Aesthetic Ambivalence: Racial Capitalism and Maputo’s Chinese Gloria

Abstract

In 2016, the Gloria Hotel in Maputo, Mozambique became the largest newcomer to the capital’s expanding skyline.  A site of executive conferences and lavish weddings, the hotel is one of the city’s most remarked-upon urban developments.  The Gloria’s formidable visual impact, however, has as much to do with its Chinese ownership and aesthetics as its grandeur.  Built by a Chinese minerals exploration, supermarket, and hotels enterprise, the Gloria is known for its distinct Eastern aesthetic and as a marker of racial newcomers to the country’s globalized investment scene.  Centering a racial capitalism approach (Robinson 1983), and combining the idea of aesthetic citizenship (Gastrow 2017) with field research conducted over 2018-2020, this paper explores Mozambicans’ ambivalent views of the hotel, Chinese presence in Mozambique, and these dynamics’ racial contours.  I argue that while heterogeneously viewed, Mozambicans have generally associated Chinese economic and social activity with racialized mistrust – sentiments that come through in the hotel’s regard.  However, as Mozambicans have also turned favorably toward the hotel as an aspirational space, and the economic and social possibilities that China offers, the Gloria has become a site for middle class members and elites to display growing wealth, status, and luxurious lifestyle, in newly transforming postcolonial ways, and with implications for foreign investment in African contexts.