Book contents
- China in Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century African Literature
- Cambridge Studies in World Literature
- China in Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century African Literature
- Copyright page
- Epigraph
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 Kofi Awoonor Imagines China
- Chapter 2 Figures of Extraction
- Chapter 3 Figures of Risk
- Chapter 4 Racialization and Afro-Chinese Identity
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Chapter 4 - Racialization and Afro-Chinese Identity
Henri Lopès’s Le lys et le flamboyant
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 June 2023
- China in Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century African Literature
- Cambridge Studies in World Literature
- China in Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century African Literature
- Copyright page
- Epigraph
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 Kofi Awoonor Imagines China
- Chapter 2 Figures of Extraction
- Chapter 3 Figures of Risk
- Chapter 4 Racialization and Afro-Chinese Identity
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Chapter 4, Racialization and Afro-Chinese Identity: Henri Lopes’s Le lys et le flamboyant, argues that race needs to be understood as a complex series of shifting racializations brought about through interactions between Africans and Chinese rather than as only an engagement with its ahistoricity as disseminated out of Western classifications rooted in histories of colonialism and imperialism. I examine how multiracial identity is represented in Henri Lopès’s francophone Le lys et le flamboyant (The Lily and the Flame Tree) (1997). I show how the novel—on the level of both form and content—subverts the rhetoric surrounding Africa–China relations as either a total “win-win” or unavoidably a “new colonialism.” I capture how each respective discourse is a mystification and so exceedingly dangerous for individuals when instrumentalized by the jingoistic discourse surrounding Africa and China.
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- China in Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century African Literature , pp. 157 - 208Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2023