What Are Friends For?

H.L.T. Quan
What Are Friends For? China's New Adventures in Africa & the Trope of Solidarity

This talk focuses on one of modern development’s most familiar reiterations: the aggressive economic engagement with Africa. It explores China’s “new adventures” in Africa by investigating the recent acceleration of China-African economic engagement, the new Africa-China strategic partnership, and the official campaign to legitimize China’s aggressive approach toward Africa. The trope of solidarity and cooperation, as articulated by the official narrative of African and Chinese states, anticipates criticisms of the familiar development of colonial economic reiterations, where Africa is being pursued for its raw materials and market availabilities.
H. L. T. Quan is a political theorist and a documentary filmmaker. She teaches in Justice & Social Inquiry in the School of Social Transformation at Arizona State University. Her writings can be found in Social Identity, Race & Class, Meridians, Signs, and the edited volumes Race & Human Rights and Global Africa. Through Quad Productions and in collaboration with C. A. Griffith, Quan has co-directed, co-produced, and co-edited more than half a dozen short and feature length documentaries. Griffith and Quan recently completed the feature length documentary, Mountains That Take Wing/Angela Davis & Yuri Kochiyama: A Conversation on Life, Struggles & Liberation. They are working on America’s Home, a feature length documentary about gentrification, empire and popular resistance in San Juan, PR. Quan is finishing her book manuscript, AntiDemocracy: Savage Developmentalism and the Modern World. She is also a UCSB Alumna.