Language, Race, and Power in Sino-Nigerian Encounters: A Critical Race Theory Analysis

Sino-Nigerian encounters, whether in workplace settings, educational institutions, commercial environments, or daily urban life, are shaped by racial dynamics that have received insufficient theoretical attention in both China-Africa relations scholarship and Nigerian race studies. This study applies Critical Race Theory to an analysis of race, language, and power in Sino-Nigerian encounters across Nigeria's major urban centres, making an original contribution to the intersection of race scholarship and Sino-African relations. Drawing on Crenshaw's intersectionality, Omi and Winant's racial formation theory, and Fanon's colonial encounter analysis, the study employs a qualitative critical methodology including sixty narrative interviews with Nigerian individuals who have experienced significant Sino-Nigerian encounters in workplace, educational, and commercial contexts, twenty interviews with Chinese nationals reflecting on racial dynamics in their Nigerian experience, and critical discourse analysis of racial representations in both Chinese state media Nigeria coverage and Nigerian social media China-related content. Original theoretical contributions include a Sino-African Racial Formation Model that theorises how racial identities are mutually constituted in Sino-Nigerian encounters in ways that reproduce, resist, and partially transform both Chinese and Nigerian racial consciousness, and the concept of linguistic racialism describing how Mandarin language competency is racially coded in Nigeria, conferring privilege on Chinese nationals that is systematically denied to Nigerian Mandarin speakers in equivalent professional situations. The theoretical framework contributes a critical race perspective largely absent from the mainstream China-Africa relations literature.

Keywords: Critical Race Theory, race and language, Sino-Nigerian encounters, racial formation, power dynamics