Race in Translation, Translation as Anti-racist Praxis

Abstract This article calls on scholars pursuing anti-racist scholarship across Asian studies, Asian American studies, and Black studies to interrogate reductive tendencies of compartmentalization and comparativism in considering the entanglements of racial Blackness and global China. Connecting a recent case of media racism that involved Chinese citizens in Africa to the geopolitics of anti-racism across sinophone and anglophone spheres, it argues that greater attention to the circulation and interaction of racial discourses and racializing practices is necessary for addressing the increasingly transnational formation of anti-Blackness in the Global South. Pushing back against what the author identifies as “homoracialism” in founding and ongoing scholarship on race and China in both Asian studies and Asian American studies, this article proposes a translational approach to anti-racist critique and action. Conceptualized as a social practice that sutures epistemic disjunctures and activates new communities of meaning, anti-racist translation foregrounds the embodied in-betweenness and activist transformation of diaspora subjects. The article provides examples of grassroots experiments of anti-racist translation in lesser-known social justice movements among diasporic Afro-Asian communities in Africa, China, and North America.