Considering the African presence in China from an ethnographic and cultural studies perspective, this book offers a new way to theorise contemporary and future forms of transnational mobilities while expanding our understandings around the transformations happening in both China and Africa. The author develops an original argument and new theoretical insights about the significance of the African presence in Guangzhou, and presents an invaluable case study for understanding particular modes of transnational mobility. More broadly, it challenges forms of (re)presenting and producing knowledge about subjects on the move; and it transforms existing theorisations and critical understandings of mobility and its shaping power. Through an ethnographic approach, the book brings us closer to a number of practices, features and objects that, while characterising the lives of Africans in Guangzhou, are also evidence of the interplay between individual aspirations, and the structural constraints embedded in contemporary regimes of transnational mobility. Raising critical questions about ways of (un)belonging in the precarious settings of neoliberal modernity and the future of African mobilities, this book will be of interest to scholars of transnational, African and Chinese Studies.

In his biting first full-length collection in English, Tijuana poet Roberto Castillo Udiarte commiserates with Zona Norte streetwalkers, embodies the desert lizard, and maps a life lived in the dimness of the barroom -- as well as its incisive light. The poems in Smooth-Talking Dog display the counterculture influence of a wide range of influences on both sides of the border, from both the page and the rock concert stage, as hilarious and tragic as they are deadly serious. Celebrating Baja California's status outside the Mexican literary mainstream, Smooth-Talking Dog proves just how permeable the aesthetic border between the U.S. and Mexico really is.