ABSTRACT
This chapter interrogates the “China in Africa” discourse and, drawing on critical post-structuralist insights, deconstructs mainstream Euro-American discourses on the Chinese engagement in Africa that are territorially based, binary, value imbued. Africa is a site of contestation in which Euro-American ideologies exert influence through championing, in many regards, their difference from China. This signals a failure to locate an adequate representation of the world in an age of economic globalisation in the context of the Anthropocene, the present ecological era in which human-based planetary alteration driven by market capitalism is being inscribed in the fossil record. China’s integration into the global economy has accelerated the problem of the Anthropocene and, in turn, underlined the imperative of re-thinking global political economy in the context of the Anthropocene.
