Shortcut English: Pidgin Language, Racialization, and Symbolic Economies at a Chinese-Operated Mine in Zambia

Abstract

“Shortcut English” is a pidgin spoken between Zambians and Chinese migrants at a Chinese-operated mine in southern Zambia. Contrary to most historical contact languages, the symbolic valences of Shortcut English favor the Zambian laborers over the Chinese mine managers and owners. In the past, Zambians at Summers have categorized Chinese as bamukuwa/ “whites.” Haruyama analyzes how the racializing dynamics of the new pidgin Shortcut English increasingly result in Chinese being figured as machainizi, a denigrated racial other whom Zambians see as unfit to run the mine, which contributes to sometimes violent resistance.

Anti-Blackness and Moral Repair

“…2.2.The differences between Zambian conceptualizations of race, in which Asians such as Chinese and Indians qualify as whites but not as “real whites,” and more globally hegemonic Euro‐American styles of racialization are discussed at greater length in Haruyama 2023.…”