Arise Africa, Roar China: Black and Chinese Citizens of the World in the Twentieth Century
Posted: January 2nd, 2022 | 1 Comment »Yunxiang Gao’s Arise Africa looks like an excellent study….
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.
Silvia or Si-Lan Chen was born in Trinidad , her father was the Trinidad born lawyer, Eugene Chen and her mother was a mulatto who was decided from the Ganteaume family, a French family which included a General from the Napoleon army. Sylvia was taken to London where she was trained in dance and after her mother died, she was taken to China. Later in life, she moved to the US and worked in Hollywood. She choreographed dances in the film “The King and I”, and tutored Yvonne De Carlo (who played Mortitia in the Adams Family TV series) in dance.