Precarious Accumulation

Nellie Chu's Precarious Accumulation examines migrant entrepreneurs—rural Chinese bosses, West African traders, and South Korean jobbers—operating within Guangzhou’s fast fashion commodity chains.

Drawing on fieldwork in urban villages, household workshops, and wholesale markets, Chu traces how aspirations for autonomy and accumulation are produced and constrained by market forces, state and quasi-state actors, and infrastructural shifts.

The book develops concepts such as migrant bosshood, flexible appropriation, stalled mobility, and precarious accumulation to explain the rhythms of just-in-time garment production and speculative labor.

Chu also analyzes how COVID-19 and digital platforms (e. g.

, Shein) intensified precarity and reshaped production, distribution, and labor practices.

The work links place-based ethnography to broader debates about contemporary capitalism, migration, and labor in the global south.