“History Written in Advance: Christian Prophecy, Chinese-Zambian Relations, and Diffracted Modernity”

Over the last decade, Mandarin-language Jehovah’s Witness congregations have proliferated across Zambia. These congregations are almost exclusively composed of local Zambians who have learned Mandarin as a second language but count few to no ethnic Chinese congregants.  Though they find little success in converting Chinese migrants, these Witnesses transgress common Zambian social norms by befriending Chinese migrants, eating Chinese food, and expressing appreciation for Chinese culture. Explaining their actions, Witnesses invoke and elide history in ways that erase national and racialized differences between themselves and Chinese migrants.  They instead act upon a temporal horizon in which Biblical truths must be quickly spread before the rapidly approaching dissolution of the current system of things. In doing so, they enact a diffracted modernity that appropriates modernity’s totalizing tropes while challenging the secular liberalism of the nation-state, as they anticipate the world entering its final years before Jehovah God vanquishes all human-governed polities.

Justin Lee Haruyama is an ACLS Yvette and William Kirby Centennial Fellow in Chinese Studies and incoming assistant professor in the Department of Community, Culture and Global Studies at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan. His work in China-Africa studies demonstrates how central scholarly concepts such as race, colonialism, patriarchy, and capitalism are being fashioned anew by processes that do not have the West as their focal point.