“Dear Friends”: From People’s Cultural Exchange to People’s Cultural Production

The article explores how the politics of South-South cooperation, namely between Africa and China, play out at the level of cultural subjectivity, implicating modes of affect and identities that are not captured by the more commonly employed binary framework of “friend” or “enemy.” It asks whether it is possible for the Africans and Chinese to imagine each other without the West as its geocultural dominance diminishes; and if so, how is this being made possible? As modes of transmitting and learning, cultural initiatives under the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation and “Belt and Road Initiative” provide a window into both people’s understandings of one another. While necessary for building people-to-people relations, the article, relying on an analysis of data collected from Chinese websites, argues that the state-sponsored cultural exchanges largely reify existing racialized ideas of “the African” and Orientalist views of “the Chinese.” However, building on Simbao’s (2019) point about artists’ works that “push back” against dominant discourse, the article further argues and demonstrates through the journey and works of three artists (Chinese, Kenyan, and Ghanaian) that radical imaginaries reflecting the inner states of acting subjects of China-Africa engagements are available in local cultural productions, uncompromising in communicating shared beliefs and posing challenges to power relations on multiple scales.