This reading group is an initiative of the ERC project China Africa Fashion Power (https://www.chinaafricafashionpower.org/)

The Global Africa reading group aims to facilitate critical discussions and dialogues on topics pertaining to ‘Africa’ and the Global South as a whole. In this, it strives to create a scholarly community that encompasses and accommodates the multitude of studies of and from Africa, and an avenue for keeping abreast with the academic developments pertaining to our theorised notion of ‘multiple Souths’. Combining aspects of a reading group and a seminar, Global Africa aspires to bring together esteemed international guest speakers with the China Africa Fashion Power project team, other African studies, humanities, and social sciences scholars based at  Dutch universities, as well as interested PhD and Master students.

About the ERC project China Africa Fashion Power

Fashion is a significant economic force globally and one of the most poignant indicators of cross-cultural exchange. Thus, the China Africa Fashion Power project uses everyday fashion (clothes, textiles, accessories, hair) as the lens to investigate how China’s global power is manifested, negotiated, and resisted in people’s daily life in Africa (Kenya and Mozambique).This will be studied by critically examining Africa-China networks of everyday fashion production, trade, retail and consumption, using a multi-disciplinary, multi-method, multi-sited, and multi-scalar approach. Thereby, the five-year-project aims to theorise how everyday fashion is created, circulated, valuated, and consumed in and through Global Souths Value Chains connecting Guangdong, Nairobi, and Maputo.

Schedule: For this semester, there will only be ONE Global Africa seminar event. This event will be held in Room 0.16, BG1 Turfdraagsterpad 9, Amsterdam, from 2:30-5:30pm on Thursday, 10 September, 2026. This event will comprise of two roundtable panels followed by discussions.  In addition to these two panels, we will also be having a short movie screening with Hangfeng Chen, our artist-in-residence. All speakers will present in person.

Attendance: In-person event only.  Drinks and snacks will be served.

For enquires: f.m.m.atchulo@uva.nl

*Acknowledgement: This event is sponsored by the European Research Council (ERC) Consolidator Grant 2021 research & innovations programme (grant number 101044619) and The Robert H.N. Ho Family Foundation Global”.  

Panel 1 (2:30-3:15pm): Spaces of Connection: African Traders and Transnational Life in Guangzhou. 
Speakers will include Dr. Ke Ma (University of Amsterdam), Fairuzah Atchulo (University of Amsterdam), and Rishuai Chen (Leiden University). This session will be moderated by  Dr. Tommy Tse (University of Amsterdam).

Ke Ma is a post-doctoral candidate at the University of Amsterdam, and affiliated with the ERC Project China Africa Fashion Power (https://www.chinaafricafashionpower.org) where she investigates how African female models, influencers, and sourcing agents in China use social media to mediate the South-South fashion trade. Ke’s talk titled ‘The Digital Atelier: Designing Garment and Self in the China-Africa Fashion Trade’ will focus on how mobile phones function as instruments of self-making in the China-Africa fashion trade. Beyond coordinating suppliers and customers, traders use phones to sketch garment designs, prototype business ventures, and project entrepreneurial personas. This shows how these digital practices consolidate a particular form of masculine selfhood—one grounded in creativity, independence, and commercial success—that is negotiated within the racialized structures of transnational fashion economies.

Fairuzah Atchulo is a PhD candidate at the University of Amsterdam, and affiliated with the ERC Project China Africa Fashion Power (https://www.chinaafricafashionpower.org) under which she researches on the consumption end of the China-Africa global value chains in Kenya and Mozambique. Fairuzah’s talk titled ‘Fashioning the local other’ explores why certain markets in Guangzhou more frequented by African traders and others not are not. This talk chips at the well-known appellation of Little Africa as a rhetoric to describe the visible presence of Africans in Guangzhou as a geographic, economic, or diasporic space. Instead, it reframes Little Africa in Guangzhou as the visible spaces of African culturalisation and a site of cultural production – as a creative embodiment of the material, cultural and symbolic space of Africa in Guangzhou where African traders help produce, translate and stabilise the material, aesthetic and symbolic value of fashion made in China for the African market.

Rishuai Chen is a PhD candidate at the African Studies Centre at Leiden University. His research focuses on the role of everyday practices of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in complexifying migratory experiences and dynamic connections across the Global South. Rishuai’s talk titled ‘The Distance of Connection: African Traders in Guangzhou” will explore how attending to different forms of distance that emerge in everyday migrant life can offer a way of rethinking the promise of ‘connection’ within Global Africa. By approaching distance not as the opposite of connection, but as a key to understanding the meaning and possibility of connection.

Panel 2 (3:30-4:15pm): Intimate Economies: Gender, Beauty and Marriage between China and Africa.
Speakers will include Cai Chen (Université Libre de Bruxelle),  Dr. Ewa Majczak (University College of London) and Dr. Johanna von Pezold (University of Amsterdam). This session will be moderated by Prof. Rachel Spronk (University of Amsterdam).

Cai Chen is a PhD candidate and teaching assistant at Université Libre de Bruxelles, currently visiting Leiden University (IIAS & ASCL) where he researches on the ethno-racial dynamics among Sino-Congolese couples living in the postcolonial Democratic Republic of Congo. Cai’s talk titled ‘Mixed Intimacies in Global Shadows: (Re)thinking Marriage-scapes from Africa’ centers Africa in understanding global marriage-scapes, with a focus on emerging intimate formations between African and Chinese women and men. Shaped by enduring and contemporary global forces—historical, socio-cultural, and political-economic—these mixed intimacies reveal Africa not merely as included in global marriage-scapes, but as actively constitutive of their making.

Ewa Majczak is a visiting fellow at the University College of London, and her research focuses on the intersections of technologies influence gender inequalities within society. Ewa’s talk examines informal digital economies in Cameroon through the lens of redistribution, focusing on fashion influencers. Ewa holds a PhD in anthropology from the University of Oxford, where she explored the influence of digital visual technologies on young women’s livelihoods in Yaoundé, Cameroon, with particular attention to their economic and intimate prospects.

Johanna von Pezold is a post-doctoral candidate at the University of Amsterdam, and affiliated with the ERC Project China Africa Fashion Power (https://www.chinaafricafashionpower.org). Her research examines  the creation of fashion in the trade and retail of Chinese-made garments and textiles in Mozambique. Johanna’s talk  titled ‘From Head to Market: Human Hair and Chinese Diasporic Life in Mozambique’ will explore the Chinese community in Mozambique through Chinese hair entrepreneurs who live and work in Maputo’s wig and extension trade. Using human hair as an entry point, the paper foregrounds the diversity, precarity, and entrepreneurial spirit of Chinese migrants navigating volatile markets, transnational supply chains, and intimate beauty economies. Following shop owners from Henan and Fujian, it shows how global hair circulations become embedded in everyday Mozambican life and shape diasporic belonging beyond the Global North.

Cinematic Intermission (4:30-5:30pm): Voyages of Identity, a film by Hangfeng Chen

Hangfeng Chen will present fragments from his ongoing hybrid film Voyages of Identity. The film documents his visit to Pate Island, East Africa, where he meets a Kenyan woman said to have Chinese ancestry, who traces her lineage to Admiral Zheng He's sailors through oral histories and local legends. This personal narrative resonates with his transnational research journey of African Wax Print—from Indonesian batik and Dutch colonial trade to contemporary Chinese manufacturing. The film explores how migration, colonialism, and global trade continue to shape identities across continents.

Hangfeng Chen is a visual artist and filmmaker, his work explores memory, history, displacement and hybridity. He holds an MA from the Netherlands Film Academy and is an artist-researcher at the University of Amsterdam.