Kaian Lam 林嘉欣

All photos of Cape Verde personally taken by me on site.

Unnarratizing China-Angola Relations: Visual Memories, Mediating Bodies, and Bilateral Infrastructures of Feeling

Angola is one of China’s most important economic partners in Southern Africa. Approaching China-Angola relations, we develop notions of translational politics and adopt instruments of everyday political aesthetics. We interview Chinese translator-interpreters who have worked in Angola, tapping into their quotidian migrant knowledge and searching for embodied, affective evidences of bilateral infrastructures of feeling. With this, we locate new sites of China-Angola engagement in the midst of multisensory experiences. The proposed methodology has the potential to relativize state-centrist discourse and subvert dominant visuals. Our contribution to China-Angola knowledge prioritizes mundane, everyday politics.

Hypervisible Non-Residents and Emergent Forms of Living: Translator-Interpreters’ Entanglements in Chinese-Angolan Modes of Operation and Infrastructural Projects

This article is based on textual-visual interviews with language professionals who have been employed in Angola through Chinese enterprises. Despite their expertise on Chinese and Angolan matters, a great majority of them are, and will remain, non-residents. The objective is to make sense of their geopolitical (im)mobility, affectual commitment, and personal investment in public works projects in Angola, where they cannot reasonably expect to become full-fledged community members. Approaching ‘hypervisible non-residents’ and understanding their lives in Angola as ‘emergent forms of living’, the discussion accounts for the aesthetics that connects a vast Chinese-Angolan built environment with migrants’ many, varied perceptual worlds. The research critically examines the socio-political foundations of the economy by applying human-centred knowledge of global systems.

PRESENTATIONS

Yale Africa-China Symposium: Cultural Dimensions March 14-15, 2024, Eduardo Mondlane University, Maputo

Chinese in Africa/Africans in China (CA/AC) Research Network “Writing for Impact” Workshop June 1-2, 2023, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg

Association for Asian Studies (AAS) Annual Conference 2024 March 1, 2024 (online), organized panel

WRITING

Two full-length research articles under review