Arise Africa, Roar China: Black and Chinese Citizens of the World in the Twentieth Century

Posted in Asian Diaspora, Books, History, Media Archive, Monographs, Politics/Public Policy, United States on 2022-01-19 02:15Z by Steven

Arise Africa, Roar China: Black and Chinese Citizens of the World in the Twentieth Century

University of North Carolina Press
December 2021
408 pages
49 halftones, notes, bibl., index
6.125 x 9.25
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4696-6460-6
eBook ISBN: 978-1-4696-6461-3

Yunxiang Gao, Professor of history
Ryerson University, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

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.

Table of Contents

  • Title Page
  • Copyright Page
  • Dedication
  • Contents
  • Acknowledgments
  • Introduction
  • 1. Africa, Arise! Face the Rising Sun! W. E. B. and Shirley Graham Du Bois
  • 2. Arise! Ye Who Refuse to Be Bond Slaves! Paul Robeson, “the Black King of Songs”
  • 3. Transpacific Mass Singing, Journalism, and Christian Activism: Liu Liangmo
  • 4. Choreographing Ethnicity, War, and Revolution around the Globe: Sylvia Si-lan Chen Leyda
  • 5. Roar, China! Langston Hughes, Poet Laureate of the Negro Race
  • Epilogue
  • Notes
  • Bibliography
  • Index
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The Prism of Race: W. E. B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Paul Robeson, and the Colored World of Cedric Dover [Silkey Review]

Posted in Articles, Biography, Book/Video Reviews, History, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, United States on 2016-12-16 01:23Z by Steven

The Prism of Race: W. E. B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Paul Robeson, and the Colored World of Cedric Dover [Silkey Review]

Journal of American History
Volume 103, Issue 3, December 2016
pages 822-823
DOI: 10.1093/jahist/jaw452

Sarah L. Silkey, Associate Professor of History
Lycoming College, Williamsport, Pennsylvania

The Prism of Race: W. E. B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Paul Robeson, and the Colored World of Cedric Dover By Nico Slate. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. xviii, 246 pp. $90.00.)

Nico Slate explores the evolution of twentieth-century “colored cosmopolitanism,” an intellectual movement to unify the “colored world” around shared experiences of exploitation and oppression, through the lens of Cedric Dover’s transnational intellectual and artistic circles (pp. 17, 19). Observing how African Americans represented “a racial minority within the United States but a racial majority within the colored world,” Dover (1904–1961), a scholar and Indian nationalist of mixed-race ancestry from Calcutta, advocated “colored solidarity” as a tool for antiracist, anti-imperialist activism to achieve social justice on a global scale (p. 141). Seeking inspiration and friendship from African American intellectuals, Dover taught at Fisk…

Read or purchase the review here.

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The Prism of Race: W.E.B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Paul Robeson, and the Colored World of Cedric Dover

Posted in Asian Diaspora, Biography, Books, Media Archive, Monographs, United Kingdom, United States on 2015-08-18 01:35Z by Steven

The Prism of Race: W.E.B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Paul Robeson, and the Colored World of Cedric Dover

Palgrave Macmillan
December 2014
268 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 9781137484093
Ebook (PDF) ISBN: 9781137484116
Ebook (EPUB) ISBN: 9781137484109

Nico Slate, Associate Professor of History
Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Born a Eurasian ‘half-caste‘ in Calcutta in 1904, Cedric Dover died in England in 1961 a ‘colored’ man. One of the foremost experts on race in his generation and a leading figure in the movement toward Afro-Asian solidarity, Dover encountered in his own life the central paradox of race in the contemporary world: he knew that race did not exist in blood or bone, even as he knew that the color of a child’s skin determined everything from where he could go to school to how long he would live. Dover strove to be, in his words, ‘both ‘racial’ and antiracial at the same time.’ His life and work stand at the heart of one of the most creative and politically significant redefinitions of racial identity in the twentieth century—the invention of the colored world. This innovative ‘biography of race’ explores the concept of colored solidarity as enacted in Dover’s life as well as the ideas and relationships that connected him and four of his closest African American friends and colleagues: W.E.B. Du Bois, Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, and Paul Robeson. In doing so, it illuminates a fascinating episode in the intellectual histories of race and cosmopolitanism while offering powerful insights into ongoing debates surrounding racial and ethnic identity today.

Table of Contents

  • Preface: Of Color
  • Introduction: The Prism of Race
  • Acknowledgments
  • 1. Cedric Dover’s Colored Cosmopolitanism
  • 2. W.E.B. Du Bois and Race as Autobiography
  • 3. Langston Hughes and Race as Propaganda
  • 4. Paul Robeson and Race as Solidarity
  • 5. The Black Artist and the Colored World
  • 6. The Death and Rebirth of the Colored World
  • Epilogue: Barack Obama and Race as Freedom
  • Afterward: The Library of the Colored World
  • Notes
  • Index
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Living Portraits: Carl Van Vechten’s Color Photographs of African Americans, 1939-1964

Posted in Arts, Media Archive, United States on 2012-09-17 23:57Z by Steven

Living Portraits: Carl Van Vechten’s Color Photographs of African Americans, 1939-1964

Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library
Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut

Carl Van Vechten (1880-1964), photographer, promotor of literary talent, and critic of dance, theater, and opera, had an artistic vision rooted in the centrality of the talented person. He cherished accomplishment, whether in music, dance, theater, fine art, literature, sport, or advocacy. He began to make photographic portraits in 1932; in 1939 he discovered newly available color film. For a quarter century, he invited friends and acquaintances, well-known artists, fledgling entertainers, and public intellectuals to sit for him, often against backdrops reminiscent of the vivid colors and patterns of a Matisse painting. Among his subjects are a very young Diahann Carroll, Billie Holiday in tears, Paul Robeson as Othello, Althea Gibson swinging a tennis racquet, and a procession of opera stars, composers, authors, musicians, activists, educators, and journalists who made notable contributions to the cultural and intellectual life of the country. Also included are brilliant color images of notable and everyday places: Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee; the wedding of friends; pushcarts and street scenes of Harlem; children at play in a housing project’s yard.

The Collection

Color slides of Blacks.
1,884 color Kodachrome slides, 2 x 2 inches each

[Note from Steven F. Riley] Also includes photographs of: Peter Abrahams, Prince Etuka Okala Abutu, Armenta Adams, Adele Addison, Alvin Ailey, Betty Allen, Sanford Allen, Martina Arroyo, William Attaway, Ethel Ayler, Pearl Bailey, James Baldwin, Harry Belafonte, Roy Thompson Beresford, Mary McLeod Bethune, Charles Blackwell, McHenry Boatwright, Margaret Allison Bonds, Paul Bontemps, William Stanley Braithwaite, Carol Brice, Jonathan Brice, Maurice Brooks, Anne Wiggins Brown, Debria Brown, Roscoe Lee Browne, Joyce Bryant, Ralph J. Bunche, Dan Burley, Miriam Burton, John Carlis, Thelma Carpenter, Diahann Carroll, John Carter, Shirley Verrett Carter, Horace Cayton, Omar Clay, Ladybird Cleveland, Leo Coleman, Durward B. Collins, Janet Collins, Zebedee Collins, Clayton Corbin, Edna Cordoza, Eldzier Corter, Robert Curtis, Jimmy Daniels, Ossie Davis, Gloria Davy, Ruby Dee, William Demby, Beauford Delaney, Inez Dickerson, Hugh Dilworth, Mattiwilda Dobbs, Owen Dodson, W. E. B. DuBois, Todd Duncan, Roy Eaton, Bobby Evans, Martha Flowers, Benny Garland, Althea Gibson, Richard Gibson, John Birks “Dizzie” Gillespie, Shirley Graham, Reri Grist, Nicolas Guillen, Juanita Hall, Bertha “Chippie” Hill, Ramon Blancos Habana, Frank Harriott, Afrika Hayes, Marion Hayes, Roland Hayes, Chester Eugene Haynes, Godfrey Headley, Bomar Himes, Geoffrey Holder, Leo Holder, Charlotte Holloman, Nora Holt, Marilyn Horne, Langston Hughes, Phillipa Husley, Earle Hyman, Ivie Jackman, Annette Jackson, Mahalia Jackson, Raymond Jackson, Louise E. Jefferson, Charles Johnson, Hal Johnson, Hylan “Dots” Johnson, Marie Johnson, (Everett) LeRoi Jones , James Earl Jones, Laurence Clifton Jones, Ulysses Kay, William Melvin Kelly, Eartha (Mae) Kitt, George Lamming, Carmen De Lavallade, Everett Lee, Henry Lewis, Powell Lindsay, James Lowe, Robert Keith McFerrin, Claudia McNeil, Geraldyn (Gerri) Hodges Major, Claude Marchant, William Marshall, Mabel Mercer, Lizzie Miles, Arthur Mitchell, Edgar Mittelholzer, Mollie Moon, Linwood Morris, Willard Motley, Lorenzo Newby, Maidie Norman, Godfrey Nurse, Frederick O’Neal, Leonard de Paur, Louise Parker, Louis Peterson, Julius Perkins Jr., Mildred Perkins, Charles Perry, Ann Petry, Evelyn La Rue Pittman, Leontyne Price, Bertice Reading, Guy Rodgers, Percy Rodriguez, Pearl Showers, Edith Spurlock Sampson, Diana Sands, Harold Scott, George Shirley, Bobby (Robert Waltrip) Short, Merton Simpson, Noble Sissle, Clarence Smith Jr., William Gardner Smith, Rawn Spearman, Melvin Stewart, William Grant Still, Billy Strayhorn, Howard Swanson, Archie Savage, Wesley Tann, Ellen Tarry, Dorothy Taylor, Claude Thompson, Veronica Tyler, Margaret Tynes, Henry Van Dyke, Elaine Vance, William Warfield, Dorothy West, Moran Weston, Clarence Cameron White, Josh White, Lindsay H. White, Roy Wilkins, Billy Dee Williams, Camilla Williams, John Alfred Williams, Maurice Williford, Ellis Wilson, John W. Work, and Dale Wright.

To view the collection, click here.

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