Unbinding Global China: Fieldnotes from a West African fishing port

This commentary engages with DiCarlo and DeBoom's unveiling of ‘Global China’ as a contested concept by drawing on my field research on China's maritime engagements in West Africa. While concurring with the need to interrogate this geographical imaginary, I caution against this field's lingering tendencies of exceptionalization and territorial fixation, and probe into how these tendencies might risk confining our understanding of the differently situated actors and relations that constitute maritime ‘Global China’.