Yunxiang Gao

Dr. Gao Yunxiang’s new book Arise, Africa! Roar, China! Black and Chinese Citizens of the World in the Twentieth Century (University of North Carolina Press, 2021) unpacks the close relationships between a trio of the most famous twentieth-century African Americans, W. E. B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, and Langston Hughes, and their little–known Chinese allies, journalist, musician, and Christian activist Liu Liangmo and Sino-Caribbean dancer-choreographer Sylvia Si-lan Chen, during World War II and the Cold War. 

Charting a new path in the study of Sino-American relations, this book foregrounds African Americans, combining the study of Black internationalism and the experiences of Chinese Americans with a trans-Pacific narrative and an understanding the global remaking of China's modern popular culture and politics. It reveals much earlier and widespread interactions between Sino-African-American leftist figures than the familiar alliance between the Black radicals and the Maoist China. The book’s multi-lingual approach draws from the massive, yet rarely used, sources from multiple archival streams in China, Chinatowns, and the United States. This allows for the well-known stories of Du Bois, Robeson, and Hughes to be retold anew alongside the sagas of Liu and Chen, in a work that will transform and redefine Afro-Asia studies.

Robert H. Ferrell Book Prize of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR) is designed to reward distinguished scholarship in the history of American foreign relations, broadly defined. The prize committee "were 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. Gao's multi-lingual archival finds—in such diverse collections—reveal the potential of transnational history to tell enormous stories in exciting and revelatory ways. The careful work Gao do to attend to the complexity of her historical subjects while also helping the reader understand how these individuals shed light on much larger historical phenomena is visible on every page of the book. We all learned so much from reading this rich work of truly excellent scholarship."

Dr. Gao Yunxiang's book, Sporting Gender: Women Athletes and Celebrity-Making during China’s National Crisis, 1931-45 (University of British Columbia Press, 2013), Dr. Gao examines the rise to fame of female athletes in China during its national crisis of 1931-45, an emergency brought on by the Japanese invasion of the country. By re-mapping the lives and careers of individual female athletes, administrators, and film actors within the wartime context, Dr. Gao shows how these women coped with the conflicting demands of nationalist causes, unwanted male attention, and modern fame. While addressing the themes of state control, media influence, fashion, and changes in gender roles, she argues that the athletic female form helped to create a new ideal of modern womanhood in China at time when women’s emancipation and national needs went hand in hand. This book vividly brings to life the histories of these athletes, and demonstrates how intertwined their experiences were with the aims of the state and the needs of society.