Honorable Mention, 2022 Robert H. Ferrell Book Prize, Society for
Historians of American Foreign Relations
Shortlisted, 2022
Wallace K. Ferguson Prize, Canadian Historical Association
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.
