Chapter 3 - Figures of Risk

Summary

Chapter 3, Figures of Risk: Memoirs of a Chinese South African and a Cameroonian in China, features two memoirs of diaspora – from a South African of Chinese descent and a Cameroonian student in the PRC. Both represent the vicissitudes of diasporic mobility in Africa–China relations. They conceptualize mobility through the complex interplay between racial identity, government bureaucracy, threat of imprisonment, personal risk, and economic gain. This chapter shifts the focus to figures of risk, embodied by the gambler and the trickster. As memoirs, these narratives foreground how an individual positions their cultural identity (Hall), complicating and even subverting the official narratives of Africa–China relations through an explicit claim to lived experience. By focusing on these autobiographical writings, I expand the concept of the alluvial to mean the accretions and erosions of everyday life, whether material or metaphysical, acquired through interactions with Others. The texts exemplify cultural creolizations that play (or gamble) with the alluvium of diasporic experience.