Now available: Professor Gao Yunxiang's book, Arise, Africa! Roar, China!

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) (external link)  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.