Conclusion

Summary

In the Conclusion, Forming Afro-Chinese Worlds, I deepen my discussion of aesthetics by focusing explicitly on the literary forms that writers use to imagine Afro-Chinese worlds. I make one last conceptual intervention by theorizing alluvial form (how a narrative texturizes the matrix of space and time through water and sediment, reconfiguring “worldliness”) with Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor’s The Dragonfly Sea (2019). This novel approaches the topic of Africa–China relations by fictionalizing the real-life story of a Kenyan woman found to have Chinese DNA. Through short, proleptic bursts that mimic waves rolling into shore, the novel reanimates the Indian Ocean as the primary site of exchange between the Swahili coast and southern China. The text counters the dehumanizing discourse surrounding Africa–China relations, using literary form anchored in the sociocultural histories of East Africa and so representing China in and on its own terms. I end by considering the fractal form of history, or the underlying process of creolization that I have teased out of how each chapter conceptualizes the alluvial.