Arise Africa, Roar China: Black and Chinese Citizens of the World in the Twentieth Century

by Yunxiang Gao

Overview

This book explores the close relationships between three of the most famous twentieth-century African Americans, W. E. B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, and Langston Hughes, and their little-known Chinese allies during World War II and the Cold War—journalist, musician, and Christian activist Liu Liangmo, and Sino-Caribbean dancer-choreographer Sylvia Si-lan Chen. Charting a new path in the study of Sino-American relations, Gao Yunxiang foregrounds African Americans, combining the study of Black internationalism and the experiences of Chinese Americans with a transpacific narrative and an understanding of the global remaking of China's modern popular culture and politics. Gao reveals earlier and more widespread interactions between Chinese and African American leftists than accounts of the familiar alliance between the Black radicals and the Maoist Chinese would have us believe. The book's multilingual approach draws from massive yet rarely used archival streams in China and in Chinatowns and elsewhere in the United States. These materials allow Gao to retell the well-known stories of Du Bois, Robeson, and Hughes alongside the sagas of Liu and Chen in a work that will transform and redefine Afro-Asia studies.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781469679259
Publisher:	The University of North Carolina Press
Publication date:	02/01/2024
Series:	The John Hope Franklin Series in African American History and Culture
Pages:	408
Sales rank:	410,466
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x (d)

About the Author

Gao Yunxiang is professor of history at Toronto Metropolitan University, and author of Sporting Gender: Women Athletes and Celebrity-Making during China's National Crisis, 1931-1945.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

This ambitious and innovative book makes a significant contribution to the scholarship in a number of fields, including African American studies, Black internationalism, China-U.S. relations, modern Chinese history, and, very importantly, transnational history. It offers an exhaustively researched, brilliantly structured, and beautifully written account of left-wing African Americans and diasporic Chinese activists reaching across national borders in their struggle for identity, camaraderie, and solidarity."—Wang Xi, professor of History, Indiana University of Pennsylvania, and Changjiang Professor of history, Peking University

Arise, Africa! Roar, China! examines the intertwined lives of people we usually think of as inhabiting nonoverlapping domains. Chinese active in the U.S. world of arts and letters during World War II came to know and work with prominent African American intellectuals: the Robesons, the Du Boises, Langston Hughes. Their relationships helped form Chinese views of the Black diaspora, as well as African American views of China's place in the emergent project of anticolonial and racial liberation. Talking about transnational/transcultural history is easy; doing the work is difficult. Yunxiang Gao shows us that it can and should be done."—Gail Hershatter, University of California, Santa Cruz

In narrating the lives of these critical figures in transpacific relations, this impressively well-researched book makes a major contribution to our understanding of what has been called Black internationalism, the idea of racial solidarity of nonwhite peoples against racism and colonial oppression."—Marc Gallicchio, author of The African American Encounter with Japan and China: Black Internationalism in Asia, 1895–1945

Editorial Reviews

A History Today 2022 Book of the Year|A Book Authority 2022 Best New African American History Book and Best Politics Ebook

This tour-de-force of research connects the scholarship on Black internationalism, Chinese American studies, modern Chinese popular culture and politics, Black Diasporas, and transnational studies. . . . Arise, Africa! Roar, China! will surely stimulate more research on Sino-African diaspora history and the transnationality of modern Chinese history in the future."—Chinese Historical Review

Ambitious in its scope and inspiring in its subject material. Gao's provocative book demonstrates the importance of transpacific and translingual approaches in modern Chinese and African American history. It offers a new perspective on Sino-American relations through five compelling case studies that have rarely been examined side-by-side. . . . A pleasure to read and a layered work of scholarship that invites further rereading, revisiting, and reflection."—Modern Chinese Literature & Culture

Gao is by any measure a talented and engaging writer who brings her fascinating subjects vividly to life. . . . Gao tells a good story, actually five, and tells them very well. That the stories and protagonists are all linked yields a book is far more than the sum of its parts."—Asian Review of Books

A most impressive display of transnational research which furthers the important field of African American internationalism."—Peace & Change

Profoundly impressed . . . and dazzled by the creative approach [Gao] took to documenting and contextualizing the many different kinds of connections that existed between W.E.B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, Langston Hughes, Liu Liangmo, and Sylvia Silan Chen. . . . reveal[s] the potential of transnational history to tell enormous stories in exciting and revelatory ways. . . . truly excellent scholarship."—Sheyda Jahanbani, Chair of the Robert H. Ferrell Book Prize Committee at SHAFR

Gao's innovative research enriches the current English-language scholarship on Sino-African American interactions, advancing our understanding of Sino-U.S. relations and Black internationalism from a once-overlooked aspect of modern Chinese history."—Chinese Historical Review

From the Publisher