Abstract
Bandung-inspired South–South solidarity frames are constitutive for recent African–Asian relations and include a perception of harmonic state–society relations. Civil society is assumed to contribute to the development and maintenance of “eye-to-eye” relations among Southern states. Contrary to these expectations, the analytical focus on African–Asian civil society relations foregrounds differences and contradictions in both the conceptions and political implications of African–Asian solidarity. In this context, the recourse to the field of China–South Africa gender politics, which we undertake, is especially telling for two reasons. Firstly, gender politics has been one of the most vibrant areas of transnational as well as transregional civil society since the World Women’s Conference in Beijing in 1995 gave weight to (South) African–Asian gender networks. Secondly, feminist responses to African–Asian transregionalisation remain critical and insist on experiences and norms of feminist transnationalisation. The widespread attitude of “feminist abstention” to China–(South) Africa relations, which we read as a challenge to the solidarity narrative without breaking its mould, provides solid empirical evidence for this assumption.
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Notes
- 1.
Instructive overviews of the developments during the UN Women’s Decade pertaining to the emerging disputes, discourses, strategies and concepts of inter- and transnational women’s (movements’) politics, with the first World Women’s Conference in Mexico (1975), the second in Copenhagen (1980) and the third in Nairobi (1985) as points of culmination, can be found in Peggy Antrobus (1995) as well as in Rawwida Baksh and Wendy Harcourt (2015).
- 2.
The latest volume of the South–South network DAWN (Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era), on theories and praxes of transnational gender politics (Sen and Durano 2014), provides a lot of illustrative material on the mutual relations and interconnectedness of the different levels, spheres and arenas of gender politics. They cross from the local to the national, involve the regional and international to bring to light all their border “trans-cending” dimensions.
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Mageza-Barthel, R., Ruppert, U. (2020). Bringing Transnationalism Back In: On Gender Politics in South Africa’s China Interactions. In: Anthony, R., Ruppert, U. (eds) Reconfiguring Transregionalisation in the Global South. International Political Economy Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28311-7_8
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