Epistemological friction in the contact zone: Ethiopian itinerant commerce, socio-cultural articulation, and the unlearning of race in Chinese trade cities

This article introduces the concept of racial unlearning to examine how racism is deconstructed within micro-level Afro-Chinese interactions. Drawing on longitudinal data generated among Ethiopian traders who travel between Ethiopia and China, I situate Ethio-Chinese encounters within Bhabha’s [Bhabha, Homi K. [1994] 2004. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge] “in-between spaces”—interstitial zones of fractured hegemony in which African agency produces not merely epistemic articulation but ontological consequence, carving out deracialised social realities. In these spaces, blackness and Chineseness emerge as liminal identities that evolve towards mutual recognition through iterative processes of racial unlearning. I argue that, within localised Afro-Chinese interactions, racialisation and racial unlearning unfold as concomitant processes—a dynamic that dominant global racial discourses have failed to anticipate. This reorientation shifts analytical attention away from macro- and meso-level scholarship preoccupied with the formation of racial hierarchies, and towards blackness and Chineseness as active, lived, and relationally constituted experiences.