-organiser of SASE Network Q: Asian Capitalisms and co-lead of the Finance and Money working group of the China in Europe Research Network.

Online via Zoom. Please register here.