This study examined the nature and awareness of, and attitudes toward Chinese nation branding in Africa. Using critical discourse analysis and survey research, the project examines the impact of images and messages indicative of brand-China on attitudes toward China in the Gambia, Kenya, and South Africa; reconstructing the manufacture of China's national imaginary in Africa. By debating the significance of these images to China's continued rise on the continent, the author hopes to prompt a reconsideration of the discursive power mechanisms exercised in and through national image making in Africa. The argument established is that national imaginary constructions serve as part of the "strategy, substance, and symbolic action" of strategic self-presentation, and thus, African leaders and individuals should pay more attention to performative practices states engage in as, first, national imaginary constructions and, second, as strategies of presentation in the world. This study is located within the general body of scholarship that constitutes Black or Africana Studies, with a specific focus on Afro-Chinese relations. It contributes to this body of scholarship by focusing on how historical and contemporary relations between the Gambia, Kenya, and South Africa, and China fit within a trajectory of African interactions with and response to engagement with foreign nations. -- Abstract.
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