Engaging both socio-cultural and linguistic anthropological methods and theories, Jay Schutte’s work concerns the semiotic and political economy of language, race, and mobility in Chinese and African student encounters in contemporary Beijing.

The current title of his dissertation is Translating Ideologies: Race, Mobility, and Language in the Sino-African Encounter. In it, he investigates the educational encounter between Africa and China through an ethnographic analysis of African students’ engagement with Chinese Universities in Beijing, China. The study focuses on the relationship between ‘English’, ‘whiteness’, and ‘cosmopolitanism’ as analytics mediating the interactions between African and Chinese actors. Here, the dissertation endeavors to depict how this relationship – between what appears to be familiar colonial tropes – becomes reconstituted in novel, but ultimately limiting ways in Sino-African encounters in Beijing. As such, the dissertation affords an opportunity to re-approach the analytics of postcolonial translation from a context expected to have cathartically invoked “the Third World [starting over] a new history of man” (Fanon 1965: 238).

His work draws on two primary theoretical trajectories. The first is influenced by linguistic anthropological theories of metapragmatics, translation, and language performativity. The second engages socio-cultural and postcolonial arguments around political economy, decolonization, and ideology. This confluence of ideas follows three cumulative years of ethnographic research on African and Chinese university students’ encounters, mediated through language, race, and mobility as an imbricated set of semiotic and ideological relations. The research and analytical methods used in this research include historical archival work, ethnographic interviews, linguistic analyses, as well as the semiotic analysis of media objects.