My current ethnographic project examines non-elite, self-employed migrant entrepreneurs from Liberia, Senegal, Nigeria, and South Korea who have located themselves in Guangzhou and serve as the cross-cultural links through which transnational chains for fast fashion are formed. Specifically, I analyze how the global links for fast fashion intersect with migrants’ personal experiences of civil war, financial bankruptcy, gang violence, and broken marriages in places outside of China. Their entrepreneurial activities in Guangzhou deserve scholarly attention, because they have redefined the terms of economic development between China and the post-colonial world by determining the speed, routes, and means through which people and commodities move across national boundaries. Many members within these cross-ethnic, diasporic groups learn Mandarin Chinese, settle in Guangzhou, establish underground churches and mosques, and intermarry with Chinese citizens who are predominantly women. By examining the highly gendered, cross- cultural practices of “bosshood” in Guangzhou, I will analyze how these traders’ divergent family and work lives are collectively shaped by their roles as intermediary traders in the global chains of fast fashion production and exchange. In turn, their intimate relations and economic activities in Guangzhou transform post-socialist market spaces and former agricultural collectives, thereby shaping local policies of economic development based on lineage rights and spatial governance. Additionally, I have begun to examine how African and Korean traders’ religious lives in post-socialist China are intimately connected to their understandings of universality, masculinity, and entrepreneurship. My observations of migrants’ religious lives in China will serve as the basis of my future research projects.

My research deepens anthropological theories of globalization based on socio-political developments that are currently taking place within the global south. By placing religion, gender, race, and class-based inequalities at the core of its analytical inquiries, my book manuscript will contribute to literatures on global capitalism, racial politics in post-socialist China, diaspora studies, and post-colonial encounters. Specifically, it argues that global commodity chains rely on diverse forms of factory spaces, labor practices, and performances of gender in order to sustain the demands of flexible accumulation. These transformations are not simply responses to the external dictates of global capitalism but are social dynamics that are actively remade by ordinary people through their everyday experiments with market practices. More specifically, my project shows how global exchanges emerge out of processes of negotiation and encounter among people who struggle to make a living as social inequalities continue to deepen. My work demonstrates how domestic and transnational migrant entrepreneurs negotiate their social inclusions and exclusions as they attempt to convert their spatial and subjective identities from rural to urban and from wage worker to entrepreneur. Therefore, it emphasizes the unstable and shifting forms of religious practices, labor, migration, and entrepreneurial subjectivity that comprise the intermediary and transnational links of supply chain capitalism.