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

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.

Author: Yunxiang Gao
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
Published: 02/01/2024
Pages: 406
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.37lbs
Size: 9.21h x 6.14w x 0.91d
ISBN: 9781469679259

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.