Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Precarious Accumulation: Fast Fashion Bosses in Transnational Guangzhou

Precarious Accumulation: Fast Fashion Bosses in Transnational Guangzhou

Chu, Nellie

Hardcover

AnthropologyGeneral Racism & Ethnic StudiesGeneral Sociology

ISBN10: 1478029641
ISBN13: 9781478029649
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: Feb 3 2026
Pages: 280
Weight: 1.20
Height: 0.75 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
In Precarious Accumulation, Nellie Chu tells the story of the migrant entrepreneurs at the heart of Guangzhou's fast fashion industry--one of the world's most dynamic hubs of transnational commodity production. Chu shows how rural Chinese migrants, West African traders, and South Korean jobbers navigate the high-speed, low-margin world of just-in-time garment production that fuels the constant accumulation of wealth via global supply chains. Drawing on fieldwork in Guangzhou's urban villages and household workshops, Chu outlines how these entrepreneurs' dreams of economic freedom clash with the reality of precarity and the exclusions of emigre status. Migrant bosses operate within a highly competitive, informal economy where they are both agents and target of exploitation, as they must evade rent collectors, endure racialized policing, and mitigate extortion from security officers and competitors. Chu crucially demonstrates how their efforts generate novel forms of migratory labor, commodity production, and cross-cultural exchange in postsocialist China.

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