African American Literature and African American Studies in China, 1933–1977: Contacts, Translation, and Literary Internationalism

Li, Guoqian

African American Literature and African American Studies in China, 1933–1977: Contacts, Translation, and Literary Internationalism

Files

Li_hawii_0085A_12009.pdf (1.44 MB) (Embargo until 2024-08-23)

Date

2023

Authors

Li, Guoqian

Advisor

Yoshihara, Mari

Department

American Studies

Abstract

This dissertation explores the introduction and translation of African American literature and African American studies in China from 1933 to 1977. It will show that Chinese intellectuals’ interest in Black America was driven by their contact with Black American artists, writers, and activists such as Langston Hughes, Paul Robeson, and W. E. B. Du Bois in the international conferences, ranging from Comintern Congresses in the late 1920s and World Peace Conferences in the 1940s to Afro-Asian Writers’ Conferences in the late 1950s and 1960s. The trajectory of Chinese intellectuals’ exploration of Black American activism through literature reflects China’s foreign relations with the United States, the Soviet Union, and the Third World. On the one hand, the study of African American literature and activism in China, from the publication of Black Literature by Yang Changxi to Yang Shengmao’s Black American Liberation Movement: A Brief History, was shaped by the political imperatives from the 1930s to 1970s, which were imbued with nationalist sentiments, Cold War tensions, anti-imperialism, and decolonization movements. On the other hand, Chinese intellectuals’ study of African American literature and culture reflected the rise of the Black American liberation movement within the United States and the rise of black internationalism and the global resistance movement against capitalist imperialism. The dissertation traces how Chinese intellectuals from Republican China to Communist China engaged in these movements and how their study, although imprinted with nationalist ideologies, comprises a part of the broader history of Afro-Asian solidarity and global liberation.

Keywords

African American studies

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/10125/107865

Extent

221 pages

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Ph.D. - American Studies

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