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Representations of Blackness within Sino-African American relations, 1949-1972

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Representations of Blackness within Sino-African American relations, 1949-1972

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Content Representations of Blackness within Sino-African American Relations, 1949-1972 Keisha A. Brown University of Southern California Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures The degree being conferred is Doctorate of Philosophy August 2015 1 Table of Contents Introduction p. 2 Chapter One: Representation of American Blacks in China pre-1949 p. 19 Chapter Two: Sounds of Blackness: Aubrey Pankey, Transnational Music, and Representations of Blackness in Maoist China p. 48 Chapter Three: From Souls to Guns: W.E.B. Du Bois, Robert Williams, and Representations of Blackness p. 89 Chapter Four: Black Femininities in Representations of Blackness p. 139 Conclusion p. 162 Bibliography p. 168 2 Introduction Chinese depictions of and diplomatic exchanges with African Americans from 1949 to 1972 is the focus of my dissertation research into the Chinese side of Sino-African American relations. 1 This dissertation is a cultural and historical analysis of the representations of Blackness in Maoist China exploring the racial and ethnic frameworks within China influencing perceptions of Black Americans in the Cold War era context of postcolonial, anti-imperialist and propagandist proclamations of colored international solidarity. Additionally, Marxist and Maoist theories, Chinese nationalist ideologies, and notions of race grounded in modern Chinese history are interrogated in terms of formation and function within Sino-African American relations. As a transnational study, this research places Chinese and African American histories in dialogue to examine the complexities of this transnational network along multiple vectors, including race, gender, and politics. Recent Cold War era scholarship, especially research concerning the CCP foreign relations agenda and practices, integrates third party actors and their impact on the superpowers (U.S. and USSR) as well as the changing global political landscape. 2 Even within these changing Cold War era narratives, scholarship on Chinese foreign policy as it relates to African Americans is limited beyond the rhetoric of the CCP and Mao Zedong’s calls for support of African Americans. In the limited instances when African American and CCP foreign relations is discussed, this unlikely solidarity network is analyzed in terms of politics, usually framed within 1 Although the Maoist era extends beyond 1972, this dissertation uses this year as a bookend because of the impact of Richard Nixon’s 1972 visit to China on CCP and PRC connections with Black radicals, Communists, Socialist sympathizers or those with leftist leanings. While Nixon’s historic visit marked the ushering in of a new age of U.S.- China political relations, it also designated the end of the CCP inviting or aligning with those considered extremely leftist, radical, or categorized as threats to U.S. national security. What happens beyond 1972 are issues I will tackle when transforming this dissertation into a monograph. 2 Scholarship includes: Chen Jian, Mao's China and the Cold War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001); Robert McMahon, ed, The Cold War in the Third World (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2013). 3 U.S.-China, Sino-African, or Afro-Asian relations. While the principles of the Non Alignment Movement (NAM) and the Spirit of Bandung aligned with African American struggle for civil and equal rights, these modes of discussing Cold War colored solidarity were firmly grounded in state-to-state relations or state coalition building. Where does this leave relations between a people and a nation? Using transnationalism as a research paradigm and framework pushes beyond the limitations of Bandung or NAM in terms of analysis of Sino-African American relations, Blackness, and the performance of race as sites of resistance. While the years that this research emphasizes coincide with the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, I also wish to locate these events in the larger history of Black internationalism. The definition of Black internationalism used in this research is derived from Michael O. West, William G. Martin, and Fanon Che Wilkins, eds., From Toussaint to Tupac: The Black International since the Age of Revolution. In the anthology’s introduction, “Contours of the Black International”, Black internationalism is described as the “conscious interconnectedness and interlocution of black struggles across man-made and natural boundaries. […] black internationalism envisioned a circle of universal emancipation unbroken in space and time.” 3 Emerging in response to slavery and White imperialism, Black internationalism connected freedom and liberation movements within the African diaspora while also including the creation of transnational collaborations and solidarities with other people of color. In using this framework, I am able to place African Americans and their involvement with the Communist Party of the U.S. (CPUSA) in the early twentieth century in conjunction with people such as Aubrey Pankey or the participation of Black Americans such as W.E.B. Du Bois in post 3 Michael O. West, William G. Martin, and Fanon Che Wilkins, eds., From Toussaint to Tupac: The Black International since the Age of Revolution (UNC Press, 2009), 1. 4 Bandung Afro-Asian organizations. Additionally, Black internationalist framework allows my research to highlight how the CCP and Mao, in their calls for solidarity and interactions with African American in Sino-African American relations (moving beyond nation-to-nation interactions) tapped into a long-standing discourse while addressing what is new or unique to this new dimension of Black internationalism. My dissertation also seeks to contribute to the discussions of the history of ethnic and racial identity in China. At the turn of the twentieth century, during the late Qing, some of China’s most important and influential thinkers, such as Kang Youwei, Liang Qichao, and Sun Yat-sen, constructed discourse of race in China that drew on a myriad of sources that included Western Spencerian Darwinism as well as global events. 4 Scholarship by Frank Dikötter, Barry Sautman, Joseph Esherick, Emily Honig, Thomas Mullaney, and Dru Gladney have discussed the function of race and ethnicity within modern China from multiple perspectives. Esherick’s essay “How the Qing Became China” as well as much of Dikötter’s scholarship including his book The Construction of Racial Identities in China and Japan examine the history of ethnic nationalism and the notion of a Han race in late Qing China. Ethnic nationalism was effective in the creation of a Chinese identity separate from the Manchu rulers of the Qing dynasty that, after the fall of the Qing, continued to unite the various people of China and maintain borders through claims of race, culture, and nationalism. Thomas Mullaney in Coming to Terms with the Nation: Ethnic Classification in Modern China furthers this discussion by focusing on the processes that led to the creation of the 56 ethnic nationalities that the PRC currently recognizes. Dru Gladney in “Representing Nationality in China: Refiguring Majority/Minority Identities” discusses oriental orientalism. In China, this is seen by the “objectified portrayal of minorities as 4 Shu-mei Shih, “Race and Revolution: Blackness in China’s Long Twentieth Century,” PMLA, 156. 5 exoticized, and even eroticized [that] is essential to the construction of the Han Chinese majority, the very formulation of the Chinese ‘nation’ itself.” 5 “Racial Nationalism and China’s External Behavior” by Barry Sautman argues about the function of racial nationalism in the PRC. According to Sautman, “[r]ace as a social construct affects PRC external behavior through the medium of nationalism. The main way in which racial nationalism is constructed in China is through the official propagation of myths of origin and descent.” 6 During the twentieth century “Chinese racial nationalism, and, for a time, racial internationalism under Mao was a major undercurrent in China’s revolutionary sequence.” 7 This revolutionary sequence under Mao included the PRC’s changing foreign relations agenda that included the transnational network of Sino-African American relations. In terms of race and ethnicity in China as it pertains to Blackness, there are two main arguments that my work engages with. The first is that Blackness, in the Han Chinese imaginary, is always associated with slavery, a fate that the Chinese people should avoid. In her article “Race and Revolution: Blackness in China’s Long Twentieth Century” Shu-mei Shih astutely observes and argues that in the Chinese context, there is a connection between Blackness and slavery. While, as we will see in Chapter One, that there is a connection between African Americans and slavery through the translated texts Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Gone with the Wind, there are also other understandings of Blackness pre and post 1949. Yet, I want to add to this argument by demonstrating that slavery is not the only association with Blackness. The circulation of Black bodies, such as Buck Clayton and his orchestra, or literature written by African Americans such as Paul Laurence Dunbar, impacted and shaped understandings of 5 Dru Gladney, “Representing Nationality in China: Refiguring Majority/Minority Identities,” The Journal of Asian Studies 53, no.1 (Feb. 1994): 94. 6 Barry Sautman, “Racial Nationalism and China’s External Behavior,” World Affairs 160, no.2 (Fall 1997): 79. 7 Shu-mei Shih, “Race and Revolution: Blackness in China’s Long Twentieth Century,”156. 6 Blackness that reached beyond slavery. As such, while there was an association of slavery connected to the past of African Americans, the past experiences of Black Americans was seen as a thread that connected African Americans and Chinese people’s vis-à-vis oppression at the hands of Whites. The imagined shared past allowed, particularly in the pre-1949 Republican era Chinese context, used the culture produced by Black Americans as a metaphor for evolving Chinese understanding of state and self. The second argument is that post-1949, after the founding of the People’s Republic of China, earlier discussions of race were completely supplanted by those of class. The basis for the above argument relies on two main points. The first is that the ushering in of the PRC led to the dismantling of some academic institutions and fields of study, such as anthropology, that were influential in shaping Chinese discourses of race. Second, the end of the Republican era “brought an end to racial discourse rife with theories predicated on the connection between national belonging and lineage.” 8 While class, because the PRC is a Communist country, was the major discourse, it did not completely supplant racial discourses. The dismantling of institutions did not mean the eradication of racial discourses already circulating within China. As demonstrated in the succeeding chapters, some of the pre-1949 racial discourses pertaining to Blackness that persisted in the PRC and are navigated by the cohort of African Americans in China that are discussed in this dissertation. Nor did the discourses about race in terms of national belonging and lineage dissolve either. These racial discourses still persist in contemporary China and have, to some degree, become more pronounced due to the rise of Han Chauvinism in conjunction with China’s economic boom and continual development of and trade with various African nations. 8 Melissa Lefkowitz, “Revolutionary Friendship: The Image of the African from Mao to Now (1955-2012)” (master’s thesis, Harvard University, 2012), 7. 7 What does change, especially during the Maoist Cold War era, is the reframing of racial discourses under the two main camps of anti-U.S. imperialism and colored solidarity. The framing of American Blacks as an oppressed people in Mao era representations had two functions. First, Chinese representation of Blackness, of Sino-African American relations and interactions, and of solidarity with African peoples and American Blacks resonated with political, ethnic, and racial agendas in the Chinese context. The racial and ethnic frameworks that Chinese people used to process and understand what a colored alliance would look like were fraught with political, racial, and historical complexities, making it unclear what the power structure within such as alliance might look like. Second, this framing separated American Blacks from Africans while still placing both groups in dialogue and unity through the notion of an international solidarity movement. This narrow framing of African Americans as oppressed peoples was a persistent undercurrent in almost all Chinese representations of African American people and culture in spite of the dramatic changes to representations of Blackness that were occurring in the U.S. during the years examined in this research. Current scholarship connecting African Americans and China is primarily comprised of biographical studies of American Blacks who went to China, the imaginary of China for African Americans, or Asian American and African American solidarity within the U.S. 9 While making 9 Scholarship includes: Betsy Esch and Robin D.G. Kelley, “Black Like Mao,” Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society 1, no. 4 (1999), 6-41;Marc Gallicchio, The African American Encounter with Japan & China: Black Internationalism in Asia, 1895-1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); Fred Ho,ed, Afro Asia: Revolutionary Political and Cultural Connections Between African Americans and Asian Americans (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008); Robin D.G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (Boston: Beacon Press, 2002); Luo Lianggong. “China and the Political Imagination in Langston Hughes’s Poetry,” in American Modernist Poetry and the Chinese Encounter, ed. Zhang Yuejun and Stuart Christie (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 111-119; Manning Marable and Elizabeth Kai Hinton,eds, The New Black History: Revisiting the Second Reconstruction (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2011); Manning Marable and Vanessa Agard-Jones, eds, Transnational Blackmess: Navigating the Global Color Line (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); Bill Mullen, Afro-Orientalism. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004). 8 important interventions, these studies are analyzed from the perspectives of Black movements or organizations for the purposes of understanding Black Internationalist politics or to provide background for alliances and connections between African Americans and Asian Americans in the United States. 10 Yet, there is a lack of engagement of these connections between China and U.S. Blacks beyond the limited travel logs and recollections of trips abroad by African Americans able to visit China. Additionally, this scholarship is mainly based on English- language sources. The lack of incorporation of and engagement with Chinese language sources is problematic because it furthers notions of an ideal and romanticized solidarity network without fully being able to critique the gaps in understanding the “other” within transnational interactions. One work that does begin to bridge that gap is Robeson Taj Frazier’s text The East is Black: Cold War China in the Black Radical Imagination. Frazier’s work builds upon the body of scholarship, such as Robin Kelley and Betsy Esch’s “Black Like Mao: Red China and Black Revolution,” that analyzes China as a site of revolutionary potential within the Black radical imaginary. But what sets Frazier’s scholarship apart is his interrogation of the Chinese context that the subjects he discusses inhabited. In doing so, his research begins to examine more closely the China in the Black radical imaginary and China in the lived experiences of African Americans that travel to the PRC during Maoist era. Additionally, within The East is Black, Frazier discusses African Americans whose travels to China during the Cold War that have been 10 Recent scholarship that interrogates Chinese sources and Chinese understandings or depictions of African Americans includes Yunxiang Gao, “W.E.B. and Shirley Graham Du Bois in Maoist China,” Du Bois Review 10, no. 1 (2013), 59-85; Matthew Johnson, “From Peace to Panthers: PRC Engagement with African-American Transnational Networks, 1949-1979,” Past and Present: Supplement 8 (2013), 233-257. 9 relegated to the margins. One example is that life and travels of William Worthy, an African American who was the first American journalist to gain entry into the PRC. Within Sino-African American relations, the mutual “enemy” of U.S. imperialism was a thin yet fundamental bond linking the two groups during the Cold War era. Both sides of this transnational network aspired to transcend national, racial, ideological, and historical boundaries to tackle the oppressive system of U.S. imperialism in order to change United States governmental policies and affairs both domestically and abroad. There was much at stake, resulting in both sides using the implications and importance of this transnational network as political leverage. For African American movements, Sino-African American relations, illustrated most visibly through Mao Zedong’s 1963 and 1968 speeches of solidarity, were further examples that the plight of Black Americans, although primarily categorized as a domestic issue, was intimately and intricately connected to U.S. foreign issues including relations with emerging postcolonial nations in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) intentionally placed the racism and discrimination that African Americans were subjected to at the fore of its criticisms of U.S. imperialism in order to highlight the contradictions within the values and promises of American democracy. While there were political gains to be had, Sino-African American relations was as much a cultural project as it was a political enterprise because culture was used as the linchpin between and molder of these relations and identities, thus allowing these transnational interactions to exist. During the Mao era, the representation of American Blacks was predominately framed in terms of an oppressed peoples. CCP foreign policy during the Cold War, when dealing with non-White nations or peoples, fell into two main categories: the broader category of aligning non-white continents (Asia, Africa, and Latin America are most often cited) in solidarity 10 movements and the more narrow category of supporting specific oppressed countries or peoples in their battle against some system or country. American Blacks are in the latter category as their struggles against racism are framed as clashes with and against American imperialism (meidiguo zhuyi). Yet, this transnational network was fraught with many misunderstandings, one of which was race. Chinese news reportage on race relations and racial inequality in the United States were problematic because the struggle against race was seen as merely a part of the supposedly larger war against class. The hope that overcoming racial discrimination would help spark a revolution against issues of class thus making American imperialism implode was a core tenet in the narrative advocating an alliance with and support of American Blacks. The majority of sources that report at length on American Blacks follow this narrative put forth by the CCP and solidified by Chairman Mao that American Blacks are an entity within the larger international colored solidarity movement engaged in battle with the common enemy of American imperialism. African American movements and individuals were primarily evaluated with this framework in mind. Due to the importance of cultural understandings and representations within Sino-African American relations, this dissertation uses culture as a reflective framework for three important reasons. First, culture as a framework, allows for analysis of non-state actors. Culture slipped “past borders and works in contrapuntal and mysterious and powerful ways. It did not determine in every respect what happened in the Third World during the Cold War. But its presence nevertheless intruded constantly on so-called core-periphery relations, complicating any seemingly straightforward narrative concerned only with, say, strategy or economics.” 11 As such, 11 Andrew Rotter, “Culture, the Cold War, and the Third World” in The Cold War in the Third World, ed. Robert McMahon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 173. 11 I will incorporate the experiences of some Black Americans in regards to their travels in China or political relationship with Mao Zedong as case studies regarding the representation of Blackness. These nongovernmental actors are significant because their travels to China put action and movement behind the calls for solidarity. These travels to China, for many at Mao Zedong’s invitation, demonstrate that on some level, there was an idealistic hope that such an alliance or solidarity movement was possible. Second, the fact that “cultures insulate, shift, and change their shape in response to encounters with other cultures” allows me to articulate the changing representations of Blackness due to the one-to-one interactions of African Americans in China. As such, cultural interactions in this period of Sino-African American relations was a process of synthesis. 12 Lastly, furthering cultural understandings was a soft diplomacy tactic deployed by many nations during the Cold War era, including China, to create alliances. In the construction of group identities, be it national or transnational, culture acts as a cohesive tool binding group members around a core “we” identity. A collective “we” identity is usually formulated in relation to or in opposition of some “other”. The result is depictions, tropes, and representations of the other (regardless of how imagined or factual they are) that impact and mediate interactions and policies towards others. In the case of Sino-African American relations, cultural understandings and connections, such as parallels made between Negro Spirituals and Chinese folk music, was a means of furthering the bonds between these two peoples against American imperialism. The framework of transnationalism in conjunction with a critical cultural lens allows for the exploration of how the subjects included within this 12 Ibid., 172-173. 12 dissertation claimed and performed their own identities in light of dominant representations to shape notions and understandings of Blackness. Moving beyond narrating the experiences of a cohort of Blacks who had encounters with China or Maoism, this dissertation analyzes Chinese depictions of Blackness and their cultural and political effects. I complicate the current narrative of Sino-African American relations through an analysis of the multiple ways that race, as a lens for understanding the “other”, handicapped the possibility of this alliance and its many propagated promises to fully materialize through a focus on the representation of Blackness in the Chinese context. Chinese source documents show there was a lack of thorough knowledge concerning the ways in which race and racism had profound social, economic, and political effects for African Americans and how racism in America differed from and worked in conjunction with other modes of societal division and systematic oppression. As such, the analysis of Chinese representations of Blackness is important for understanding and analyzing the frameworks for interpreting and analyzing race in the Peoples Republic of China (PRC) because the ways people or states imagined and represented others could and did impact behavior towards them. Within this dissertation, Blackness, in the Chinese context, is a framing reference. Blackness is not just a racial categorization based on skin color, but also encompasses American history, culture, society, and politics as it relates to the struggles of Blacks. I often analyze Blackness in terms of performance of race informed by Harry Elam’s and Kennell Jackson’s Black Cultural Traffic, which highlighted the ways that performativity can shape representations or conceptualization of blackness. For the subjects within my dissertation, the international platform and their time in China served as the public spaces where they performed representations of Blackness; for example, Robert Williams’ political ideology offered a version 13 of Black radicalism chronicled in the Chinese press. Moreover, there are images or impressions about Blackness that precede the performer and “crowd the performance space”; and, indeed, African Americans in Mao era China similarly performed in a space crowded with images of Blackness, both those inherited from before 1949 (see Chapter One) and those propagated by the CCP political apparatus of the Mao era. 13 Approaching race as performance also helps draw our attention to the complexities surrounding how representations of Blackness “can end up in unlikely places, in contradictory alliances, can take on new and unintended forms, and can synthesize radically disparate materials.” 14 Race is not a static, ontological identity. Rather, one’s racial identity is a performance, or a conscious choice that one makes. The performance of race as identity, both conscious and unconscious, is a constant negotiation of disavowal, affiliation, and exclusion. Treating race as performative allows me to differentiate between audience and performer as a means to discuss the racial and ethnic frameworks in China that shaped perceptions and representations of Blackness; how the Black Americans I discuss upheld or challenged those frameworks and beliefs, and the important conjunctions and disjunctions between performer and audience. Secondly, the performance of race as either acquiescence to or a reaction against domestic and international events led to certain political, ethnic, and racial ideas resonating within a populace at one moment in time and not at another. Criticizing racism in the U.S. yet failing to critically engage in further in-depth about race allowed the CCP to simultaneously render race both visible and invisible by subsuming issues of race under the banner of economic issues Yet, race is reintegrated into the narratives through the performance of race by the individuals that I use as 13 Ibid. 14 Elam Jr. and Jackson, Black Cultural Traffic, 5. 14 case studies within this dissertation. For example, Victoria Garvin teaching English to her Chinese students through Black history or Aubrey Pankey’s singing of Negro Spirituals in China, articulated different perspectives outside of the larger metanarrative that the CCP was constructing. These case studies, while focusing on the role and actions of certain individuals, illuminates some of the broader cultural and political implications of Sino-African American relations. Chapters Outline Chapters of this dissertation are organized thematically in regards to representation of Blackness in Maoist China. A thematic approach works best as it allows for the different aspects of Black culture introduced to the CCP and Chinese people, mainly through American Blacks that visited China, to be discussed separately throughout the span of years that this research covers. But the combination of the all of the dissertation chapters enables the reader to understand changes over time to the CCP narrative of Blackness as well as other ideas that either buttressed the CCP narrative or altered the mainstream depiction of American Blacks as objectified victims of American imperialism. While each chapter discusses one or more Black Americans that travel to and/or live in Maoist China, this dissertation is not a biographical travel log of these individuals. Instead, these individuals and their experiences in China are case studies to exemplify different aspects of and changes in representations of Blackness in Maoist China. “Representations of American Blacks in China pre-1949”, the title of Chapter One, provides a historical and sociopolitical context for tropes of Blackness prior to 1949. Within this chapter, I argue that in many pre-1949 cultural representations of Black Americans, the struggles of African Americans and the Black body itself became metaphors for Chinese struggles reflecting Chinese identities of self and nation. By chapter’s end, I focus on, regardless of the 15 various misconceptions about African American struggles, how American Blacks were represented and how these representations were connected to Chinese identities. As a result, the chapter’s analysis of various representations of Blackness as it pertains to African Americans establishes a foundation pertaining to some of the narratives that the subjects in subsequent chapters had to navigate and interrogate via their performativity of race and/or gender. In Chapter Two, “The Sound of Blackness”, I focus on the role of Aubrey Pankey in shaping representations via his musical concerts held in Beijing and Shanghai in 1955. Although Aubrey Pankey is not the first African American to travel to China, he is the first American, White or Black, to perform in the PRC. A classically trained baritone, Pankey’s musical repertoire included Negro Spirituals with one third of the songs he sung in China being Spirituals. His trip to China also led to mass dissemination in the press concerning the history and selected lyrics of Negro Spirituals. As argued in Chapter One, in many pre-1949 discourses, the Black struggle was taken out of the chattel slave narrative as Chinese readers read their own struggles or struggles of the Asian diaspora into slave narratives such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin. In his performance of Negro Spirituals, Pankey is introducing Black subjectivity as he is reinserting the Black experience into these narratives. Moreover, while these songs are from a history of violence and despair, the creation of the songs as well as their meanings represent the subjectivity of Blacks, even in the face of slavery. Pankey, in the Chinese context, reclaimed the agency of Black bodies through a restoration of Blacks into these narratives and the historical and cultural significance of these songs to the Black American experience. Chapter Three, “From Souls to Guns: W.E.B. Du Bois, Robert Williams, and Representations of Blackness” discusses the impact of performativity of race and the political ideology of W.E.B. DuBois and Robert F. Williams, two Black men in exile invited to China by 16 Mao Zedong, on representations of Blackness. I place these two men together in this chapter because, unlike Pankey, these men are primarily politically rather than culturally affiliated with China, Mao, and the CCP. Also, Du Bois and Williams’ extensive history of political activism, scholarship, and respect that each garnered translated into political clout that became an attractive vehicle to propagate Maoism to others, especially those in the African diaspora. Du Bois’ role in shaping China’s foreign relations with various African nations has been a source of much discussion. However, his role in shaping representations of Blackness has not been interrogated as much. In asserting support for Blacks as victims of American imperialism, the CCP and Mao are re-victimizing American Blacks by ignoring their agency. Du Bois’ political engagement with the CCP (1959-1963) changed the narrative regarding racism’s impact on African Americans, especially through the translations of Souls of Black Folk (1959), and their agency against racial oppression. Following Du Bois’ death in 1963, Robert Williams becomes the Black individual the CCP reaches out to as a means of reaching the larger Black American community. In addition to the global circulation of the Black Crusader, Williams’ stance of armed self-protection, articulated within his text Negroes with Guns, resonates with Mao’s increasingly aggressive ideas about continual revolution. From 1963 to 1969, Williams is credited as being the impetus behind Mao’s statements of solidarity with African Americans (issued in 1963 and 1968) and printed written and visual images during this time highlight armed and violent acts of struggle by Blacks in the U.S. While this builds upon Du Bois’ articulations of Black agency, Williams’s own political ideology added a new dimension. Due to these men’s performativity in conjunction with the CCP’s foreign relations policy, the suffering of American Blacks moves from a metaphor for Chinese suffering pre-1949 to Blacks as a metonymic part of a complex web of global struggles as they become, post-1949, a distinct part that is connected to 17 a larger whole. Radicalism within the writings of these men, I argue, is their performativity of race that has a role in shaping representations of Blackness. Entitled “Black Femininities in Representations of Blackness”, Chapter Four focuses on the intersections of class, gender and race in Maoist China through the travels of Shirley Graham Du Bois, Victoria Garvin, Eslanda Robeson, Claudia Jones, and Mabel Williams in China. 15 The objective of the chapter is not to “add” Black women’s voices to the overall dissertation or the larger narrative of American Blacks in China; rather, the chapter interrogates narratives of Black femininities within transnational networks. Recent scholarship on these five women examines their travels in China as a part of a larger narrative of their lives, works, and political ideologies. Yet, there is limited analysis of the Chinese context that these women navigated during the Cold War era. Framed by a Black leftist feminist analysis, this chapter focuses on their time in the PRC to analyze how their agency and their performance of intersectional identities along the lines of class, gender and race complicates discourses of radical Black subjectivity within transnational networks and global spaces. These Black leftist feminists are drawn to the PRC because of the CCP’s progressive policies and laws geared towards gender equality and imagined of the PRC as the site of an incipient revolution that could have worldwide ramifications, including changes in the status of Black women. I argue that these women’s performances alter lingering pre-1949 narratives about Black women, primarily those based on women characters in translated slave narratives such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The result is the addition of new voices to discourses about class consciousness as well as knowledge about African American women. Moreover, their respective roles in shaping notions of Blackness and 15 While Shirley Graham Du Bois and Mabel Williams travel to China with their respective husbands (Chapter Three), I uncouple them and place these women’s experiences and roles in shaping notions of Black femininities in Chapter Four. 18 Black femininities during their time in China helps bring a balance to discussions of Black masculinity and its representations in China within Sino-African American relations. Focusing on the role these Black leftist feminists played in altering of representations of Blackness, I place these women’s thoughts about and experiences in China between 1949 and 1972 in dialogue and consider them within discourses of gender in Maoist China. Lastly, while these five women rarely overlap in their transnational sociocultural and political exchange, I interrogate the function of the one point of contact mediating these women’s experiences in China: Song Qingling (Soong Ching-ling). Researching what race and ethnicity means within East Asian spaces is an area of bourgeoning scholarship, but is still undeveloped. Scholars are still grasping for terms to reflect the frameworks of differences within these places outside of the limited and inadequate terms of race and ethnicity. My dissertation adds to this conversation by interrogating notions of race and difference through an examination of African Americans travelling to or living in China between 1949 and 1972. The body of scholarship that this research produces will foster a better understanding of the Chinese side of this solidarity alliance and compel scholars to engage with the philosophies, politics, and culture of both sides of this interaction in order to analyze how much the various sides of this solidarity movement understood or misunderstood one another. These Black Americans travelling in transnational networks add their unique experiences and perspectives to international discourses and movements concerning political, social, economic, and racial equality. 19 Chapter One: Representations of American Blacks in China pre-1949 This chapter provides context and background regarding frameworks of difference and ideas about Black foreign “others” prevalent in the Chinese context prior to 1949 in order to analyze how and for what agendas were Black Americans being represented in China prior to the founding of the PRC. I examine many pre-1949 tropes of Blackness were connected to representations of the Chinese nation and the Chinese self, the Black body functioning as both a metaphor for Chinese oppression as well as a space where ideas of race and modernity (or its lack) mingled. In examining how the Black body was imagined and contested within the pre- 1949 Chinese context, the chapter aims to interrogate how the experiences of U.S. Blacks were used to symbolize and embody ideas of powerlessness, oppression, and struggle. 16 These conflicting yet mutually existing representations of Blackness within pre-1949 China will be discussed in terms of narratives of identity as well as in the context of literature, travel logs, visual, musical, and political narratives. As a complete overview of all representations of Blackness in China, let alone their reception and interpretation prior to 1949 is impossible, the pre-1949 tropes discussed at length in this chapter are those whose legacies are important to understanding the changing frameworks of post-1949 representations. As will become clear in later chapters, these pre-1949 representations of African Americans as objects of oppression and stand-ins for Chinese victimhood will partly recede, and representations of Blacks as subjects with cultural and political agency will come to the fore; yet these earlier tropes will continue to exert much influence into the Mao era. 16 Fassil Demissie, et al., eds. Imagining, Writing, (re)reading the Black Body (Pretoria : UNISA Press, 2009), xiii 20 Nationalism, Modernity, and Race Towards the end of the Qing dynasty, the Chinese imperial government faced an identity crisis. The late Qing was politically and economically crippled by the Opium wars and the foreign suppression of the Boxer Uprising that resulted in treaties that forced China to pay large indemnities to multiple foreign powers. In addition to the numerous and embarrassing military defeats, the government faced internal strife as factions debated over the best courses to take in order to modernize the country. 17 The fall of the Qing in 1912 only intensified the crisis; the quest for a national identity; questions concerning how to keep the vast Qing territory unified and what paths China should take to become a modern nation-state were still major concerns carried over from the late Qing. The late Qing was plagued with domestic social unrest and strained relations with foreign powers. In addition to indemnities, the Qing imperial government was forced to give foreign powers territorial concessions and allow access to major Chinese ports. In this scheme, the British Empire was the most aggressive and gained the most from China’s wartime failures. Additionally, the British Empire had much influence and power in the Euro-American partitioned and colonized world. In this geopolitical order, “China was relocated in the geocultural space called the World, in which the British were unquestionably the most dominant nation in the nineteenth century. It was in this new World that the Chinese had to find a place to 17 After Japan’s defeat of the Qing in the first Sino-Japanese war (1895), a wave of young Chinese intellectuals began to travel and study overseas, and many were learning foreign ideas and theories and applying them to the situation in China. Moreover, between June and September 1898, Emperor Guangxu issued a series of edicts for modernizing the Qing Empire. The main areas of reform were in education (examination system, upgrading of existing schools and colleges, and opening of new institutes for vocational studies) and economic development. However, these reforms were halted and some of its supporters executed (or fleeing in exile) as they were seen by many in the Qing court as undermining the privileges and principles of Qing rule. [Jonathan Spence, The Search for Modern China (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2013), 221]. 21 invent a history and a new identity for China.” 18 The creation of a Chinese national identity within the changing world landscape involved two main discourses: nation-state and race. These discourses “were introduced to the Chinese as scientific knowledge and as a progressive form of government.” 19 While these pseudo-scientific and teleological discourses were introduced by and through foreigners, “ideas of race, nation, and history as objects of discourse produced on China were grafted into indigenous discourses conducted in the Chinese language.” 20 At the same time that “European discourse of race, nation, and history were resisted and reconfigured as they were appropriated by the Chinese in the production of knowledge of China itself,” Chinese people found that literature, films, and music produced by or about Blacks that culturally expressed the Black American plight in searching for recognition and self-identity resonated with their own quest to find their place in this new White dominated world. It was amidst the cultural and political narratives of national identity and race that representations of Blackness were shaped and utilized for the development of a Chinese identity. Narratives of Black oppression and sympathy for Blacks became linked to Chinese identities of self. It was not just European discourses that were involved in the production emerging Chinese nationalism; Black American narratives were also grafted onto indigenous discourses in pre-1949 China. During the quest for modernization, new ideas about science, national identity, and race circulated globally. Within the rhetoric of modernity was the assumption that progress was linear and societies were classified in two categories: advanced and backwards. Ideas about advancement or backwardness comingled with scientific ideas resulting in pseudo-scientific 18 Kai-wing Chow, “Narrating Nation, Race, and National Culture: Imagining the Hanzu Identity in Modern China,” in Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia, ed. Kai-wing Chow, et al (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2001), 50. 19 Ibid,, 47. 20 Ibid., 48. 22 notions of race. Social Darwinism, one such pseudo-scientific discourse, “tended to fix upon race—that combination of biology, environment and culture—as the repository of those attributes which enabled (or prevented) a group to evolve toward civilization.” 21 So while Chinese people empathized with the sufferings that Blacks experienced, there is little to suggest that Chinese people saw Blacks as equals. Rather, the plight of Blacks post-emancipation combined with negative stereotypes attached to Black skin and their continuing experiences of oppression and discrimination led many Chinese to see Blacks as inferior. In some cases, the plight of Black Americans was seen as a warning: in order to avoid future domination by Whites, China and its people needed to advance lest they be treated like Blacks. Literature One useful window into Chinese understandings of race and attitudes toward Blacks in the early twentieth century is found in popular literature of the era. In this era, Chinese intellectuals were influential in Chinese society and culture as well as in shaping representations of Blackness; they were also the primary producers of Chinese translations of foreign works and concepts. Lin Shu was among the leading translators in this era, and his translation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin had a great impact on representations of Blackness. Lin Shu and other translators of the late Qing and early Republican eras often used their literary translations as a means of addressing the cultural and political issues of their day. Lin Shu’s translation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, translated as A Record of the Black Slaves’ Plea to Heaven (Heinu yu tian lu), “made uninvited revisions to Stowe’s accounts of both US and transatlantic relations…[and] also engaged with a transpacific discourse on ‘coolies’ and 21 Prasenjit Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995), 21. 23 Chinese labor in the Americas.” 22 Lin clearly explained to his Chinese readers that the fate of enslaved Blacks within the text could be one of the “consequences of continued political and social upheaval in China” and urged them to take actions to avoid that fate. 23 Therefore, while the characters in the original text and the subsequent Chinese translations were enslaved Blacks in America, they were framed by the translator as a stand-in for the struggles of the oppressed Chinese people and Chinese coolies. In using the text as a warning, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, in China “gave readers a powerful tool to understand the position of China in the world economy to contemplate the nature of the Chinese ‘race’.” 24 Lin’s translation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin was one of the earliest popular depictions of American Blacks in China and influential in shaping representations of Blackness in China prior to 1949. 25 In his original 1901 translation, the plight of the enslaved Black person resembled that of the Chinese subject who had suffered discrimination and oppression at the hands of White colonialists and imperialists in China since the Opium wars. 26 The publication of the translated text came just a year after the Boxer Uprising. 27 The events of the Boxer Uprising and the 22 Michael Gibbs Hill, Lin Shu, Inc.: Translation and the Making of Modern Chinese Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 20. Lin could not read or speak English and was assisted in his translation projects by others who could read the foreign language originals. In the case of Uncle Toms Cabin, Lin was assisted by Wei Yi. 23 In China, “since 1850s, then, the management of the coolie trade and protection of Chinese laborers overseas had presented itself as a major issue to the Qing court in Beijing and to regional administrators who oversaw the centers of trade on China’s coastline.” Ibid., 57-58. 24 Ibid, 52. 25 “Uncle Tom's Cabin opens on the Shelby plantation in Kentucky as two enslaved people, Tom and four-year old Harry, are sold to pay Shelby family debts. Developing two plot lines, the story focuses on Tom, a strong, religious man living with his wife and three young children, and Eliza, Harry's mother.” The novel ends when both Tom and Eliza escape slavery; one physically and the other spiritually. Eliza freedom is realized when she and her family reach Canada. However, Tom's freedom, albeit spiritual, comes through his physical death as Simon Legree, Tom's third and final master, whips him death for refusing to deny his faith or betray the hiding place of two fugitive women. (“Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” Harriet Beecher Stowe Center, accessed October 13, 2014, https://www.harrietbeecherstowecenter.org/utc/.) 26 The Opium wars were two wars fought between the Qing and European powers, in the first case (1839-1942) the British, in the second (1856-60) both Britain and France with both serving to forcibly open up Chinese markets and ports to England and other European countries. [James Hevia, English Lessons: The Pedagogy of Imperialism in Nineteenth-Century China (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 4-6]. 27 Prior to the Boxer Uprising of 1900, the late 1800s in China saw an increased imperialist expansion and foreign powers. In this context, a form of nationalism evolved for the Chinese as it made them aware “of their relationship 24 violence that accompanied the foreign military suppression and subsequent occupation lingered in the minds of Lin Shu’s readers. As earnest as Lin’s expression of sympathy for the plight of enslaved Blacks under slavery was, his equating the struggles of enslaved Black persons with those of Chinese people acted as a simplifying metaphor that suspended attention to all kinds of details and differences, obliterating many characteristics of the Chinese struggle while at the same time shedding little light on how brutal, violent, and destructive chattel slavery in America was. In the afterward to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Lin wrote, It was rather that we had to cry out for the sake of our people because the prospect of enslavement is threatening our race. In recent years the American continent has severely restricted the immigration of Chinese laborers. A stockade has been erected at the landing place where hundreds of Chinese who have come from afar are locked up. Only after a week do they begin to release one or two people, and some people are not released even after two weeks. This is [like] what is referred to in this book as the ‘slave quarters’. 28 The fictionalized American slave narrative was flattened and presented as a universal story of the oppressed and downtrodden that resonated with audiences in late Qing China. As such, the victimization of the slave at the hands of Whites could also metaphorically represent the victimization and humiliation that Chinese people endured at the hands of Europeans and to foreign forces and to the Manchus. It [nationalism] carried as well a corresponding sense of the Chinese people as a unit that must be mobilized for its own survival.” (Spence, The Search for Modern China, 222). The Boxer Uprising is an example of this new emerging nationalism among the Chinese. The Boxers United in Righteousness, abbreviated as the Boxers, shared a cacophony of religious and spiritual beliefs, such as the belief that they could not be harmed, and recruited mostly young and poor males. The Boxers anti-Western zeal “led to widespread attacks on foreign missionaries and their converts. The Boxers were suppressed by foreign forces, but in the wake came the first signs of a growing anti-Manchu Chinese nationalism.” (Spence, The Search for Modern China, 141). 28 David Arkush and Leo O. Lee, trans and ed, Land Without Ghosts: Chinese Impressions of America from the Mid- Nineteenth Century to the Present (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 79. 25 Americans under semi-colonialism. 29 Not only are the distinct struggles of each group overlooked or eclipsed, but Blackness becomes a malleable tool, establishing the literary model of using the struggles of Blacks to represent other struggles. 30 The original translation of the novel as well as adaptations for the stage “based” on the original 1901 translation are fraught with many problems as the content is changed for the purposes of meeting the desires of the readers in China. Lin Shu argued that these omissions were justified under the privilege of artistic license; those elements omitted were said to detract from the plot development. 31 As Betty Ch’maj has argued, these omissions compel us to ask, “Did the translators understand slavery in the United States? How accurate was their black/yellow parallel? Did they dismiss or disguise the historical circumstances that directly influenced the writing of the novel?” 32 While these are not crucial questions for every translated text, in the case of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in China these questions are of great importance because, from all accounts, Lin Shu’s translation and later reproductions and play adaptations served as one of the primary understandings that Chinese readers had of Black slavery in the U.S. Other historical narratives about slave history were few and rarely discussed in Chinese texts of the time. Lin’s version of Blackness became a touchstone for depictions of African Americans in the Chinese literary world. In spite of these problems and questions, Lin’s translation did give rise to the beginnings of consciousness about Blacks in the United States as well as early notions of Chinese solidarity with American Blacks. The story of Uncle Tom’s Cabin was made into a play on several 29 The term semi-colonial in regards to China at this time simply means that their nation was never part of any European or American empire and the Qing government was not replaced by a foreign government. 30 Ruth Meserve and Walter Meserve, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Modern Chinese Drama,” Modern Drama 17, no. 1 (1974): 59. 31 Tao Jie, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin: The First American Novel Translated into Chinese,” Prospects 18 (1993): 520. 32 Betty Ch’maj, “Foreward: The Strange Inscrutable Career of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in China,” Prospects 18 (1993): 511. 26 occasions by various progressive Chinese playwrights in the early decades of the twentieth century. The majority of those reading such texts and attending their performances were urban elites, generally well-educated and well-off. The flattening of the reality of slavery in Chinese translations and performances of Uncle Tom’s Cabin allowed Chinese readers and viewers to insert themselves into the narrative of oppression. Slavery in Uncle Tom’s Cabin became emblematic or symbolic of all oppression under White racist imperialism and colonialism. As a result, some late Qing elites adopted the Black slave narrative as a metaphor for their powerlessness, essentially minimizing the depravity of chattel slavery while simultaneously exaggerating their political weakness. 33 Many late Qing Chinese intellectuals, writers, and those in cosmopolitan semi-colonial cities such as Shanghai, were trying to map out their place in a world that, in many contradictory ways, arrayed people on a primitive to modern spectrum. William Schafer’s article “Shanghai Savage” argues that urban Chinese produced understandings of their own identities as “modern” vis-a-vis various fantasies about the “savage” other. Schafer highlights the tropes about the savage that circulated in 1920s and 1930s Shanghai to argue that “questions of location, self- representation, and the savage in Shanghai were intertwined with questions of the relationships between the image of the savage and representation itself.” 34 Using Shanghai as a geographical 33 While the elites in the late Qing dynasty were mainly “oppressed” in terms of their weakening political power, there was a segment of the Chinese diaspora that did experience conditions close to chattel slavery: those involved in the “coolie” trade, mainly linked to Cuba and Peru from the 1850s to the 1880s. The “coolie trade” picked up after the abolition of the African slave trade led several countries in the America’s to seek new sources of cheap labor in the indentured paraslavery of Chinese laborers. By the early 19000s this trade ceased, but the oppressive conditions of labor exploitation, legally enforced racist discrimination, and state-tolerated anti-Chinese vigilante violence persisted in many countries in the Americas, including, of course, the U.S. When reading and translating Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Lin and Wei wept. “They did not shed tears for the black slaves, but because the four hundred million yellow people were repeating the tragedies of the black slaves” (Tao Jie, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” 519.) In the 1901 translation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Lin Shu was thus appealing to the Chinese elite’s sense of solidarity within the Chinese diaspora for the more downtrodden Chinese who experienced many forms of racist mistreatment and violence. t 34 William Schafer, “Shanghai Savage,” positions: east asia cultures critique 11, no. 1 (2003): 93. 27 space of global modernity and identity formation, Schafer examines the tropes about the savage that circulated, highlighting how the written, verbal, and visual representations of the savage “other” were used to form a representation of the city and how modernist literature simultaneously critiqued and employed using a savage other to form a modern identity. Mu Shiying’s 1932 story “Five in a Nightclub” demonstrates the ambivalent representations of Blackness within modernist literature in Shanghai. White man’s happiness, black man’s misery. Music from the cannibal rituals of Africa; the loud-soft thunder of drums, the trumpet’s wail, and in the center of the dance-floor a row of indignant Russian princesses performing the black man’s tap-dance; scores of white legs kick below black-clad torsos: Duh-duh-duh-duh-da!....dancing, the layers of white and black…the layers of white and black. Everyone contracts this malaria, Fevered music; ah, the deadly mosquitoes of African jungles. 35 Mu uses racial tropes already in global circulation to convey an image of “African Americans with [B]lack Africans under the sign of the savage; jazz in Mu’s text is both ‘music from the cannibal rituals of Africa’ and ‘the [B]lack man’s tap-dance’”, a contagious mix of the primitive savage and exotic modernity, 36 Such representations of Blackness, often detached from any actual Black person or character, can be found in many Chinese literary works of the era. Mao Dun’s novel Rainbow (Hong) tells of the struggles of the protagonist Mei’s growing into adulthood in Shanghai’s turbulent political environment. Mei has few relics from happier childhood days in that she cherishes, including a Blackface clock. Mentioned repeatedly throughout the course of the novel, the clock is described as “a red-lipped, white-toothed Negro figure with a small clock in its 35 Ibid., 94. 36 Ibid. 28 protruding belly.” 37 The presence of the Blackface object, relics that were popular in the United States, illustrates the exportation of American racism in the form of consumer goods. As Mei struggles to understand her place within a rapidly changing nation, she refers to the clock and her other treasured childhood trinkets as a comforting reminder of her past. The clock, although it marks the passage of time, also exemplifies Mei’s nostalgia for the past. The past anchors Mei and stabilizes her, “The clock of the belly of the Negro doll ticked steadily. All was beautiful. All was calm.” 38 While the Blackface clock continues to mark the passage of time, the contradiction between the function of the clock and what the object represents for Mei leads one to question if its presence is a means of critiquing American racism or Western imperialism. Whatever the reasons, its inclusion reflects some of the larger trends in pre-1949 representations. Similar to the clock, Blacks and the Black body are objectified and connected to evolving Chinese conceptions of self and nation. During these same decades, the literature and poetry of African American writers was introduced through translation into Chinese literary circles. In Chinese literary journals and newspapers in the 1920s and 1930s, one could find translated works by Claude McKay, Paul Dunbar, Jean Toomer, Countee Cullen, and Langston Hughes. 39 Paul Laurence Dunbar’s poem “Conscience and Remorse” published in the Shanghai magazine Liberation Illustrated under the Chinese title “Xinhui” or “Heartbreak” along with a brief biography of the author, led to Dunbar 37 Mao Dun, Hong (Rainbow), trans. Madeleine Zelin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 15. 38 Ibid., 17. 39 In addition to his poetry, Hughes also traveled to China (Shanghai) and Japan in the 1933. His trip and his impressions of Shanghai were described in his travel autobiography I Wonder as I Wander (1956). His impressions of 1930s China created an imaginary of China and Chinese people that unfolded throughout the remainder of his life evidenced by his poetry. For more on the imaginary of China in Hughes poetry, see Luo Lianggong scholarship on Langston Hughes, including Luo’s essay “China and the Political Imagination in Langston Hughes’s Poetry.” 29 being fairly widely known in Chinese literary circles. Clearly, some Chinese poets were interested in these poems and found some level of relatability to them. 40 Such translations of Black poets is significant in terms of representations of Blackness. Unlike Uncle Tom’s Cabin, these works about the Black American experience were written by Black Americans. Starting with Dunbar and soon followed by the translations of other notable Black writers, such as Hughes and McKay, these poems were, according to literary historian Xilao Li, read with sympathy and empathy by Chinese readers. 41 Similar to the reception of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the language of the poems, which expressed disappointments, frustrations, and anger about oppressive treatment and subjugation, resonated with audiences in China. After the war with Japan (the second Sino-Japanese war) began in 1937, fewer works by foreign writers circulated in China. One reason, according to Xilao Li, is that the “mood of Chinese poets and the reading public turned patriotic and fiery.” 42 What foreign literature was translated into Chinese during this period often had war as the backdrop. It is in this context that Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell, became popular in China in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Gone With the Wind was marketed as a love story set during the American Civil War. Set in the American South, primarily the Atlanta area during the Civil War, the text follows the love stories and personal tragedies of its heroine Scarlett O’Hara. Even though it was set during the Civil War, slavery is more of a back-drop than the central driving action. While there were enslaved Blacks in the novel, Mitchell’s ideas about slavery are not overt in the text. 40 Xilao Li, “‘I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings!’: Dunbar in China,” African American Review 41, no. 2 (2007): 387; What is interesting in the biography of Dunbar, and also reinforces earlier arguments concerning a lack of understanding the geographical location and dispersal of Blacks in America, is Dunbar’s place of birth, Ohio, is omitted. Moreover, Dunbar and his works are associated with American Southern literature. In introducing African American literature, it was commonly associated with American Southern works as it was presumed that “all black writers were from the South.” (Ibid., 388). 41 Ibid.,388-389. 42 Idid., 389. 30 The first translation of the text by Fu Donghua appeared in 1940, following the successful debut of the film in 1939. 43 Fu Donghua was a famous translator in his time and, similar to Lin Shu, abridged and rewrote passages of the novel to make the translation appeal to a target audience. In his translation of Gone With the Wind, Fu used “a lot of Chinese-culture- specific words and phrases and also [rewrote] some of the sentences and paragraphs in his translation, which makes it read like a Chinese novel.” 44 According to Zhao Baohe, Fu’s audience was mainly “fashionable and disengaged ladies and gentlemen who yearned for the American-style of life but didn’t know much about American culture and American language.” 45 Travel Logs in America: Liang Qichao, Zuo Taofen, and Xiao Qian As the early twentieth century brought Chinese people into ever more frequent contact with a changing global context, racial discourses and attitudes developed. 46 In the case of African Americans, Chinese discourses were dominated by two main and somewhat contradictory attitudes; expressing sympathy towards African Americans even while presenting them as inferior. The judgment of inferiority largely stemmed from social Darwinist and related discourses that labeled people with dark skin as inferior because they had been conquered and became enslaved by Whites. Sympathy toward African Americans partly resulted from the 43 Zhao Baohe, “A Comparative Study of Two Chinese Versions of Gone with the Wind from a Social-Cultural Perspective,” Studies in Literature and Language 4, no.2 (2012): 60. 44 Ibid. 45 Ibid., 61. 46 The defeat that the Chinese nation and its people experienced during the Opium Wars in the mid-nineteenth century was not the first time that China had been defeated by a foreign other. However, what was new at this time was the racially charged interactions between Chinese people and foreigners, sometimes called “barbarians” or “devils”, combined with socialist Darwinist ideas about race. Ultimately, the skin color of foreigners began to be used to socially distinguish and determine one’s place within a racial and social hierarchy [Frank Dikötter, The Discourse of Race in Modern China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), 38.] In this ranking system the order was white, yellow, red, brown and black. Red, brown and black races were placed after the yellow and white races because the Chinese people saw these three groups as conquered since these peoples were either fully enslaved or colonized by Whites (Ibid., 38.) 31 Chinese immigrant experience in the United States where they received racist treatment, and suffered mob violence and legal discrimination epitomized by the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. This sympathy that resulted from the sense of a shared oppression led the Chinese to learn about the inequalities in America from various sources including literary works such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin and other propaganda about slavery and Jim Crow in the United States. 47 African Americans also occasionally appeared in the travel logs of Chinese travelling in the U.S. In 1903, Liang Qichao, one of the leading progressives of the late Qing, traveled throughout the United States. Liang’s six-month excursion, catalogued in his book Notes on a Tour of the New Continent (Xindalu Youji Jielu), “became popular reading for a whole generation of Chinese eager to learn about a fascinating and yet mysterious land.” 48 In spite of the racist laws and policies that the U.S. adopted against Chinese immigration, Liang’s elite status allowed him access to travel extensively within the U.S. and gave him opportunities to meet with notable Americans such as J.P. Morgan. Although he had some reservations about aspects of American politics and culture upon leaving the States, on the whole Liang found that the American spirit of self-reliance and self-motivation was a model that China should emulate in its quest to become a modern nation. Interestingly, Liang Qichao, adopted some of the mainstream arguments that justified the lynching of American Blacks. On the topic, Liang recounts, “During the ten months I was in America I counted no less than ten-odd accounts of this strange business in the newspapers. At first I was shocked, but have become accustomed to reading about it and no longer consider it strange.” 49 Although he becomes desensitized to these 47 Alexis Collins, “Reflections from Kunming: A Shansi Rep Writes Home, ” Oberlin Alumni Magazine Reflections from Kunming, 1994, http://www.oberlin.edu/alummag/oampast/oamspring97/features/Shansi/oamspring97_shansi.html. 48 Jing Li, “Rhetoric and Reality: The Making of Chinese Perceptions of the United States, 1949-1989,” (PhD Dissertation, Rice University, 1995), 15. 49 Arkush and Lee, Land Without Ghosts, 91. 32 brutal acts against human life, he believed that lynchings were a necessary remedy for the behavior of Blacks. There is something despicable about the behavior of blacks. They would die nine times over without regret if they could possess a white woman’s flesh. They often rape them at night in the forest and then kill them in order to silence them.” 50 While Liang accepted the false justifications of lynchings, his questions concerning how the U.S. government allowed for these wanton, inhumane acts to occur demonstrated that, in some regards, he retained quite a critical eye. 51 He decided that racism or, in his words, “preconceived opinions about race” allowed for the pervasive lynching of Blacks. Due to his preoccupation with finding which models of government and reform China should follow, Liang’s thoughts about lynching stemmed from a critique of the apparent discrepancies between the supposed “modernity” of America and the “backwardness” of China. For Liang, “[t]he American Declaration of Independence says that people are all born free and equal. Are blacks alone not people? Alas, I now understand what it is that is called ‘civilization’ these days!” 52 Here Liang used lynchings, gruesome and violent acts predicated on racism, to critique American justifications of imperialism and colonialism, based on the supposed modernity of their society. Moreover, here Liang also reversed arguments Western powers used to justify their imposition of extra- territoriality in China; how were the violent atrocities committed against Black Americans in America any more “civilized” than the punishments inflicted von accused criminals that occurred in China? In the end, Liang’s time in the United States led him making some interesting comments and observations about American democracy in light of lynchings that impacted his formation of ideas about race and the plight of Blacks in America. Liang’s ambivalence 50 Ibid., 90-91. 51 Philip Huang, Liang Ch’i-ch’ao and Modern Chinese Liberalism (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1972), 78-79. 52 Arkush and Lee, Land Without Ghosts, 91. 33 demonstrates that while he criticized the hypocrisy of Western claims of civilizational superiority, Liang was still susceptible to accept racial stereotypes about Blacks. Zou Taofen was another Chinese scholar of considerable influence who made his way to America in 1935. In the 1930s and 1940s, Zou was a leading political dissident, journalist, and publisher. 53 His education and early employment history was closely intertwined with the institutions established by American Christian missionaries. He graduated from the American mission established by St. Johns University in Shanghai in 1921 and took a job working for the local YMCA until shifting to journalism in 1926. 54 Zou’s readers, which consisted mostly of educated Chinese youth, combined with his progressive politics led the Guomindang to see him as a threat. After one of his close associates was assassinated, Zou fled China and went abroad to Europe and America. His travels in Europe included a stop in the Soviet Union, which made a positive impression on him. Zou had been critical of America even before landing in the States. Moreover, prior to his departure for the U.S., while making arrangements for his journey to New York from London, he had a rude encounter with a U.S. immigration officer, reminding him of the racist discrimination that many Chinese experienced at the hands of the U.S. government. Although Zou Taofen’s trip lasted only two months, his travel logs about America covered a wide range of topics and critiqued “the materialist culture and self-complacency” in America. 55 One crucial section concerning problems within America included his observations about the Negro problem or “heiren wenti.” Within the six pages concerning what he witnessed or understood to be the “Negro problem,” he recounted some of the reasons he was given justifying the racism against Blacks in American culture and found in the rationales given. Zou 53 Jing Li, “Rhetoric and Reality,” 36. 54 Ibid., 37. 55 Zou is a Leftist explicitly meeting with anti-racist leftists in the U.S., including those in the South. Therefore, his agenda, travel, and point of view differs from others discussed. (Ibid.) 34 clearly saw the brutal act of lynching as a violent byproduct of the racial discrimination experienced by Blacks. One of the examples that Zou wrote about involved a Black person who dared to sit in the “Whites Only” section of the bus angering some Whites to the point that this Black person was killed. A second, more horrific and senseless example given by Zou is that of a pregnant Black woman who was hung upside down by her legs from a tree. While suspended, someone cut open her pregnant stomach and pulled out her unborn child. This scene of the horrific and gruesome murder of a child and mother, was too tragic to look at (kan buren du). 56 While Liang Qichao discussed lynchings, Zou went into far more detail, as evidenced by the retelling of these two stories. After recounting this barbaric treatment that Whites in the South meted out to Blacks, Zou Taofen asked why this inhumane behavior persisted? His answer was that through this excessively strict treatment, the capitalist class wished to maintain its oppression of Blacks. Working-class Whites bought into the capitalist class slander that all Blacks lynched were rapists or qiangjian zhuanjia. By rejecting the idea that Black men were avid to rape White women, Zou shows far more clarity about American realities than Liang Qichao had. For Zou, lynching’s social function was not the mythical protection of White women’s purity, but was a form of terrorism meant to keep Blacks in their position as an economic and social underclass. After detailing some of the economic and racial discrimination that Blacks face, even to the point of death, in his later discussion about the usage of the racial 56 While these examples are actual accounts of lynchings in the U.S., it is unclear if Zou is not clearv about when these incidents occurred. In the case of the pregnant woman, it is a retelling of the lynching of Mary Turner in 1918. A mob “lynched Mary Turner on May 17, 1918 in Lowndes County, Georgia because she vowed to have those responsible for killing her husband arrested. Her husband was arrested in connection with the shooting and killing Hampton Smith, a white farmer for whom the couple had worked, and wounding his wife. Sidney Johnson, a Black, apparently killed Smith because he was tired of the farmer’s abuse. Unable to find Johnson, the killers lynched eight other Blacks Including Hayes Turner and his wife Mary. The mob hanged Mary by her feet, poured gasoline and oil on her and set fire to her body. One white man sliced her open and Mrs. Turner’s baby tumbled to the ground with a “little cry” and the mob stomped the baby to death and sprayed bullets into Mary Turner.” (Henrietta Vinton Davis, “Black Women Who were Lynched in America,” Henrietta Vinson Davis (blog), August 1. 2008, (http://henriettavintondavis.wordpress.com/2008/08/01/black-women-who-were-lynched-in-america/.) 35 slur “nigger” (nige), Zou highlighted the similarities between the oppression of Blacks in the States and that of Chinese people. Zou began with the generalization that in the American South all Whites call Blacks “niggers.” In order to emphasize how degrading the term is, he equates it with the term Chinamen (cai na men). Zou is more critical of America than Liang, especially when it comes to issues of race and the treatment of Blacks as oppressed victims, particularly in the American South. Moreover, Zou analyzed these conflicts in the U.S. in terms of class and saw lynchings and other forms of racial oppression linked to class issues. This observation is one that resonates with those common among Socialists that became a dominant one under Mao and the CCP. Journalist and literary critic Xiao Qian, beginning in August of 1945, traveled in the United States for six weeks. Yet, it was only when traveling through the segregated South that he recorded the observation that many Chinese were unsympathetic to the plight of Blacks. In terms of racial prejudice, Xiao believed that “the United States, Australia, and South Africa are the principal nations discriminating against non-whites. Discrimination in America is not just against blacks. In the West it is against Orientals, in the South against blacks, and in the East against Jews.” 57 Even though he noted that multiple groups in the U.S. are racially discriminated against, he, like the other Chinese travelers to the U.S., located racism against Blacks primarily in the South. In some ways, it seemed that, for Xiao, the racism in the South was infectious: “there are really some Chinese (especially those who have gone to the South) who, having eaten at the American table, end up copying Americans' prejudices against blacks and call them retarded, 57 Arkush and Lee, Land Without Ghosts, 185. 36 lazy, and dishonest". 58 The reason behind these racist ideas, for Xiao, is economic since this discrimination against nonwhites “is clearly a matter of rice bowl [jobs].” 59 The travel journals of Xiao, Zou, and Liang are significant not only because of the detailed first-hand accounts of travels in America, but also because of their opportunity to travel within a country that was closed off to the average Chinese person. 60 Curiously, all three, Liang, Zou, and Xiao, relate racial discrimination against American Blacks as occurring almost exclusively in the American south. This is surprising given that they all spent considerable time in America traveling to several major cities, yet, with the exception of Xiao, never discussed racism as occurring in other regions of the country. The fact that the American South was depicted as the site of oppression and violence against the Black body reveals that, for the Chinese imagination, the legacies of slavery in the South were strongly connected to racial discrimination towards African Americans that these travelers witnessed and recorded. Images of Blackness While the written depictions and discussions pertaining to Blackness found within literature and travel logs were important in shaping representations of Blackness, so too were images of Blackness. Images are influential because in addition to being accessible to literate and illiterate people alike, images are also shorthand versions of concepts. Moreover, the visual stereotypes within images of Blackness had a deeper and longer lasting impression than conceptual understandings of Blackness. One pre-1949 visual representation of American Blackness is found on the Darkie toothpaste (later renamed Darlie) packaging. Originally a product of the Hong Kong company Hazel & Hawley Chemical Co., the racist American Blackface image 58 Ibid. 59 Ibid., 186. 60 Liang Qichao speaks no English and is a quite early visitor to the U.S. in 1903. Yet Zou Taofen and Xiao Qian were both fluent in English prior to their visits to the U.S. 37 combined ideas of hygiene and modernity in the Chinese context at the turn of the twentieth century. 61 While the racist Blackface image is imported, the racist ideas behind the image are not. According to Heller and Pomeroy, “Racial and ethnic stereotypes have no higher purpose than to simplify, dehumanize, and degrade people, yet many such stereotypes have been used for mass market product identification, advertising, and as trade character mascots.” 62 The paradox here is that while these images were born out of White racism against American Blacks, these racist images became iconic and easily recognizable images for products. Though these Blackface images were used by “[m]anufactures and ad men relentlessly exploited blacks to advertise new mass-produced goods and to persuade retailers to stock those goods on store shelves. It is impossible to calculate how much revenue was generated and how many individual fortunes were made through the use of [B]lack images as product trademarks and other symbols.” 63 The stark contrast between the dark skin and the white teeth is a visual image that portrays the effectiveness of the toothpaste. 64 But for the Chinese consumers to whom the product is being marketed, there is a lack of understanding why the Blackface image is racist. Additionally, the fact that the image is combined with ideas of modernity meant the Darkie icon has different connotations in China than in the United States. Darkie toothpaste becomes a visual representation of American Blacks through the marketing image used on product branding. Although it was not an image that African Americans would have projected of themselves as “African Americans have always…vigilantly fought the emergence and perpetuation of stereotypes—whether created by whites or by people in their own communities. They correctly 61 Steven Heller and Karen Pomeroy, eds, Design Literacy: Understanding Graphic Design (New York: Allworth Press, 1997), 210. 62 Ibid. 63 Larry Buster, The Art History of Black Memorabilia (New York: Clarkson Potter, 2000), 45. 64 Ibid., 32. 38 perceive stereotypes as a violent form of advertisement in which the meaning travels faster than the perception of the fine print.” 65 The Blackface image of Darkie toothpaste as well as the Blackface doll in Mao Dun’s Hong, highlight the exportation of racism to the extent that it had become fairly commonplace in China’s coastal cities in the 1930s. Musical Narratives The jazz music scene in Shanghai during the Republican era was an important space where representations of Blackness were articulated through the performance of race and music. The 1920s and 1930s was Shanghai’s golden age of jazz and became, for White and Black American jazz musicians alike, the “Paris of the East.” 66 During the 1920s, the circulation of American jazz music (both live bands and gramophone records) as well as the increased popularity of Western dancing styles, such as the foxtrot, were important in the early years of Shanghai’s jazz age. To accommodate the growing interest in the new musical genre and dance steps, many entertainment venues, such as cafes and lavish ballrooms were constructed. At the height of Shanghai’s Jazz Age in the early 1930’s, the lavishness of the new hotels and venues constructed, including the Cathay Hotel and the Canidrome ballroom, eclipsed the grandeur and splendor of earlier entertainment spots. It was during this zenith of Shanghai’s golden Jazz Age, just a few years prior to the eruption of the second Sino-Japanese war in 1937, witnessed an increased interest in Black jazz musicians which resulted in them being actively scouted and recruited to perform in Shanghai. 67 The Shanghai scene that Buck Clayton entered upon arrival to Shanghai in 1934 was one in full swing and splendor, and afforded him great opportunities to perform. Audiences at the Canidrome, where Clayton and his band the Harlem Gentlemen 65 Diawara, “The Blackface Stereotype”, 14. 66 Andrew Jones, Yellow Music: Media Culture and Colonial Modernity in the Chinese Jazz Age (Durham: Duke UP, 2001), 1. 67 Ibid.; Andrew Field, Shanghai’s Dancing World: Cabaret Culture and Urban Politics, 1919-1954 (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 2010), 33-37; 91-96. 39 played during the majority of their time in Shanghai, included foreigners as well as many wealthy local Chinese. While in Shanghai, the racism that Clayton and the other band members experienced was typically at the hands of White marines. In one incident, a group of White American marines shouted racial epithets and threw bricks at Clayton and other members of the band. This instigation led to a fight in which Clayton and his musicians emerged as the victors. What made this experience of racism different for Clayton and others is that it occurred in “a colonial setting characterized by the systematic oppression of the ‘natives’.” 68 Similar to the adoption of Uncle Tom’s Cabin as a universal narrative of oppression, the local Chinese onlookers equated their experiences with racism at the hands of White Americans and Westerners with that of Clayton and his band mates. In Clayton’s words, When it was all over the Chinese onlookers treated us like we had done something that they had always wanted to do and followed us all the way home cheering us like a winning football team. I guess they figured it was something that should have been done a long time before, because I remember one time I saw a marine fall off his bicycle and he promptly got up, went over to a Chinese coolie and kicked him in the ass and then got back on his bicycle and rode on off. 69 In this case, Blackness at that moment went beyond jazz, the impetus that bought Clayton and his band to China, and was also equated with a shared experience of facing violent racist abuse and, rather joyfully in this case, repudiating that abuse with a victorious blow of strength. 68 Jones, Yellow Music, 4. 69 Ibid., 5. 40 Another Black performer who had a connection and presence in China prior to 1949 was Paul Robeson. Robeson was a man of many talents but he originally garnered international fame as a singer for his renditions of Negro slave spirituals. In addition to being an entertainer, Robeson was involved in international politics, a Communist sympathizer, and an advocate for equal rights for all peoples worldwide. Like other Black internationalists, Robeson peered beyond the shores and limitations of American democracy for other models of workable resistance and connections. Robeson’s interest in Chinese culture and language began in the early 1930s. 70 Although Robeson did not visit China, he learned Chinese and sang a few Chinese songs in Mandarin on the album “Chee Lai: Songs of New China” recorded in 1941. 71 The album, created with the help of Liu Liangmo, was composed of four songs sung by Robeson: one in English, one in Chinese, and two in both languages with commentary by Robeson. Chinese songs that Robeson sung included “Chee Lai” or “March of the Volunteers” (which would later become the national anthem of the PRC) and “Feng Yang”. 72 The album would not have been possible without the work of Liu Liangmo, an influential organizer in China’s YMCA, and the main advocate for China’s patriotic “mass singing” movement of the 1930s. Liu came to the United States in 1940 and throughout the early and mid- 1940s, while working with the United China Relief, toured the U.S. discussing the situation in China, disseminating the song “March of the Volunteers,” and working as a journalist for the Pittsburgh Courier with his column “China Speaks.” 73 During World War II, the Pittsburgh 70 Greg Robinson, “‘Internationalism and Justice’: Paul Robeson, Asia, and Asian Americans,” in. AfroAsian Encounters: Culture, History, Politics, ed. Heike Raphael-Hernandez and Shannon Steen (New York: New York University Press, 2006), 263. 71 Ibid., 268. 72 Ibid. 73 Robert Chi, “‘The March of the Volunteers’: From Movie Theme Song to National Anthem” in Re-envisioning the Chinese Revolution: The Politics and Poetics of Collective Memories in Reform China, ed. Ching Kwan Lee and Guobin Yang, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 227; Marc Gallicchio, The African American Encounter 41 Courier was the most widely read African American paper, with an estimated readership of two hundred thousand people. The paper’s anticolonial stance led to a lot of coverage of Third World struggles in columns such as Liu’s “China Speaks.” These features by Liu and other foreign nationals (Indian national Kumar Goshal and Nigerian national Prince Orizu) not only allowed for the readers to link their experiences to those of other people of color internationally, but also provided a space for these foreign nationals to articulate that other people of color were also making similar connections. At times Liu’s “China Speaks” column discussed representations of Blackness in contemporary China. In his May 15, 1943 column (“A Closer Understanding Between Negro, Chinese will Hasten Victory”) he remarked that the limited knowledge he had about Blacks was based on slavery and Negro spirituals: “In China, I had only a vague idea about the Negro problem here in America. We knew about Abe Lincoln’s struggle for the liberation of the Negro people. For that we love Lincoln. We sang Negro spirituals, and love them, and always felt that there is a sadness and a yearning to be free in them.” 74 African American music as a topic of interest resurfaced in Liu’s column, on January 29, 1944, under the subheading “Spirituals are Favorites:” “Furthermore, we know a little bit about the Negro people already. Paul Robeson’s singing the Chinese fighting songs has made the Negro people very dear to our hearts. Among the American songs, Negro spirituals are our favorites.” 75 In the space of his column, Liu claims to speak on behalf of China when he states what “we” know about Blacks. While it is problematic that one man is speaking, even in an with Japan & China: Black Internationalism in Asia, 1895-1945 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 164-166. 74 Liu Liangmo, “China Speaks: A Closer Understanding Between Negro, Chinese will Hasten Victory,” Pittsburgh Courier, May 15, 1943. 75 Liu Liangmo, “China Speaks: Would Welcome a Negro as Student Representative to Visit Chinese Youths,” Pittsburgh Courier, February 29, 1944. 42 informal capacity, for a whole nation, what comes across is that there is knowledge about African Americans, albeit limited, based loosely on very cursory knowledge about chattel slavery, U.S. history (the understanding of Lincoln as liberator also plays into an image of African Americans as having no political or historical agency or role in the struggle for freedom) and Negro spirituals. Liu was a very cosmopolitan Chinese, a Christian working with the YMCA who regularly interacted with Americans before visiting the U.S., yet even he had very simplistic understandings of African American slavery and, apparently, even less of contemporary conditions. Although the musical collaboration between Paul Robeson and Liu Liangmo on “Chee Lai” produced a musical representation of their shared ideal of unifying American Blacks and Chinese people, the cultural connections that these two men made between African American culture and Chinese culture were quite limited. As such, both Robeson and Liu engage in what John Russell calls “racial mimesis”. According to Russell, racial mimesis is “a variety of discursive practices conducted in and through various media that serve to authenticate, reinforce, and reify existing ideologies of racial difference”. 76 The “Chee Lai” collaboration, while it acknowledged the differences between African Americans and Chinese people, also tried to bridge the divide between the two peoples that tapped into long standing Black internationalist ideas of looking to the East for models of resistance. 77 Although Robeson falls out of popularity around 1958, his political and musical presence in China in part paved the way for Aubrey Pankey to be invited to China by the Chinese People’s Association for Cultural Relations with 76 John G. Russell, “Race as Ricorso: Blackface(s), Racial Representation, and the Transnational Apologetics of Historical Amnesia in the United States and Japan,” in Racial Representations in Asia, ed. Yasuko Takezawa (New York: Apollo Books, 2011), 128. 77 Although Liu Liangmo’s background in music explains his attraction to the musical aspect of Black culture, it seems that his understanding of Black culture, even while living in the U.S., does not evolve as much as one would desire considering his background, identity as a cosmopolitan Chinese, his work with the Black press, and his partnership with Paul Robeson. 43 Foreign Countries (Zhongguo renmin dui wai wenhua xiehui zhuban) to perform in 1955. In trying to capitalize on the spirit of Bandung following the Afro-Asian conference held earlier that year, the CCP began to include African Americans in its foreign relations’ narrative of international colored solidarity. Moreover, the CCP, in the early to mid-1950s, invited many cultural troupes and performers from other nations as part of its soft power cultural diplomacy. Pankey fit within this matrix of culture and politics as he was framed as a performer-activist in the same vein as Paul Robeson. Political Narratives W.E.B. Du Bois’ prophetic assertion that the problem of the twentieth-century would be that of the color line was also the guiding ideology of Black internationalists in the early and mid- twentieth century. Black internationalists, according to Marc Gallicchio, emphasized the role of race and racism as a guiding factor in world affairs. As such, colored peoples of the world, in various stages of throwing off the shackles of slavery, colonialism, and imperialism, needed to unite. Within this colored solidarity, Black internationalists engaged with East Asia. Japan was seen as symbolically and politically significant within the colored solidarity in the early decades of the century primarily because of its’ defeat of Russia in the Russo-Japanese war of 1904- 1905. 78 The defeat of a White nation (Russia) by a colored nation (Japan) ignited hopes that there could be alternatives to the institutional and social racism African Americans battled daily. Yet beliefs in Japan as the “great colored hope” began to falter significantly, especially as Japan’s imperialist aggression continued to extend towards other “colored” Asian nations in the Pacific. 78 Gallicchio, The African American Encounter, 7. 44 Japanese imperialism was problematic for two main reasons. First, Japan was applying systems of domination to other colored nations. Second, the Japanese emperor and his government framed the application of imperialist systems of colonialization in East Asia as one colored nation lending a hand to uplift the other “backwards” Asian nations. But under the guise of brotherly uplift, Japan in fact implemented colonialism in Korea and tried to extend its colonial empire into mainland China. For Black Americans who kept abreast of the evolving war in the Pacific, the form of “help” and “modernizing” that Japan offered became suspect; many began to fear it was no different than the imperialism of U.S. and European nations. Even though the appeal of Japan was wearing thin, many Black internationalists still clung to some belief in a colored solidarity, discounting Japanese aggression until Japan’s excessively violent political campaigns in China (horribly epitomized in the Nanking Massacre of 1937) could no longer be overlooked. 79 Even individuals who would later develop political ties to China after 1949, such as W.E.B. Du Bois, did not critique Japanese aggression and imperialist projects in East Asia prior to 1937. Yet, with the eruption of war, the contradictions between Japan’s identity as a colored nation and an imperialist power were no longer easily ignored. It was during this time that, to borrow Marc Gallicchio’s terminology, that Black Americans found China again as a hopeful partner in solidarity. 80 Initially, China was seen as a single entity, but it soon became apparent that there were two China’s: the one of the Nationalist Guomindang (GMD) and that of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). 79 Under the rule of the KMT, Nanjing was the capital of the Chinese Republic. Japanese troops entered the city on December 13 th , and for seven weeks thereafter the Japanese soldiers “unleashed on the defeated Chinese troops and on the helpless Chinese civilian population a nearly unparalleled storm of violence and cruelty that has become known as the ‘Rape of Nanjing.’ […] Certainly robbery, wanton destruction, and arson left much of the city in ruins, and piles of dead bodies were observable in countless occasions.” (Spence, The Search for Modern China, 401-402.) 80 Gallicchio, The African American Encounter, 2-4. 45 During the war, the racism and prejudices within the U.S. army, which mirrored American society, did not end at the American shores. The reality of the racism that Black G.I.’s faced in Asia became a topic of interest in the press. While it was rumored that Black soldiers had limited access to China, it was not until images of convoy’s filled with only White soldiers taken during the road building projects in Burmese of 1943-44, that the realities of racism overseas that Black soldiers endured was intensely criticized in the Black press. 81 The fact that Black soldiers faced discrimination at the hands of White Americans was shocking but not unheard of. But the fact that similar attitudes were being propagated by the GMD was upsetting and unsettling news. While articles in the Black press did not criticize the GMD for White soldiers actions and attitudes towards Black G.I.’s deployed in China, Blacks were upset that the GMD did not outwardly chastise these racist incidents and actions. As Nationalist leaders, such as Chiang Kai-shek and his wife, garnered international attention and support for their efforts in China, they missed the opportunity of using the international spotlight to take a stand concerning racism and racial equality for all colored peoples. 82 The GMD never made a complete declaration one way or the other and generally sidestepped questions pertaining to race and racism. A final crushing blow to Black internationalists’ hopes that the GMD might be a force supporting colored solidarity occurred at the United Nations charter meeting in San Francisco in 1945. 83 At the meeting, there was a Chinese delegation that included a single CCP representative: Dong Biwu (Tung Pi-wu). 84 Dong used this moment to capitalize on the 81 Gallicchio, The African American Encounter, 196-197. 82 Ibid., 199-201. 83 John Robert Badger, “China Refuses to Take Stand for Racial Equality,” Chicago Defender, May 12, 1945. 84 Dong Biwu joined the Chinese Communist Party (CCC) in 1921 and was one of the founding members of the Party. Prior to joining the CCP in 1921, Dong was involved with Sun Yat-sen;s revolutionary society and, after 1911, became involved with the Guomindang (GMD) or Nationalist Party. After the GMD and CCP split in 1927, Dong became committed to the CCP and held numerous leadership positions and was involved in many monumental events in the party’s history, such as the Long March (1934-1935). After the establishment of the PRC in 1949, Dong continued to be appointed to top party positions, such as member of the Central People’s Government 46 Nationalist’s failure to take a definitive stance on race and made a statement on behalf of the CCP inviting Black Americans to China. In an article covering Dong’s comments, he is reported as saying “[w]e will welcome Negro workers and technicians to Communist China. We don’t tolerate race discrimination [..] Be sure to come to our territory after the war—if you can get out of America.” 85 In setting itself up as the antithesis of the GMD on the topic of racial equality, the CCP was planted in the minds of Black internationalists and radicals as a possible ally in their struggle. Conclusion When the civil war between the GMD and the CCP resumed in 1946, the CCP would come out as the victor and establish the People’s Republic of China in October 1949. The words of Dong in 1945 would be realized and echoed in Maoist China by both sides in what I term Sino-African American relations. My usage of politically laced terminology post-1949 is apt as some of the earlier cultural understandings of Black Americans becomes politicized within both contexts. As such, representations of Blackness, while culturally or socially based, became part of a political agenda of the CCP and the PRC. Prior to 1949, while a few Blacks such as Langston Hughes and W.E.B. Du Bois traveled to China, on the whole there was little of interaction with Blacks which changes and played a significant role in Sino-African American relations post-1949. In his book, Marc Gallicchio states that Black Americans “lost” China in 1945. I argue that what they lost was the GMD’s version of China. They then began to embrace the CCP’s ideal of China, in part ushered in by Council, president of the Supreme Court, and acting President of the PRC in the mid-1970s. [Yuwu Song, ed., Biographical Dictionary of the People’s Republic of China (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland &Company, Inc., 2013), 68-69; Nym Wales, Red Dust: Autobiographies of Chinese Communists (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1952), 35-43.] 85 Richard Dunham, “Chinese Leader Invites Negroes to China, Hits American Jim Crow,” Chicago Defender, May 26, 1945. 47 Dong Biwu’s statements issued in the U.S. in 1945. However, while there was a shift from GMD to CCP in the notion of a colored solidarity, which was solidified with the establishment of the PRC in 1949, there were legacies from representations of Blackness pre-1949 that had lasting impacts on Sino-African American relations in the Socialist period. Regardless of misconceptions about race and the plight of African Americans, the overall framing of Blacks as oppressed and the usage of narratives about Black Americans struggles as a metaphor for Chinese suffering were two primary ways that Blacks were represented and become two of the largest obstacles of representation that Blacks who went to China in the Mao era had to navigate and contest. Within the Chinese context pre-1949, while there is no singular “Chinese view” pre-1949, Chinese people, both in in China as well as in the diaspora abroad, could sympathize with the oppression that Blacks faced. But there was a lack of empathy due to a lack of Black agency within China. The Black body and the narratives about it were reflective and cautionary: reflecting the Chinese struggles with Whites and warning Chinese people what could happen if they did not fight imperialist and colonialist systems of oppression. The elision of the Black body and the unique struggles of Black Americans, the repeated use of Blacks as metaphorical stand-ins for Chinese people’s own unjust experience of racial oppression occluded the agency of Black Americans from their representations in China. Repeatedly, framing Blacks as victims, the language re-victimized Blacks, re-inscribed them as people acted upon and not as a people who were also struggling against racism. 48 Chapter Two: Sounds of Blackness: Aubrey Pankey, Transnational Music, and Representations of Blackness in Maoist China Chapter Two explores representations of Blackness in China through the cultural vehicle of music by focusing on the influence and work of Aubrey Pankey, an African-American classically trained baritone singer who performed in China in 1955. While Aubrey Pankey never learned to speak Chinese, he accepted the invitation of the Chinese People’s Association for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries (Zhongguo guomin dui wai wenhua xiehui; CPACRFC below) to travel to Beijing, Shanghai and surrounding cities in 1955, just six years after the founding of the People’s Republic of China. As this was the first cultural tour by a U.S. citizen since the founding of the PRC, the optics and significance of this tour merit analysis. Moreover, the trajectory of Pankey’s life underscores the myriad ways that race, WWII and Cold War era international relations, and the politics of identity intersected. In tracing how Pankey traversed the shifting political sands in four continents (North and South America, Europe, and Asia) across the span of three decades we see the evolution of his political ideals and activism and of the highly politicized international context of cultural exchanges in which he was an important participant. Pankey’s touring repertoire included both classical music as well as Negro Spirituals. His performance of music unique to African American culture in China, and the Chinese media associated discussions of the Negro Spiritual genre, brought forth new cultural and political aspects of Blackness into the Chinese context. In 1955 issues such as American racism, imperialism, and the disenfranchisement of American Blacks were becoming important 49 components of CCP foreign relations, along with the promotion of an ideal of colored solidarity. Pankey’s visit in 1955, accompanied by the printing in concert programs and newspapers of Negro Spiritual song lyrics, brief historical narratives about the music itself, and Aubrey Pankey’s moving biography combined to provide historical and political context and connections between the common, although limited, points of reference about American Blacks within the Chinese context up to this time: slavery and music. In Chapter One we saw that narratives about Blacks in late Qing and Republican era China were often used as metaphors or warnings to mobilize notions of Chinese nationalism, but that such metaphorical deployment also led to the erasure of the Black body in narratives about the plight of Blacks in America. Pankey’s time in China, albeit brief, reclaimed the Black body within Black narratives of oppression and struggle. His explanation and performance of songs that came from slavery at least momentarily enhanced the limited discourses about Black Americans. Pankey’s visit and performance of spirituals helped crystallize a shift in how representations of African Americans worked semiotically in China; from primarily serving as a metaphor or foil for Chinese experiences of racial oppression in the late Qing and Republican era to emerging, albeit in limited ways, as a people with their own distinct historical and political experiences with whom the Chinese could express their solidarity in the midst of efforts to forge a global political network. Pankey, in small but significant ways, helped nudge Chinese discourses on African Americans as they were undergoing a larger political shift from objects or stand-ins for oppression and slave-like disempowerment to cultured subjects, potential allies with their own agency. Aubrey Pankey 50 Aubrey Pankey was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1905, but was orphaned by the age of 16. 86 At that time, Pankey began studying music and worked various menial jobs, such as a cook and chauffeur, to pay school fees and other living expenses. 87 His hard work and diligent studies paid off as Pankey earned scholarships to, in order of attendance, Hampton Institute (now Hampton University), Oberlin College, and Boston College. After graduating from Boston College in 1930, Pankey made his first sojourn to Europe, a trip that would last nine years. During his first year in Europe, Pankey advanced his musical studies at the Vienna Conservatory of Music. 88 In 1931, in spite of the German fascist threat, Aubrey Pankey performed in both Austria and Germany. In his pre-WW II travels, Pankey held concerts in almost every major city in Europe, performing over 200 times. 89 In addition to Europe, Pankey also performed in Egypt and Palestine. In 1940, he returned to the United States stopping first in New York City where the city government held a special concert celebrating his first performance in the U.S. He then toured other major American cities before travelling south to Mexico, the West Indies, and Panama to perform. In 1947 he returned to Europe and began a new musical tour the following year. 90 The 1948 musical tour, started in Hungary and included Czechoslovakia and other European countries and Pankey’s singing received unprecedented widespread interest among the people. 91 Pankey also attended the World Congress of Intellectuals for Peace held in Poland as part of the People of Color delegation before settling down in France later that same year. 86 CPACRFC, “Meiguo jinbu heiren nan zhongyingechangjia” [“A Progressive Black American Baritone Singes”] in Yinyuehui [Concert Program] Shanghai, 1955. 87 Xinhua News. “Mei heiren gechangjia Panji he jie nu gangqin jia Kenuokewa [“Black American Singer Pankey and Female Pianist Knotkova.”] Hangzhou Daily February 23, 1955. 88 Concert Program, x. 89 Xinhua News. “Mei heiren gechangjia Panji he jie nu gangqin jia Kenuokewa [“Black American Singer Pankey and Female Pianist Knotkova.”] Hangzhou Daily February 23, 1955. 90 Concert Program, x. 91 Xinhua News. “Mei heiren gechangjia Panji he jie nu gangqin jia Kenuokewa [“Black American Singer Pankey and Female Pianist Knotkova.”] Hangzhou Daily February 23, 1955. 51 However, his time in France was brief as the French government, under pressure from the United States government, expelled him. 92 Following expulsion, Pankey relocated to England for a year and a half, at which time (presumably because of the United States government) his work visa was not renewed. 93 After leaving England, Pankey continued to live, tour, and perform in eastern bloc countries prior to his concerts in China in late 1955. The above biography of Pankey, based solely on Chinese sources, primarily a biography of the artist in his Chinese concert program and a long article in the Hangzhou Daily Times, purposefully depicts Pankey in a certain light. While the music program biography is brief and objective in tone (hometown, education, travels and concerts), the Hangzhou Daily article includes more descriptions of Pankey’s struggles as an orphaned youth and how he was a victim of U.S. imperialism as the American government interfered in his ability to establish residence in both France and England. This depiction of Pankey followed the CCP line, weaving Pankey’s life story into a narrative of how democracy failed him, making him a victim of U.S. imperialism, and leading him to the ideological truths of Socialism. 94 Although these biographies mentioned his return to the United States, they omit the racial barriers that he broke upon his return, such as being the first Black soloist to perform with the New York Symphony Orchestra in 1940. 95 Such facts did not fit into the narrative of Pankey as a victim of U.S. imperialism, for to show Pankey breaking racial barriers would have indicated that some progress was being made within U.S. culture and society in regards to racism. 92 Ibid. 93 Ibid. 94 Other Chinese news articles have a very similar narrative of Pankey’s life story. Those publications include: Renmin Ribao (November 30, 1955), Jiefang Ribao (December 12, 1955; December 13, 1955; December 15, 1955), and Guangming Ribao (November 18, 1955). 95 “Feature Aubrey Pankey on Air,” Philadelphia Tribune, October 4, 1941. 52 But it is not just the CCP press that constructed an ideologically shaped biography of Aubrey Pankey. The narrative of Pankey’s success—an orphan turned international singing sensation—was told differently in the American press, including much of the Black press. There, his life story was framed within the ideal of the American dream; Pankey’s success was attributed to his pulling himself up by his bootstraps while the barriers of racism were marginalized with phrases such as “[a]s a youth, he worked hard at anything he could do to save money.” 96 In contrast, the Chinese media’s biography of Pankey highlighted many moments when he of experienced American racism, while omitting other instances where racism clearly figured in his experiences, such as when Austrian Nazi’s protested his concert in 1932 or when the former President of Panama tried to ban Pankey from entering the country in 1942. 97 Most telling of all, while the Chinese sources mention Pankey’s travels to the West Indies and Latin America in 1942, they omit that fact that this trip was a five month unofficial goodwill tour sponsored by the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs (OCIAA), an American organization coordinated by Nelson Rockefeller at the request and direction of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. 98 The OCIAA would change titles several times in the early 1940s from its original name, the Office for Coordination of Commercial and Cultural Relations between the American Republics (OCCCRBAR), to the Office of the Coordinator of Inter- 96 “Pankey on Goodwill Tour of Americas, Now in Chile: Fine Reception Accorded Him in Buenos Aires,” Atlanta Daily World, August 24, 1942. 97 According to articles in both the Chicago Daily Tribune and the Chicago Defender Pankey’s concert in Salzberg was disrupted by hundreds of Austrian Nazis. The mob outside protesting while Pankey was inside performing was suppressed by the Vienna government and police. Pankey was surprised by the mobs racist attitudes as he stated that this type of overt and blatant racism was something he expected to experience in the American South, not Europe. [William Shirer, “Austrian Nazis Riot at Recital by U.S. Negro: Aubrey Pankey Guarded by Police,” Chicago Daily Tribune, May 11, 1932; “Guard Baritone After Austrians Demonstrate,” Chicago Defender, May 14, 1932; Harold Preece, “The Negro in Latin America: Treaties Against Discrimination,” New York Amsterdam News, September 9, 1944; “Aubrey Pankey Dies; Expatriate Singer,” New York Times, May 11, 1971. 98 Office of Inter-American Affairs, History of the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs (Washington D.C.: United States Government Printing Office, 1947), 279-282. 53 American Affairs (OCIAA) in July 1941 and the OIAA in March 1945 which soon thereafter was absorbed into the Department of State, the governmental organization that launched the Cold War Jazz diplomacy tours in 1956. 99 Pankey’s involvement with the OCIAA not only speaks to changes in his own political outlook and the shifting political context he negotiated as an African American of international fame and stature; it also sheds new light on the world of mid-20 th - century diplomatic representations of African American culture that Penny von Eschen and others have bought to our attention. Indeed, what Pankey’s sparsely documented and long- ignored experience reveals is that the mechanism of state-underwritten international cultural tours by African American musicians began over a decade before the Cold War Jazz tours, and perhaps even more importantly, that this mode of cultural diplomacy was not simply a U.S. practice, but was being actively promoted by other major world powers, including China. The OCIAA, initiated under President Franklin D. Roosevelt, was intended to promote the “Good Neighbor Policy” as well as hinder the spread of fascism in South America. Originally a term coined by President Hoover, the “Good Neighbor Policy” aimed to repair and strengthen both cultural and trade relations with Latin American nations through soft diplomacy rather than forceful political and militaristic intervention. 100 When the OCIAA was initially established under the Council of National Defense, many within the United States government strongly believed that the economic losses being suffered by numerous South American nations due to the war raging in Europe might lead to their political destabilization, ultimately making them ripe for political, economic, and cultural infiltration. 101 It was hoped the OCIAA might curb the spread 99 Gisela Cramer and Ursula Prutsch, “Nelson A. Rockefeller’s Office of Inter-American Affairs (1940-1946) and Record Group 229,” Hispanic American Historical Review 86, no.4 (2006), 785. 100 Jennifer Campbell, “Creating Something Out of Nothing: The Office of Inter-American Affairs Music Committee (1940-1941) and the Inception of a Policy for Musical Diplomacy,” Diplomatic History 36, no. 1 (2012): 30. 101 Cramer and Prutsch, “Nelson A. Rockefeller’s Office,” 786. 54 of fascism to South America. Although the administrative and organizational boundaries of the OCIAA were not clearly defined, the organization’s mission was “to assist in the preparation and coordination of policies to stabilize the Latin American economies, to secure and deepen U.S. influence in the region, and to combat Axis inroads into the hemisphere, particularly in the commercial and cultural spheres.” 102 Nelson Rockefeller became the coordinator of the OCIAA in 1941 because his name, influence, and connections in a variety of spheres, such as commerce, mass media/communications, and education would allow the OCIAA to be a liaison between various private and public sectors and to fulfill its mission of establishing a multitude of initiatives in those spheres. 103 The OCIAA established a presence in the U.S. and numerous Latin American nations through its coordination committees which “generally assisted in program development and implementation on the ground, and they reported on the success or failures of given strategies, particularly in the informational and cultural fields.” 104 The idea for Pankey’s goodwill tour was developed by the OCIAA and it was through its committees in Latin America and the U.S. that information about his tour in 1942 was picked up and reported on by various press outlets in the U.S. as well as the countries that he toured. 105 Pankey’s goodwill tour, beginning on May 28, 1942, took him to the West Indies, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Panama, Central America, and ended in Mexico before returning to the U.S. on 102 Ibid. 103 Although asked to take this position at the request of FDR, Rockefeller was not given a salary for this position. His compensation came in the form of “actual and necessary transportation, subsistence and other expenses incidental” to his duties. (OIAA, History of the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs, 282.) 104 Ibid., 788. 105 The press outlets that I have collected articles from as it relates to Pankey in South America are: Chicago Defender (July 11, 1942; November 21, 1942), Pittsburgh Courier (July 4, 1942; August 22, 1942), New York Amsterdam-Star News (August 22, 1942; August 29, 1942), Philadelphia Tribune (July 4. 1942), The Paris (TX) News (June 10, 1942), New York Post (May 28, 1942), New York Age (June 27, 1942; July 4, 1942; August 29, 1942) and Atlanta Daily World (August 24, 1942). 55 January 21, 1943. 106 In the midst of the goodwill tour, Nelson Rockefeller claimed that Pankey’s trip was “a tangible and welcome contribution to the general program to promote inter-American understanding and solidarity in this time of international crisis.” 107 Pankey seemed to have been a great choice as he was “triumphantly and enthusiastically received everywhere on this tour during which he [drew] capacity audiences.” 108 During WWII, the United States wanted to cultivate a Pan-American identity via cultural diplomacy as a means of thwarting the spread of fascism in the Western hemisphere. One method involved promoting the concept of an “All American” identity to unite the Americas. Yet, the “concept ‘All Americans was not so much an effort to foster relations between North and South America; much rather, it served as an instrument in the ideological and economic battle between the United States and the National-Socialist and Fascist forces ‘down there.’” 109 The phrase “All Americans” or “Americans All” gained widespread usage in the U.S, in government and private contexts, as a convenient means to “designate the ‘community of interests,’ the ‘singleness of purpose,’ and ‘the closeness of trade, travel and financial interchange’ between North and South America.” 110 In addition, for the U.S. government, hemispheric defense was a back door through which the American government might justify involvement in WW II. The majority of American citizens, Post WWI, did not want to get involved in another war, but President Roosevelt used the concept of ‘Americans All’ to promote his more interventionist ends. 106 While it is difficult to locate the OIAA sanctioned Pankey trip documents, the U.S. Entry Declaration for the Pan American plane that Pankey returns to the U.S. on via Mexico (dated January 21, 1943), press coverage from the countries he visited (and reprinted in U.S.) newspapers, and press releases issued by the OIAA are additional sources. (Border Crossings: From Mexico to U.S., 1895-1946 for Aubrey Pankey, Ancestry.com). 107 “Pankey Ends First Leg of Concert Tour in the Caribbean,” New York Age, July 4, 1942. 108 “Aubrey Pankey Now in Buenos Aires,” New York Amsterdam News, August 29, 1942. 109 Uwe Lübken, “‘Americans All’: The United States, the Nazi Menace, and the Construction of a Pan-American Identity,” American Studies 48, no.3. (2003): 407. 110 Ibid., 390. 56 In addition to highlighting U.S.-Latin American foreign cultural relations during WWII, Pankey’s tours add to our historical understanding of how African American musicians were tapped by the U.S. government to perform “diplomatic” and “ambassadorial” duties and to represent a nation where they were still relegated to second class citizenship. In the case of Pankey, because he was the first of a handful of Black performers to hold concerts in South America, his tours also had the effect of illuminating some of the racist systems that Blacks lived under in various South American countries. For instance, Pankey’s concerts in Panama were partly sponsored by the Westerman series, a concert series created by George Westerman to encourage dialogue and cultural connections between African Americans in the U.S. and Blacks in Panama, and the Isthmian (Panama) Negro Youth Council (INYC). 111 Yet Pankey was almost denied entry into Panama by the countries fascist-leaning former president. 112 For Westerman and the youth of the INYC, Pankey’s visit was an important show of goodwill on behalf of the OCIAA. Many Blacks in South America were not completely sold on the Good Neighbor Policy because the benefits of its social, educational, and economic initiatives were not reaching everyone, especially people of Black descent, due to racist policies in their respective countries and the American government. For example, in the American Panama Canal Zone, native Panamanian’s of Black descent were referred to as “silver” because they were paid in silver dollars whereas Whites were paid higher wages in gold and were referred to as such. 113 Similar forms of racism could be found in other Central and South American nations. Such sustained acts 111 Catherine Zein, “Claiming the Canal: Performances of Race and Nation in Panama, 1904-199” (PhD dissertation, Northwestern University, Evanston, 2012), 1; 290. 112 In terms of the event in Panama, it seems that Aubrey Pankey was slated to sing for the U.S. troops stationed there (due to the land-lease deal between the U.S. and various Latin American nations). While the sitting president of Panama was seen as an ally of the U.S. government, it was the actions of former president Arnulfo Arias that threatened to curtail Pankey’s performance and the overall success of the OIAA’s efforts in Panama. (Harold Preece, “The Negro in Latin America: Treaties Against Discrimination,” New York Amsterdam News, September 9, 1944; “Aubrey Pankey Dies; Expatriate Singer,”. New York Times, May 11, 1971.) 113 Harold Preece, “The Negro in Latin America: Panama,” Philadelphia Tribune, February 5, 1944. 57 of racial discriminations lead to many Blacks in South America to feel that “Jim Crow has prevented the Good Neighbor policy from functioning as it ought to in Latin America or in those other sections of the world where the great majority of the people are colored.” 114 So Pankey was chosen by the OCIAA to promote the façade of the inclusiveness of American democracy through a promotion of the “success” of Black Americans via the international parading of Black artists—a group of people who continued to face glaring racial inequities at home and whose ancestors had been chattel slaves. Yet, despite the obvious hypocrisies of this propaganda strategy, Pankey’s tour did have the effect of emboldening and encouraging those working on behalf on the rights of Blacks in Latin and South America to continue fighting against racial discrimination, and this is probably why Pankey was willing to participate in the venture. 115 Pankey, it can be argued, deliberately wanted to maintain a separation between his singing career and his political activism when it was convenient or necessary to do so in order to book performing gigs. In contrast to Paul Robeson for example, Aubrey Pankey never publicly announced his political ideology or affiliations while in the United States during WWII. This allowed Pankey to publically maintain a separation to some degree, between his career and political beliefs. However, Pankey’s political alignments became clearer after he returned to Europe in 1947. When Pankey returned to the U.S. in 1940 he had been lauded as the native son returning home. During his roughly seven years in the states (December 1939 to August 1947), he had many opportunities to perform and was a sought after star not only because of his singing ability 114 Harold Preece, “The Negro in Latin America: Treaties Against Discrimination,” New York Amsterdam News, September 9, 1944. 115 “Trinidad Wants Music,” Chicago Defender, July 18, 1942; Ellis Williams. “West Indians Not Behind the War Effort, Journalist Says,” Afro-American, September 12, 1942. 58 (that was praised by both Black and White publications alike) but also because of his European popularity. 116 But by 1953, he and his wife Kay were being forced out of France due to pressures from the American government. Part of Pankey’s transition, in the eyes of the U.S. government, from the lauded native son to the un-American expatriate derives from the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) investigations of musicians post World War II era of McCarthyism. Pankey’s association with the U.S. based Socialist organization the National Council of the Arts, Sciences, and Professions (NCASP) placed him in the sights of HUAC. The NCASP was established in 1945 and was formed out of the Independent Citizens Committee of the Arts, Sciences, and Professions (ICCASP) of the 1930s and it sponsored and organized many conferences, including the World Congress of Intellectuals for Peace in Warsaw in 1948. 117 While Pankey may have had other socialist affiliations, it was his attendance at this conference and his passionate speech about the racism that Black performers endured that placed him directly in the crosshairs of the HUAC. At the Warsaw Congress, Pankey delivered a speech discussing the plight of Black Americans and other racial, economic, and social difficulties that plagued American 116 Prior to his return to the U.S., African American manager Charles L. Marshall approached Pankey about possibly working together. Marshall not only informs him what the agency can offer, but how he can (and should) make the most of his European popularity as leverage for booking jobs and more money while in the U.S. In his advice to Pankey, Marshall states “But, however great and successful you are in Europe, it doesn’t mean a thing here unless every American knows about it, and your success in Europe won’t help here much here unless you are publicized and advertised in a big way and with the proper tempo……You know that American can’t appraise art for themselves. They have to have the Europeans do it for them. The Europeans have said that you are a great artist, so why not let every American know it?” Although the negotiating is not resolved in their letter exchanges, it seems that Pankey does take the advice of Charles Marshall and uses his status as an international singer, especially his popularity in Europe, to garner many opportunities in the States. (Letter to Aubrey Pankey, 19 September 1938, fol. 1, Charles Marshall Papers, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.) 117 U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Un-American Activities, “Review of the Scientific and Cultural Conference for World Peace,” April 19, 1949, p. 2-6. 59 minorities. 118 In doing so, he brought international attention to some of the struggles that African Americans faced and personalized them through discussing some of his own experiences and feelings of resentment towards the racist system. 119 Aubrey Pankey “had an unusual success when he stepped out of the role as singer and addressed the Congress as a delegate from America.” 120 It was in this role that he stated “America is a great country of which I am proud to be a citizen,”…But because of the economic barriers set up by a few exploiters of the masses, the American Negro is relegated to second class citizenship.” 121 Moreover, as it pertained to the Black artist, Pankey declared “I resent having to work harder and having to be more talented than artists of the same category before even getting an opportunity to be heard. I resent having to wonder where I can spend the night and get a meal in my travels, because in America I cannot live in most of the hotels and eat in most of the public restaurants without special arrangements made because of my color, and there are very few Negro hotels. No one can realize what that means in traveling unless one has actually experienced it. I resent being engaged by organizations in the capacity of a colored singer rather than a baritone with sincere qualities as a musician. I resent not being included in full American life with the full intellectual and cultural status as an artist. I resent being categorized in selection of artistic expression only to roles and songs which are subservient in character and 118 “Bias in U.S. Scored by Singer Before Polish Congress: Aubrey Pankey Tells Trials of Negro Artists,” New Journal and Guide, September 18, 1948; “Pankey Tells Poles Burden of Jim Crow,” Chicago Defender, September 18, 1948; “European Tour Was Success,” New York Age, December 18, 1948; “Aubrey Pankey Home From Tour Abroad,” Chicago Defender, December 25, 1948. 119 Many of the articles from the American publications label Pankey an American delegate. Yet, the Chinese sources state that he was part of the colored delegation. So while it is still uncertain if was he there to represent the U.S. government or was he a Black delegate that was part of the colored delegation who happened to be American, what is significant is the content of his speech. 120 “European Tour Was Success,” New York Age, December 18, 1948. 121 “Bias in U.S. Scored by Singer Before Polish Congress: Aubrey Pankey Tells Trials of Negro Artists,” New Journal and Guide, September 18, 1948. 60 connotation. I resent being underpaid for doing the same work and more of it. This resentment has made me determined in an intellectual way to do something about it and join forces which are willing to fight for the rights of the Negro and in sum, all of the minorities of America.” 122 Pankey took a definitive stance about the plight of U.S. Blacks. This speech built upon his 1945 comments concerning a singer’s duty to society. In a 1945 newspaper article, Pankey had stated “[t]he time has gone by […] when a singer can just perform and feel that is enough; he must share the responsibility for alleviating the distress in the world and pointing the way to better social conditions.” 123 This 1945 interview and his 1948 speech seem to mark a turning point as Pankey stepped more into the role of performer activist. Because sources on Pankey are still quite limited, we cannot say for certain what factor(s) led to his decision to become so much more outspoken politically; what is clear is that with the emergence of U.S. Cold War culture and policies by 1945, Pankey began vocalizing his political beliefs and taking a clearly leftist stand. Aubrey’s Pankey’s chose to reside in East Berlin in part because the German Democratic Republic (GDR) was beyond both the direct and extended reach of U.S. governmental influence. Due to the fact that the GDR and the United States were not allies, he could ultimately settle down and establish a life and not fear that his stability was always in jeopardy. According to his obituary, “Pankey settled in Paris in 1948 but was expelled in 1953 after supporting Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, the atom spies who in England, were executed that year”. 124 Under the guise of Cold War intelligence, the livelihood of Robeson, Pankey, and other Black internationalists 122 Ibid. 123 Pearl Strachan, “Singer’s Duty to Society is Told by Pankey,” Christian Science Monitor, April 9, 1945. 124 “Expatriate Victim in Auto Crash,” New York Amsterdam News, May 15 1971. 61 that traveled in transnational circuits (musical or otherwise) was restricted. Like these other Black internationalists, Pankey took up residence in cities where there was a Black expat community. While living in France, he was part of the Black expat community there known as the “Race Colony of Paris”. 125 There was an expatriate community in East Berlin as well, but it was quite small. Most Blacks only briefly visited East Berlin, and, with the exception of Pankey and Oliver and Helma Harrington, had layovers in West Berlin and would get a day pass to enter East Berlin. 126 Some of those who visited included John Oliver Killens and Langston Hughes. 127 Pankey’s outward support of the Rosenberg’s, his status as an expatriate, as well as his choice to settle in East Berlin for the last seventeen years of his life (roughly 1954 to 1971) were all key markers of his Socialist sensibilities and affiliation. Transnational Music in the Cold War Context Takashi Fujitani has argued that in post-WW II America, the “fate of all U.S. minorities […] was tied to a larger propaganda campaign that tried to represent the United States as a nation that did not discriminate against any racial or ethnic minority.” 128 While it appeared that racism in America after the war was diminishing, Fujitani argues that it would be more accurate to say that what took place was a shift in racist practices, form exclusionary to inclusionary racism. Takashi Fujitani defines vulgar or exclusionary racism as “inhumane and […] relatively unconcerned about the health and well-being of marginalized peoples.” 129 Whereas inclusionary or polite racism, on the other hand, is concerned with the systematic subjectification of 125 Edgar Wiggins, “Foreign Stars Send Holiday Greetings to America, ” Chicago Defender, January 7 1939. 126 Stephanie Brown, “‘Bootsie’ in Harlem: An Interview with Helma Harrington on Oliver Harrington’s Life and Work in East Germany,” African American Review 44, no.3 (Fall 2011): 369. 127 Ibid.; Langston Hughes, “Berlin Today,” Chicago Defender , April 3, 1965. 128 Takashi Fujitani, Race for Empire: Koreans as Japanese and Japanese as Americans during World War II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 13. 129 Ibid., 25. 62 marginalized peoples, is “more culturalist in its understanding of difference and […] at least minimally concerned about fostering the health and well-being of marginalized peoples.” 130 According to Fujitani, the U.S. government’s shift to polite racism was in large part a diplomatic necessity of the WWII and Cold War eras, a means by which the U.S. government attempted to counteract critiques (emanating from many places, but most threateningly from the rival powers of Japan and later the USSR) that American democracy was a fallacy in light of the U.S. dehumanizing racist treatment of minorities. To counteract these critiques, the American government increasingly shifted from treating minorities as objects under vulgar racist practices to engaging with them as subjects with some form of agency within polite racist discourses and systems. I would argue that the U.S. government’s engaging Pankey as a goodwill envoy, and the later deployment of jazz ambassadors in the Cold War very much support the contention for this shift from vulgar exclusionary to polite inclusionary racism. Up until those 1950s tours, jazz, a musical form that has roots within the Black American musical canon, had been derided as “jungle music;” but on the government sponsored tours jazz was claimed to be a uniquely American art form representative of all of the positive and inclusive aspects of U.S. democracy, with Black and White American musicians being paraded and applauded overseas. In 1956, the U.S. State department began the jazz tours as part of Cold War cultural diplomacy. According to Penny von Eschen in Satchmo Blows Up the World, these tours sponsored by the State Department “illuminated connections and collisions between domestic and foreign policies, and between race, nation, and modernism.” 131 In addition to jazz as a means of cultural diplomacy highlighting the connective tissues between politics and culture, the 130 Ibid. 131 Penny von Eschen, Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), 27. 63 tours also gave the musicians chosen to represent the United States internationally a different platform to perform and interact with peoples around the globe. While the U.S. government had its own agenda, the performers on the tours, such as Louis Armstrong, were not purely pawns to be strategically used by the U.S. government: “[w]hether fostering informal musical connections after hours or backstage, pursuing romantic liaisons, or expressing political opinions in interviews and on stage, musicians slipped into the breaks and looked around, intervening in official narratives and playing their own changes on Cold War perspectives.” 132 The same could be said of Pankey and many Black arrangers and performers who traveled internationally independent of the U.S. State department prior to and during this era. Circulating within transnational music circuits allowed these performers and musicians to use the global as a theatrical space for cultural transmission and protest. During the Cold War, U.S. foreign policy shifted from its primary considerations about hemispheric protection to greater concern over the emerging third world nations of Africa and Asia. During WWII, the U.S. government was concerned with the spread of fascism taking root in Central and South America, hence the political propaganda concerning hemispheric security in the form of the Good Neighbor Policy. With the end of the war, the threat of fascism was replaced with the fear of the spread of Communism. Similar to the cultural diplomacy of the Good Neighbor Policy, soft diplomacy towards these nations during the Cold War was partly carried out through cultural tours, and the international popularity of jazz made it a highlighted genre for such tours. With its free flowing, improvisational style, jazz could become, it was hoped by many in the State Department, representative of America and of the ideals of freedom and equality inherent within democracy. Though the jazz tours were somewhat more successful 132 Ibid., 25. 64 in terms of cultural diplomacy, jazz had not been the top choice for some involved in planning the cultural diplomacy tours. The Musical Advisory Panel had been reluctant to acknowledge the importance of jazz and validate it as “real music” worthy of being promoted as American. 133 “It was only under great pressure from ANTA [American National Theater and Academy], the State Department, and Congress, where there were many who supported the idea of jazz tours in particular, that the panel agreed to consider any non-classical musicians for the program.” 134 From 1958 to 1963, when making decisions about the musical tours, panel members “agreed to promote jazz in a limited capacity, recognizing that their power might be reduced if they refused, but in return they had been permitted to institute a repertoire policy unpopular with many of their superiors.” 135 As a result, jazz was the second most funded category behind classical music, “but jazz ensembles never made up more than a third of the groups approved in any given year—and typically they constituted a much smaller proportion.” 136 As von Eschen argues, one of the contradictions of the tours as proof of the “universal, race-transcending quality of jazz” was that they “depend[ed] on the blackness of musicians to legitimize America’s global agendas.” 137 Yet von Eschen shows that the musicians also gained much by being involved in these tours. One such benefit was the ability to gain access to countries via the American government and foreign embassies that would have been otherwise inaccessible to these musicians. Some Black artists, especially the more internationally famous ones such as Louis Armstrong, might well have been invited to go to some of the nations that they toured (a list that prominently featured Eastern bloc countries and the Soviet Union) even 133 Emily Ansari, “Shaping the Policies of Cold War Musical Diplomacy: An Epistemic Community of American Composers,” Diplomatic History 36, no. 1 (Jan. 2012): 45. 134 Ibid. 135 Ibid., 52. 136 Ibid., 44. 137 von Eschen, Satchmo Blows Up the World, 4. 65 without the State Department’s active promotion, but, ironically, they would have probably had their passports revoked by the U.S. government had they privately arranged such tours. When not in control of setting the “agenda” of Blacks traveling within Cold War transnational and diasporic networks, the U.S. government severely restricted such movements (as with Du Bois, Robeson and others). What the musicians on these tours gained was the ability to travel internationally and promote their own musical and political agenda with the help of, and not the restrictions placed on them by the U.S. State department. Furthermore, it can be argued that these U.S. State department sponsored tours were a response to the cultural diplomacy practices engaged in by many nations within the Cold War international context. The tours of Pankey and other Black Americans who were gaining access to countries like East Germany and China indicate that the U.S was not unique in its cultural diplomacy practices. After leaving the U.S. in 1947, Pankey toured and performed in various socialist countries in Eastern Europe before his trip to China in 1955. These were places that the U.S. government wanted access to in order to promote democracy. As a result, the U.S. State Department capitalized of the popularity of jazz music and jazz radio broadcasts abroad in order to gain access to them in a form of soft diplomatic cultural exchanges. But the Chinese invitation to Pankey in 1955 is just one historical event indicating that this diplomacy by cultural exchange was by no means unique to U.S. policy—the U.S. was just one player in a larger global chess- game of cultural soft diplomacy. Pankey in China: Background and Context Chinese diplomacy in the Cold War context involved the CCP and Mao Zedong reaching out to other nations and peoples to establish and promote China’s policies and positions and cultural diplomacy had a crucial place in this process. To achieve its foreign relations objectives, the 66 CCP established numerous organizations, under the direction of the Foreign Ministry, such as the Chinese People’s Institute of Foreign Affairs or CPIFA (Zhongguo Renmin Waijiao Xuehui). 138 The largest of these organizations was the Chinese People’s Association for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries or CPACRFC. 139 Modeled after the VOKS (All-Union Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries) in the Soviet Union, the CPACRFC was one of the larger organizations integral in China’s international exchange. Established on May 3, 1954, the CPACRFC became the parent organization for the PRC’s friendship societies. 140 The overall goals of the CPACRFC were to facilitate nonofficial contact and foreign relations with other nations as well as help to improve the PRC’s global image. 141 Other important organizations include the “Chinese People’s Institute for Foreign Affairs, which specialize[d]in dealing with foreign political figures; and Intourist, which handle[d] the routine of foreign visits—hotel accommodations, travel, guide service, interpreter service, etc.” 142 For the CCP, the overall purpose of inviting foreign guests to the PRC was to promote China’s place in international relations and display the effectiveness of CCP polices. Foreign guests were given guided tours that showed the CCP’s successes in modernizing China. 143 These guided tours left little room for foreign guests to see and experience the country for themselves as the whole experience was primarily planned by organized political bodies such as the 138 A. Doak Barnett, The Making of Foreign Policy in China: Structure and Process (Boulder: Westview Press, 1985), 106. 139 The organization, since its inception, has changed its name twice. The CPACRFC was first renamed the Chinese People’s Association for Cultural Relations and Friendship with Foreign Countries or CPACRFFC ( 中国人民对外文化和友好学会 Zhongguo renmin duiwai wenhua he youhao xiehui) before being renamed the Chinese People’s Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries or CPAFFC ( 中国人民对外友好学会 Zhongguo renmin duiwai youhao xuehui). [Bruce Larkin, China and Africa, 1949-1970: The Foreign Policy of the People’s Republic of China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 221 n25.] 140 Ibid., 221. 141 Anne-Marie Brady, Making the Foreign Serve China: Managing Foreigners in the People’s Republic (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), 90. 142 Herbert Passin, China’s Cultural Diplomacy (New York: Frederick Praeger Inc., 1962), 132. 143 Ibid., 9. 67 CPACRFC. Treated as an honored guest during his/her stay in China, the foreign visitor was “shown every courtesy, surrounded by luxury, and given every attention. He attends receptions, meetings, important events, cultural activities, the theatre and other amusements, and excellent restaurants; he is shown the great sights of Peking and China’s other big cities.” 144 Guests saw examples of the New China in places “such as schools, social services, hospitals, voluntary study programmes, anti-illiteracy activities, parks of culture and rest, museums, dam-building and irrigation control, Chinese-manufactured trucks and automobiles. He will be able to talk with ‘representative’ people, even in their homes, through an interpreter (and in the presence of the interpreter).” 145 Nothing was left to chance as these tours were meant to showcase the best of the New China. These tours encouraged the formation of new alliances with other nation states and encouraged the composition of political literature by foreign guests as a means to combat the negative propaganda put forth by the United States. 146 When Pankey accepted the invitation to perform in China in 1955, he became the first American, Black or White, to perform in the young PRC. The timing of the visit and performance aligned with the emerging third world movements and shifts in China’s foreign affairs agenda. Aubrey Pankey arrived in China in December of 1955, just months after the Bandung conference held in April of the same year. Bandung was an important landmark event, being the first international conference convened by people of color in Asia and Africa to discuss their place in a post-colonial international world and to put forth ideas concerning international solidarity amongst people of color. At the time of the conference, the PRC was making changes 144 Ibid. 145 Ibid., 10. 146 In addition to tours, affiliated foreign cultural relations associations and organizations also established exchange programs. Beginning in the early 1950s, these exchange programs included “involving bilateral cooperation between Chinese friendship associations to deal with particular countries of areas and their established counterparts abroad.” (Barnett, The Making of Foreign Policy in China, 109.) 68 to its foreign relations policy, beginning to modify its lean to one (Soviet) side stance by establishing its own alliances within the emerging third world. At Bandung the CCP, in front of a larger audience of potential allies, put forth its Five Principles of Peaceful Co-existence, a foreign relations policy that greatly impacted PRC relations with peoples and nations of color. 147 It is this political context that framed the CCP’s invitation of a Black American, such as, Aubrey Pankey to China in the hopes of using his historic trip to connect with African Americans. At the same time, a cultural tour by an internationally-acclaimed African American performer also helped the CCP forge an image of its own cosmopolitanism and global relevance with the Chinese public. By the time of the concert in 1955, Pankey had been touring the world and performing for approximately twenty-five years and had made a name for himself; Pankey was lauded by the press as a musical great with the likes of Marian Anderson and Paul Robeson. Because of his long interest in and championing of China, Paul Robeson maintained a presence within China, so much so that within the Chinese travel documents brief biography of Aubrey Pankey, he is once referred to as “Robeson Number Two (Di Er Luoboxun). While it could be that Robeson might have been the CCP’s first choice, considering he was more publically vocal about his political beliefs and already a recognized name in China, Pankey was, becoming more of a performer- activist as well. The documents mention conferences Pankey attended, particularly his candid speech at the Polish conference in 1948. In light of this, Pankey is referred to as Robeson 147 The Five principles included “(1) mutual respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity, (2) non-aggression, (3) non-interference in other countries’ internal affairs, (4) equal and mutual benefit, and (5) peaceful coexistence.” [Chen Jian, “China and the Bandung Conference: Changing Perceptions and Representations,” in Bandung Revisited: A Conference’s Legacy and Relevance for International Order, ed. Amitav Acharya and See Seng Tan (Singapore: National University of Singapore Press, 2008), 154.] 69 Number Two (by the organizers of the Poland conference and in the Shanghai travel dossier documents) because, like his contemporary, he was taking on the identity of performer activist. In addition to the importance of Bandung in framing the diplomatic milieu of Pankey’s tour, the Geneva Summit of 1955 was of no small significance. Following escalating international tensions and looming fear of a nuclear war, the Geneva Summit was held in July of 1955 to reduce global tensions. The summit included delegates from the United States, Great Britain, France, and the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union’s cooperation in easing tensions and fears of war led to the phrase “the Spirit of Geneva” to signify and celebrate the Soviet Union’s desire for good relations with the other nations in attendance. The main Chinese newspaper, the People’s Daily, attempted to link Pankey’s visit to the Geneva Summit: “We hope that following Mr. Pankey, more musicians from the United States will come to perform in the new China. As the Four Nations Summit Conference [Geneva Summit of 1955] pointed out, [we] need to strengthen cultural exchanges between East and West and help develop friendship between all peoples, thereby strengthening the common interests of consolidating world peace.” 148 The Chinese state media framed Pankey’s tour as symbolic of the PRC’s commitment to the Bandung ideal of cooperation in building colored solidarity as well as the promotion of the Geneva Spirit of world peace and friendly relations between peoples of all nations. In terms of the PRC’s political intentions, Pankey’s visit was, to borrow Anne Brady’s phraseology, a means to make the foreign serve China. First, it aligned with China’s agenda of peace, anti-imperialism and solidarity with people of color prominently announced at Bandung. Second, it was assumed that the guided tours highlighting the achievements of “new China” to 148 Xiang Yue. “Kuayue Taipingyang de dongren de gesheng—ji heiren gechangjia Aubulei Panji de yinyuehui” [Moving songs reach across the Pacific—Remembering the Black singer Aubrey Pankey’s concert]. Renmin Ribao [People’s Daily], November 30, 1955. 70 which Pankey was privy would overwhelmingly demonstrate the rapid development successes of the young PRC, leading him to sing the praises of Mao Zedong and the PRC to the transnational networks within which he circulated. Such foreign testimony to China’s rapid development was a highly valuable and convincing form of propaganda that could serve as proof that the CCP’s political-economic program was an undeniable success. Chinese officials and organizations sought out Aubrey Pankey in the hopes that he would begin to build those bridges, a sentiment prominently featured in the People’s Daily coverage of his visit. The “people of new China desire to know how other similarly kind-hearted peoples use the democratic language of music to express peace and the yearning for a better life. Mr. Pankey’s strong voice from across the Pacific Ocean has more closely connected the hearts of people on both sides/coasts.” 149 But Pankey, it turned out, was not an ideal fit for this political purpose. Nevertheless, his tour and performances of Negro Spirituals helped shape representations of Blackness in public formats in China in revealing ways. Aubrey Pankey: On Stage The concert program from Aubrey Pankey’s performance in Shanghai sketched the basic outline for the format and content of the concerts. The program had three parts, presumably one for each night that he performed. Each consisted of Pankey and Czech pianist Maria Knotkova performing a selection of Western classical songs together. Following a brief intermission, Knotkova gave a solo performance of some piano selections followed by Pankey’s performance of six heiren minge, literally Black folk songs or Spirituals. Out of the eighteen Negro folk songs sung over the course of the three performances, only about three or four were repeated, demonstrating the breadth of Pankey’s repertoire. Moreover, the lyrics to the Spirituals were 149 Ibid. 71 translated and printed in the program while those of the Western classical songs are not. Although the name of the translator is not listed, the name of the American arrangers and composers are listed. In terms of the audiences at Pankey’s concerts, Richard Kraus’ work on musical culture in this time period is useful, particularly his characterization of the Chinese urban middle class. According to Kraus, the “urban middle class” was less of a class label than a status label. This urban middle class was comprised of three different groups: intellectuals, the old bourgeoisie, and the Communist officialdom. 150 Pankey’s audience was probably mainly comprised of these groups and likely some foreigners living in China. Although Pankey’s musical selections in the first half of the concert were from a musical genre that the audience was familiar with, it seems that Spirituals were a genre with which the audience was assumed to have had little familiarity, thus the need for the half-page “Explanation of Negro Folk music” excerpt in the program. 151 The larger of the two paragraphs is devoted to Negro Spirituals as it discusses the history, content, and significance of the music. 152 In terms of the history of Negro Spirituals, the connection to its African musical roots as well as Christianity was summarized: “Black American folk music was originally called Spirituals, and was music that cleverly fused African melodies, Biblical stories, and American Christian musical harmonies into one. The stories of the Bible both appealed to the suffering and tragedy of slavery and could also expressed the slaves’ desires and hopes for freedom that they [slaves] could not openly express.” 153 While this explanation mentions African melodies, Christian content, and the 150 Richard Curt Kraus, Pianos and Politics in China: Middle-class Ambitions and the Struggle over Western Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 24-25. 151 Concert Program , 14. 152 The explanation that is within the music program included within the November 30, 1955 People’s Daily article “Moving sings from across the Pacific—remembering Black singer Aubrey Pankey’s concert.” 153 Ibid. 72 purposes of Negro Spirituals, it is obviously extremely cursory –there is little here elaborating in the experiences and suffering of Black slaves. Pankey’s choice to highlight the performance of Negro Spirituals in his repertoire is of great importance to understanding the political and cultural significance to his China tour. While jazz was the music of the time, there were still performers such as Aubrey Pankey performing Negro Spirituals within their concert repertoire. However, though, the State Department promoted jazz diplomacy tours (and later gospel). Negro spirituals were not prominently featured, perhaps because they were so markedly a musical repository of Black pain and so redolent with the experience of slavery, while jazz by contrast was associated with modernity, democracy, and freedom. Moreover, in the Civil Rights movement, Negro Spirituals were being sung at protests by those involved in struggles for economic, social, and racial equality. So not only was this musical genre associated with America’s chattel slavery ghosts, but also with the Jim Crow South, and the brutal assaults on non-violent protests. Therefore, I contend that to promote Negro Spirituals in lieu of jazz might well have undermined the U.S. government’s foreign relations agenda in these years, as the Negro Spirituals would likely remind international audiences of the current and persistent fallacies of American democracy to allow its minorities, particularly African Americans, to exercise their full citizenship rights. The deliberate and conscious choice of musicians such as Pankey within transnational music circuits to include Negro Spirituals in their performances is an example of African American musicians using the international stage as a space of protest as well as cultural transmission. Negro Spirituals reflect Black culture as these songs were birthed out of the tradition and brutality of slavery. “Slave owners in the United States sought to completely subjugate their slaves physically, mentally, and spiritually though brutality and demeaning acts. 73 African-American frequently used music to counter this dehumanization.” 154 Negro Spirituals were used as a means of personal sovereignty and escapism; the main themes of these songs were of freedom, whether it was in the form of mental and emotional reprieve or physical freedom (escaping slave plantations) using coded language and double-entendre. 155 Post- emancipation, these songs continued to be sung within in the Black community, especially in churches. But it was through the Fisk Jubilee Singers that Negro Spirituals were performed for more diverse audiences both nationally and internationally. 156 The Fisk Jubilee Singers introduction of Negro Spirituals to a larger audience was a spot of contention within the Black community. One critique was that the versions of Spirituals that the Fisk Jubilee singers performed were tailored to fit the taste of White audiences. “The Fisk Jubilee Singers simplified slave songs. They also arranged them in multipart harmony that conformed to European classical music. Most of the spirituals’ Afro-Caribbean characteristics, such as call and response, heterophony, and pentatonic scales, were eliminated, and the song texts steered clear of any hint of despair or protest.” 157 In addition to simplifying the music, the singing of these songs the world over made aspects of Black religion public. Up to this time. Spirituals had been part of a hidden or private culture in three main ways. First, the music was part of a sacred and cultural space that enslaved Blacks had created for themselves as a means of self-expression and escapism. Second, this was a private cultural space to be shared amongst 154 Megan Sullivan, “African-American Music as Rebellion: From Slavesong to Hip-Hop,” Discoveries 3 (2001): 22. 155 Ibid., 33. 156 The Jubilee singers were the school choir at Fisk University. The school, originally named Fisk Free Colored School, was established to educate newly emancipated Blacks. In 1871, five years after its founding, the school was facing financial difficulties and it was decided that the choir could help the young school by touring and use the money raised at the concerts to help the school. The repertoire of the Fisk Jubilee singers was mainly Negro spirituals. [Andrew Ward, Dark Midnight When I Rise: The Story of the Jubilee Singers Who Introduced the World to the Music of Black America (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000), 118-126.) 157 Burton William Peretti, Lift Every Voice: The History of African American Music (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009), 39. 74 each other. And third, the Spirituals themselves sometimes contained coded language that relayed information to other Blacks without the knowledge of Whites. 158 As a result, some Blacks, objected to the public exposure of “the religious and emotional side of our people to white folks; for I supposed the latter listened to these songs simply for entertainment and perhaps amusement.” 159 Lastly, some within the early generations of freed Blacks “were determined to divest themselves of the behavioral patterns of a slave past” including the singing of Spirituals. 160 In spite of some of the criticisms surrounding the performance of Negro Spirituals, the singing of Spirituals allowed Black performers in the twentieth century to earn a living outside of minstrelsy. In the nineteenth century, after the Civil War, “black male performers who began to access the entertainment industry in minstrel troupes, and they did so in large numbers, were required to do so in blackface since the black mask conformed to by now the deeply embedded social stereotypes of black masculine subjectivity.” 161 Moreover, composers such as Nathaniel Dett and Roland Hayes put the Negro Spirituals, a musical form orally transmitted from one generation to the next, to paper as musical arrangements resulting in sheet music and musical recordings of soloists singing Negro Spirituals that were distributed and sold in many markets. The marketing of Negro Spiritual records kept the music in people’s consciousness and its most notable performers in high demand. However, for all it economic advantages, the marketing of 158 Lawrence Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom (New York: Oxford Press, 1977), 80. 159 Ibid., 162. 160 Ibid. 161 Miles White, From Jim Crow to Jay-Z: Race, Rap, and the Performance of Masculinity (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2011), 10. 75 records of Negro Spirituals can also be critiqued as a new means for commodifying the Black body and Black culture. 162 With the creation of a market for Negro Spirituals, the popularity and commercialization of this music within the African American tradition was felt to be restrictive by some Black performers and composers. Ulysses Kay and some of his fellow Black composers (such as Hale Smith and Howard Swanson) felt that it was no longer their talent or training that determined the music they were expected to produce, but their race. 163 Kay’s composition style was characterized as Neo-classical, but he became increasingly aware of and frustrated with the fact that concert-goers expected that his music must, in some way, touch upon the Black American experience. Ulysses Kay did not want to be confined to the limited categorization of a Negro composer, a label which would limit the music he felt he could compose as expressed in the statement: Aren’t you a Negro composer? I’ll answer that. Yes, I am a Negro, but I am not a “Negro composer” in quotes. Why should I limit myself with this tag or label? A tag or label is typical methods and thinking in this time, and they are wrong. So I am a Negro who composes, and my ambition is to be a good composer and in that way to make my contribution. 164 162 Ibid., 19. 163 Ulysses Kay was born in Tucson, Arizona in 1917. To cultivate and complete his training as a composer Kay attended, in order of attendance, the University of Arizona, Eastman School of Music, Yale University on a scholarship and, after being discharged from the Naval band in 1946, Columbia University. Ulysses Kay was known as a neoclassical composer. Although he constantly rallied against being known as a “Negro composer”, the fact that he was Black and a successful composer were some of the motivating factors for him being invited to be part of the first composers exchange between the United States and the USSR. The one month tour in 1958 not only demonstrates the impact of the government in the lives of musicians and composers but also another instance (via Ulysses Kay) where the United States attempts to thwart claims of racism through a “promotion” of successful Black Americans. [Emily Ansari, “Masters of the President’s Music”: Cold War Composers and the United States Government” (PhD dissertation, Harvard University, 2009), 287-289; 294.] 164 Ibid., 286;292 76 Still Ulysses Kay was not dismissive of or condescending towards musicians and performers who choose to perform Spirituals. In his early development, he reached out to Black performers and composers who were known for their compositions of Negro Spirituals, such as Nathaniel Dett, and singers such as Marian Anderson who performed both classical and Negro music. But what Kay was dismissive of was that, unlike his White counterparts, what he was “supposed” or “expected” to compose was being tied to his race. Kay wanted the freedom to choose whether or not to reference African American music traditions in his compositions without either being criticized for not doing so or being restricted in the music he could produce because of his race. Yet there was also a liberating aspect for performers, such as Robeson and Pankey, who chose to include Spirituals within their repertoire. Pankey used Negro Spirituals, particularly after 1945, to educate international audiences on the historical persecution of American Blacks and as a gateway to discuss the continuing inequalities they faced. Moreover, Pankey found that many audiences worldwide could relate to the suffering expressed in Spirituals allowing people from a variety of backgrounds to connect. During a European tour in 1947, Pankey found great enthusiasm for Spirituals among his audiences noting that “Europeans identify the sufferings expressed in the [S]pirituals with their suffering during the war.” 165 The ability to use Negro Spirituals as a means of educating and connecting with peoples worldwide made this musical genre attractive and important to Pankey’s repertoire. As many Black internationalists looked outside of the U.S. for alternative models to what they saw as the failed promises of American democracy, many Black performers on the global stage used the transnational space to shape representations of Blackness. For many of these Black performers during the Cold War era, national or transnational identities had the ability to 165 “Pankey Reports Enthusiasm for Spirituals High,” Philadelphia Tribune, December 13, 1947. 77 shape and/ or eclipse the individual’s singular identity. While there was a battle between agency, performativity, and control over representations, men such as Pankey could utilize the space of musical performance to interrogate the notions of race and gender through their individual performance of Black masculinity. Charles Gentry calls this intersectionality of race, gender, and performance as it pertains to Black male performers the Othello Effect. The Othello Effect “describes the signifying power of black masculinity to achieve social change through performance practices and the reactionary tendency of normative structures to contain or control these practices.” 166 In Pankey’s case, his decision to perform Negro Spirituals as part of his repertoire and to inform his audiences on the history and significance of this musical genre was an instance where he combined activism, performance, and agency to shape and interrogate representations of Blackness and Black masculinity in international contexts. In a letter Pankey wrote in 1961 while living in the GDR, he explained that he had “a deep love for this music, I know their meaning and value. I have promoted Negro music throughout the world, I have lectured about it. I explained the deep meaning of spirituals and told my audience, they were a weapon of resistance in the dark days of slavery. I have never given a concert without Negro Spirituals and folk songs.” 167 Pankey’s efforts to educate his audience regarding Spirituals, the history that produced them, and how they were a form of agency and resistance is important for understanding his Chinese performances. Pankey’s performance reclaimed the Black body and placed Blacks back 166 Charles Eugene Gentry, “The Othello Effect: The Performance of Black Masculinity in Mid-Century Cinema” (PhD dissertation, University of Michigan Ann Arbor, 2011), 7. 167 German documents from German archives provided by Dr. Kira Thurman. Original German: Ich habe eine tiefe Liebe zu dieser Musik, ich kenne ihre Bedeutung und ihren Wert. Ich habe überall in der Welt Neger-Musik gefördert, ich habe Vorträge darüber gehalten, ich erklärte die tiefe Bedeutung der Spirituals und berichtete meinem Publikum, daβ sie eine Waffe des Widerstandes in den dunkeln Tagen der Sklaverei waren. Ich habe niemals ein Konzert gegeben ohne Neger-Spiritials und Volkslieder Translation aid from Dr. Paul Lerner. 78 into narratives about their struggle. As discussed in Chapter One, in slave narratives and other pre-1949 Chinese translations and representations of African Americans, the plight of the enslaved Black was primarily used as a metaphor for Chinese sufferings. But Pankey reinserted Black Americans into these narratives through explaining the context that birthed this musical tradition. His discussion of how Negro Spirituals were a weapon demonstrated the subjectivity, albeit limited, of enslaved Blacks and their agency through song. In many pre-1949 representations of Blackness, American Blacks were not discussed in terms of agency and subjectivity, but were re-objectified by Chinese audiences: enslaved Blacks were objects of sympathy, not agents of culture and resistance. Moreover, as Gentry argues international travel and transnational work were not only significant in the development of a certain sense of cultural identity for performers like Pankey; these activities were essential in transforming the image of African Americans in popular culture.” 168 Performers like Aubrey Pankey, through their tours in places like Latin America and China, helped shape representations of Blackness as it pertains to African Americans in spaces and places where there had been little interaction with Black Americans. In the 1956 People’s China article “American Negro in China,” Pankey discussed his experience in China in his own words. In the short piece, Pankey primarily described his trip in terms of his musical experiences and encounters: “This is the first time that I have heard Chinese music, and I understand from my Chinese friends that few people here have ever heard Negro spirituals before. So we both start out with something in common—we can learn from each other.” 169 Pankey drew parallels between Spirituals and Chinese folk music 168 Charles Eugene Gentry, “The Othello Effect,” 7. 169 Aubrey Pankey, “American Negro in China,” People’s China, January 1956, 18. 79 “I was not surprised that my audiences appreciated and understood the Negro spirituals,…Firstly […] the Negro spiritual is built on the same musical scale (pentatonic) as a considerable part of the Chinese folk music; secondly, the Chinese people can easily identify their own past sorrows and struggles for freedom with that expressed in the Negro spirituals, that is, the Negro people’s struggle against slavery; and thirdly, the Negro spirituals have a universal appeal.” 170 Pankey drew parallels between the two distinct musical styles through a brief explanation of Chinese folk music. Chinese music, according to Pankey, “contains a melodic strain that one can easily follow. […], …to my great surprise there was a melody which almost note for note was the same as in a Negro folk song called Oh Freedom.” 171 Both Pankey and the CCP articulate how the folk cultures resonate with one another, expressing and building solidarity in spite of language barriers. While Aubrey Pankey sang classical selections from various composers as well as incorporated a few Chinese folk songs in his concert repertoire, it was the Negro Spirituals that seemed to captivate audiences and the attention of the press. Chinese commentators drew connections between Chinese folk music and Negro Spirituals and highlighted parallels between Chinese peasants and African Americans. As powerful as that experience of musical solidarity may have been, one might also find some uncomfortable continuity here with pre-1949 tropes about Blacks and Blackness. Representations of Blacks as enslaved peoples economically and physically exploited by slave owners resonated with CCP narratives of Chinese peasants suffering under despotic landlords; by sharing one another’s folk culture these two disparate 170 Ibid., 19. 171 Ibid. 80 peoples apparently discovered that they also shared a common experience, in terms of class and economic strife and oppression, and through this formed a link of solidarity. The problem was that in reality they were not of the same economic class; African Americans in the 1950s were no longer a predominately rural population; they were not peasants. Prior to the CCP establishing the PRC in 1949, seven years earlier in 1942, Mao capitalized on Chinese intellectual’s turn to rural folk culture as a means of popular mobilization during the anti-Japanese war. But even after the war, the CCP promotion of rural “folk” culture continued and “caused the rapid fading of the urban, elitist character of Chinese culture and shifted the nation’s attention to the countryside. This ‘ruralization’ of Chinese culture was crucial to the success of the Communists following the war, for it helped to make their call for a rural revolution appealing and convincing.” 172 As Mao spelled out in his talks on art and culture given at the Ya-n’an Forum on Literature and Art in May 1942, art and cultural traditions were to be used almost exclusively to educate and express the outlook of the masses: Indeed literature and art exist which are for the exploiters and oppressors. Literature and art for the landlord class are feudal literature and art. Such were the literature and art of the ruling class in China's feudal era. To this day such literature and art still have considerable influence in China. Literature and art for the bourgeoisie are bourgeois literature and art. […] With us, literature and art are for the people, not for any of the above groups. We have said that China's new culture at the present stage is an anti- imperialist, anti-feudal culture of the masses of the people under the leadership of the proletariat. Today, anything that is truly of the masses must necessarily be led by the proletariat. Whatever is under the leadership of the bourgeoisie cannot possibly be of the 172 Chang-tai Hung, War and Popular Culture: Resistance in Modern China, 1937-1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 14. 81 masses. Naturally, the same applies to the new literature and art which are part of the new culture. 173 Art was not simply for art’s sake. One of the CCP’s most effective cultural programs during the war involved using Chinese folk songs as rallying cries, borrowing melodies but changing their lyrics to infuse them with political meanings. In addition to Chinese folk songs becoming a propaganda tool, the CCP also gave value to them as cultural traditions. Particularly valued was the notion of authenticity found within rural folk culture. “In social and political terms, the folk-literature movement gradually shifted Chinese intellectuals’ concern to the countryside where they believed folk culture originated, thus focusing their attention on rural problems. Rural-urban differences were frequently emphasized. This was a pattern soon to be expanded upon by Chinese Communist revolutionaries. The movement also made the intellectuals realize the value and charm of China’s rich variety of local culture.” 174 Pankey’s signing of Negro spirituals were emphasized and their lyrics are translated and discussed, to underscore the how Chinese peasant folk songs and Negro Spirituals were connected in terms of their aesthetics and cultural and political production. The emotions within the songs, the sentiments they evoked, and the conviction that these styles of folk music were sites of authenticity connected the Negro Spirituals with Chinese folk music. While Pankey’s presence in China certainly shaped new, modern, and political representations of Blackness, there were also ways in which his performance resonated with 173 Mao Zedong, Talks at the Yenan Forum on Literature and Art, May 1942 < https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-3/mswv3_08.htm> 174 Chang-tai Hung, Going to the People: Chinese Intellectuals and Folk Literature, 1918-1937 (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1985), xii. 82 remnants of pre-1949 tropes still framing representations of Blackness that he and other African American visitors would have to navigate and counter. Pankey’s performance of Spirituals in the PRC, a form of one-to-one interaction between the two cultures, led to a greater interest in Black American culture and a dissemination of information about the plight of Black Americans in China. Unlike earlier discourses related to Black Americans, such as those surrounding Uncle Tom’s Cabin, where other struggles are read onto the Black body, the Black American sounds of struggle and freedom found within Negro Spirituals did not become a transparent metaphor for Chinese projections of their own oppression, but were presented as a discrete musical genre born out struggle that was relatable to other oppressed peoples but irreducible. That is to say, the oppression unique to Black Americans that birthed Spirituals was not removed or replaced by the struggles of the Chinese people or other people of color, but was used as a means to connect Black Americans into the CCP’s foreign relations narrative of a colored solidarity. The lyrics and their meaning were not detached from the context and experiences of the people who created the music; rather the experiences of African-Americans were a means to place American Blacks within the anti U.S. imperialism colored solidarity narrative. As such, the social and political expediency of “calling on the abstract meaning potential of black bodies” was replaced with sounds of the Black American experience. 175 In addition to discussions of Negro Spirituals, one finds descriptions in the Chinese media recounting the heartfelt reception of Pankey’s concerts in Beijing and Shanghai. The 175 Debra Walker King, African Americans and the Culture of Pain (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008), 17. In discussing the culture of pain as it relates to African-Americans, King coins the term phrase blackpain. “Blackpain denotes the visual and verbal representation of pained black bodies that function as rhetorical devices, as instruments of socialization, and as sociopolitical strategy.” (Ibid., 16). While King primarily focuses on the co- opting of Blackpain in the American context, this term is applicable for some of the ways that the experience of Black Americans in relation to pain and suffering is used in the pre-1949 Chinese context (see chapter 1). 83 PRC’s most circulated national newspaper, the Peoples Daily, covered his Beijing visit in some detail, beginning with his opening night performance: At this evening’s concert, Pankey performed in his three part program a total of 23 songs. The first part included Black folk songs/spirituals and Italian, German, Soviet Union and other countries’ music. When the Black American singer and the Republic of Czechoslovokia female pianist Knotkova appeared on stage, the audience enthusiastically applauded to give them best wishes. Pankey’s singing of Spirituals and his own compositions of songs ‘retold in the oral tradition’ received the audiences’ warm welcome. After repeated requests from the audiences, he sang five songs [as an encore], which included two Chinese folk songs and two Negro Spirituals. 176 A November 27 article, “Black American singer Pankey held a musical gathering with Beijing University students” sketched a different type of performance by Pankey and Maria in Beijing. According to the article, “Pankey and Maria on November 26 th held a yinyue lianhehui (joint concert/get-together) at Qinghua University that also included students from other colleges in Beijing.” 177 During the performance, Pankey and Maria were able to be part of the audience as “during the concert, students performed piano solos, male and female singing solos three times in the program.” 178 [Pankey then] “sang 17 songs, including songs ‘passed down in the oral tradition’ that he arranged, five Negro Spirituals, […] and two Chinese folk songs.” 179 The article concludes by briefly summarizing their stay in Beijing and mentioning that the musical 176 Renmin Ribao. “Mei heiren gechangjia he Jian ganqinjia juzing shouci yinyuehui” [Black American singer and Czech pianist hold first concert], November 20, 1955. 177 Renmin Ribao.. “Meiguo heire gechangjia Panji tong Beijing Daxue xuesheng juxing lianhuahu [Black American singer Pankey held joint concert with Beijing University students], November 27, 1955. 178 Ibid. 179 Ibid. 84 duo will be leaving Beijing to go perform in other cities. As these articles demonstrate Pankey’s concerts and musical performances were well received. But, more importantly, these pieces display the variety of audiences that Pankey performed for while in China. The differences in audience composition depicted provides insight into who was exposed to Pankey’s singing and Negro Spirituals as well as the segments of the Chinese population that Pankey was able to interact and engage with. Aubrey Pankey: Off Stage After departing from Beijing, Pankey and his companions traveled south to perform and travel in Shanghai and a few of the surrounding cities. As outlined above, the various foreign relations peoples associations took their invited foreign guests on guided tours to showcase the successes of the “New China”. Though Pankey’s dossier while in Beijing appears to be missing, his Shanghai dossier provides detailed schedule information, including the sights of Shanghai and surrounding cities that Pankey was shown. While Pankey only performed for three nights, he stayed in Shanghai for over a week. Each afternoon, he was taken to see sights of the city that best epitomize the economic, educational, and industrial changes rapidly progressing in the PRC under the CCP and Mao’s leadership. These included a nursery school, the Shanghai Conservatory of Music (where he and the students exchanged musical performances), the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Cultures Conference, and the Anda Cotton Mill where Pankey gave an impromptu concert. Pankey also visited Shanghai’s Children Palace where he performed a few songs for children in addition to touring the facility and observing the students in class. While the responses and reactions from those Pankey has the chance to interact with are not recorded in the travel dossier, notes on the detailed preparations are included as well as some 85 of Pankey’s comments. 180 The travel logs and daily itineraries of Pankey’s excursions include notes from conversations that occur while sightseeing and traveling to various attractions and events. For example, when he went to the Shanghai’s Children’s Palace, the organizers made sure to tell the teachers at the institution that the children should not wear their red scarves (signifying involvement in the Young Pioneers). 181 There is no explanation given for this in the documents, but it seems to point to a sensitivity that such a clear display of political indoctrination among children enjoying one of the most materially privileged institutions of youth cultural education in China might weaken the CCP’s claims regarding the openness and equal distribution of benefits in the New China. One of the more telling conversations about Pankey’s feelings towards the American government occurs on the 12th between him and his Chinese handlers. Asked about his time in France and the resulting situation there and how he got to China, Pankey answers that a lot of Americans want to visit China, but the American government makes travelling abroad difficult and he states that after his time in China, he dare not return to France. 182 The notes go on to state “Pankey seems to have no barrier or issue with introducing to us the oppressive conditions facing progressive American musicians.” 183 These frank conversations and candid moments are 180 What is interesting is that while Pankey is part of a traveling trio, he is the only one of the group who appears at each and every scheduled appearance. Within the travel dossier, it is recorded that on many of these trips to schools and other institutions around Shanghai, his wife Kay and the pianist Maria are usually off shopping or engaged in some more leisurely activity. Considering Kay’s political consciousness, it is interesting and almost hard to believe that she is off shopping instead of being out on these tours with her husband. It begs the question, did the CCP not know how to address their interracial marriage so they only wanted Pankey for these city tours and visits? Or was the CCP solely focused cultivating a political relationship with Pankey to the exclusion of Kay? Did the missteps of not engaging more with Kay—a politically conscious woman and arguably more radical half of the couple—lead to the CCP’s more active engagement with wives of later Black visitors such as Shirley Graham Du Bois and Mabel Williams? (CPACRFC) 181 CPACRFC, 81. 182 CPACRFC 183 CPACRFC, 3 (5 page summary). As candid as Pankey is depicted within the Chinese sources, his wife is recorded to be more forthcoming in the statement that when it comes to politics/on the topic of politics, Mrs. Pankey is more open and keen than Pankey). 183 Examples of this occurs on December 13, 1955, when she is asked about the 86 examples of Pankey’s performativity of Blackness, in terms of racism he has experienced, as well as linking his personal narrative to the official foreign relations propaganda of the PRC. One possible reason that a cultural and political relationship between Pankey and the CCP never materialized beyond his 1955 trip in China might be due to his and his wife’s reactions and interactions in China. While Pankey does, on occasion, praise the PRC’s rapid developmental achievements, he and Kay do not seem overly enthusiastic in their praises. Compared to earlier visitors, such as Eslanda Robeson in 1949, and later guests including Victoria Garvin and the Du Boises’, the Pankey’s do not uncritically praise Mao and the CCP. Moreover, Pankey could even appear somewhat critical of the “New China.” For example, at one point when passing for the second time through the city of Shenyang and being escorted on a visit to the same “modern” hospital, Pankey commented that he had seen many locations more than once. Pankey was clearly aware that his Chinese handlers were limiting what he was seeing of China and in making his awareness known he was at the very least being less fulsome in his accolades than his handlers may have hoped. This is not to suggest that Pankey was adversarial to the CCP and Mao, but he reserved his praises and encouragement for the people and not the government. For the CCP, interested in establishing and maintaining a political relationship with someone who would propagate their version of the New China, Pankey seemed to lack enthusiasm. If he was not overly forthcoming with his praises about the CCP and Mao Zedong deportation of (Claudia) Jones, Kay discusses the issue in terms of the differences between progressive in the U.S. and French Communist parties,Translation: Discussing the problem of one of the U.S. Communist Party leaders (Claudia) Jones’ deportation, Pankey’s wife discusses how the American government persecutes progressive persons/public figures, saying “U.S. Communist Party within many (U.S.) states is part of illegal organizations.” And when discussing France’s Communist Party persecution situation, (Kay) says “France’s Communist Party is strong. For example, if a progressive newspaper is closed, after France’s Communist Party’s engages in (class) struggle, the newspaper will immediately work as usual (return to normal), but the American people’s class feeling is not ample/not enough, are unknowingly oppressed.” These words chiefly spoken by Pankey’s wife.) (CPACRFC) 87 while in China, what guarantee did the CCP have that he would praise China to the outside world? Moreover, Pankey, in the eyes of the CCP delegates and translators, did not appear to have the proper ideological focus in his approach to what he saw in China. The author of the dossier seemed frustrated that while touring Pankey asked more questions about Shanghai’s past than about the rapid development of New China in the present: “During the visit, he [Pankey] did not ask many questions, but the questions he did raise were to understand Shanghai’s past situation.” 184 Nor was Pankey consistently forthright on pressing diplomatic issues. At the time of his visit, Claudia Jones had recently been deported from the U.S. Her situation was mentioned to Pankey on multiple occasions, but he never openly addressed the issue in a manner that the CPP delegates desire: “Within ordinary conversation there is little related to politics and cannot see Communist party members’ disposition, for instance while chatting about U.S. Communist people responsible for the deportation of Claudia Jones.” 185 Though the CCP wanted to capitalize on the Bandung spirit by reaching out to African Americans, Pankey was perhaps not the right fit, for he did not seem to have the same social and political capital amongst African Americans as his contemporary Paul Robeson or later guests to China such as Robert Williams or W.E.B. Du Bois. In the spring of 1955, months before his trip to China, Pankey began seeking political asylum in the GDR. Pankey knew that, if granted, he would not return to the U.S. in his self-imposed exile. While he was connected to the small Black expat community in the GDR, Pankey was not connected to African Americans in the U.S. McCarthyism was a large factor in dismantling connections between various political factions amongst Blacks as well as between Black individuals, communities and organizations in the U.S. 184 CPACRFC 185 Ibid. 88 and those overseas. In an era when Blacks were fighting for basic rights and were facing racism and persecution on many other fronts, adding the additional burden of being singled out or targeted further for one’s political beliefs or simply being accused of being affiliated with someone labeled as “red” led to many distancing themselves from the more radical elements within Black organizations. This political culture within the U.S. combined with Pankey performing in China immediately before his permanent move to the GDR led to Pankey’s disconnect from Blacks in the U.S. To underscore the gravity of this disconnect, while more information about Pankey is coming to light through in-depth archival research, much of it in archives outside of the United States, Aubrey Pankey’s contribution to Black music, as both a performer, composer, and arranger of music, is still largely overlooked. For a man of so many significant firsts, both in the U.S. and internationally, his narrative has been almost completely written out of various Black histories; residual from a moment in American history that almost severed Blacks in America from international movements and global support for their struggles. 89 Chapter Three: From Souls to Guns: W.E.B. Du Bois, Robert Williams, and Representations of Blackness Between the years of 1959 to 1968, W.E.B. Du Bois and Robert Williams, two Black political advocates living in exile, had significant ties to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and Mao Zedong. While both Du Bois and Williams had traveled extensively, their visits and, in the case of Williams, years living in the Peoples Republic of China (PRC) are the primary focus within this chapter to further discussions of their influence within Sino-African American relations. This chapter will assess the role of the Black radical in CCP foreign relations, including the functions of representations of Blackness within these evolving political and cultural relations. The Cold War era context of U.S. competition against the Socialist bloc for allies of color in the emerging Third World, forced the American government to look into the mirror and address the domestic terrorism of groups such as the Ku Klux Klan as well as the continual systematic oppression, economic exploitation, and denial of political rights of Black Americans perpetuated by White supremacy. Du Bois and Williams, among others, used international diplomacy and media as a platform to spotlight the contradictions between the rhetoric of American democracy and the violent racism of U.S. imperialism in order to advance the quest for racial and economic equality. At the same time, the CCP used its interactions with Black radicals to shape global narratives, create new alliances, and increase its participation in multiple movements through existing networks and transnational relations. The scholarship and ideologies of both W.E.B. Du Bois and Robert Williams fall within the field of radical revolutionary politics. Yet, while there is some overlap in their ideologies, there are differences within their political thought and approaches that are important to distinguish here. In doing so, I am not trying to establish a Du Bois-Williams binary. Rather, in 90 underscoring the breadth of Black radical thought, this chapter will examine how the CCP grafted aspects of both Du Bois and Williams’ political ideas onto foreign relations rhetoric that aligned with the CCP’s agenda at the time. In the vein of Manning Marable, I characterize Du Bois as a Black radical democrat whose works reflected how he crafted “a black Marxism that resonated within the unique historical experiences and material interests of both blacks and the American people in general.” 186 Du Boisian thought, while addressing race, repeatedly articulated the interconnectedness between race and capitalism or, to put it another way, how the political economy is integral in the continual pervasiveness of racism. 187 Moreover, Du Bois addressed racism and capitalistic exploitation within a global perspective in order to advocate for racial, social, and economic equality worldwide. I chose to characterize Robert Williams’ political ideas as more in line with Black Nationalism. 188 For Williams, the plight of African Americans in the U.S., was at the forefront of his political agenda. While Williams’ is an international traveler abreast of current global affairs, his political ideals were primarily concerned with issues of race in the U.S.; Williams did not aggressively try to assert the Black 186 Manning Marable, W.E.B. Du Bois: Black Radical Democrat (Boulder: Paradigm Publishers, 2005), xxxiii. 187 Ibid. For example, Marable describes a speech that W.E.B. Du Bois delivered on April 2, 1960 at Johnson C. Smith College in Charlotte, North Carolina: “Long before his critics, DuBois recognized that the struggle for desegregation would be victorious in the end, but that this effort to abolish Jim Crow would not destroy the economic prerogatives of private capital over black lives, which was the basis for all the exploitation and racism which existed in the nation. Further, he warned the sit-in demonstrators not to confuse desegregation as a political goal with cultural assimilation into the white majority. The desegregation struggle in American should not force Negroes ever to forget slavery and ‘the whole cultural history of Africans in the world. No! What I have been fighting for…is the possibility of black folk and their cultural patterns existing in American without discrimination, and on terms of equality.’” [Manning Marable, Race, Reform, and Rebellion: The Second Reconstruction in Black America, 1945-1990 (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1991), 76-77.] 188 On Black Nationalism, Marable writes: “Since the 1850s, a significant portion of the African-American people have tended to support the ideals of black nationalism, defined here, in part, as a rejection of racial integration; a desire to develop all-black socio-economic institutions; an affinity for the cultural and political heritage of black Africa; a commitment to create all-black political structures to fight against white racism; a deep reluctance to participate in coalitions which involved a white majority; the advocacy of armed self-defense of the black community; and in religion and culture, an ethos and spirituality which consciously rejected the imposition of white western dogmas. […] Black nationalists of the post-war era were both anti-racist and anti-integrationist, in the sense that they opposed Jim Crow laws and simultaneously advocated all-black economic, political and social institutions.” (Marable, Race, Reform, and Rebellion, 55.) 91 American struggle into the larger colored solidarity movements. Rather, he acted as an advocate to reveal the ugly truths of American racism towards African Americans. 189 I discuss the agency of Du Bois and Williams within the transnational network of Sino- African American relations in terms of performance of race and treat their political writings and statements while connected to Mao and the CCP as extensions of their performativity of race. The exile status of Williams and Du Bois, in the Chinese context, functioned as physical representations of the plight of Black Americans in the struggle for civil rights. During the Cold war era, Black subjectivity was usually framed within nationalist and/or diasporic terms/contexts. Du Bois and Williams contested and revised the historical and political frames that facilitated diasporic or nation-based subjectivities through their physical presence in China, political connections with Mao and the CCP, and their savvy assertions of racial identity within a context dominated by discussions of economic class. These men played important roles in helping shift the representation of Blackness and Africans Americans in China from a metaphorical stand-in for (Chinese) suffering under racist imperialism—the dominant trope of Qing and Republican era representations of African Americans—to a metonymic part of a larger global struggle. Moreover, as metaphor shifts to metonym, African Americans, in Chinese representations, shifted from objects to subjects and eventually to agents of violent resistance. Part of my analysis will consider Chinese translations of Du Bois’ Souls of Black Folk (1959) and Williams’ Negroes with Guns (1963) against both the lingering backdrop of pre-1949 translations and narratives concerning African Americans (that primarily focused on enslaved Blacks) as well as CCP foreign relations discourses. Additionally, historical analysis of the 189 While I categorize Williams as a Black Nationalist, this label was not a self-description. In Negroes with Guns, Williams clearly articulates that he sees himself as an Inter-Nationalist due to his interest in all mankind [Robert Williams, Negroes with Guns (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1962), 81-82.] 92 translations will underscore the significance of these foreign texts in China. 190 Major issues that this chapter addresses include the situating of these texts in relation to revolutionary ideals and race in the Chinese context; and how the production of these translations simultaneously upheld yet disrupted the CCP metanarrative framing African Americans as victims of U.S. imperialism as a means of connecting their struggles as a people (and not a nation) to the larger colored solidarity movement. The chapter is divided into three main sections: W.E.B Du Bois and China (1959-1963), a sketch of 1963 as a key transitional year, and Robert Williams and China (1963-1968). This division is based on an assessment of China’s foreign relations history, shaped by Charles Neuhauser’s categorization of CCP foreign relation with the emerging Third World as comprised of several phases. Neuhauser designates 1954-1957 as the Bandung phase of CCP foreign relations, during which the PRC was focused on establishing itself “firmly within the framework of the international community.” 191 However, by 1958, the CCP foreign relations agenda was moving away from Bandung to greater emphasis on and involvement with Afro-Asian solidarity movements. This new phase of CCP foreign relations, between 1958 and 1963, was marked by the creation of Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Organization (AAPSO). Labeled as the Afro- Asian phase, this shift in Chinese foreign relations was shaped by many factors including, but not limited to, the PRC gaining more legitimacy on the international stage through entry to 190 Williams’ Negroes with Guns and Du Bois’ Souls of Black Folk was translated and published was published in an era when a literary and historical texts about Africa were also being translated. These texts include Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (originally published in 1958; translated in 1964), Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm (originally published in 1883, translated in 1958), and two of Basil Davidson’s texts: African Awakening (originally published in 1955, translated in 1957) and Black Mother: The Years of the African Slave Trade (originally published in 1961, translated in 1965). [Shu-Mei Shih, “Race and Revolution: Blackness in China’s Long Twentieth Century” PMLA 128, no. 1 (Jan. 2013):159.] 191 Charles Neuhauser, Third World Politics: China and the Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Organization, 1957- 1967 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968), 2. 93 organizations such as the U.N. But, the impetus to form alliances with nationalist movements and emerging nation states in sub-Saharan Africa was also due to ideological differences and political policies eroding long standing CCP relations with the Soviet bloc, as well as varying levels of estrangement from many alliances with nations important to the Bandung conference. 192 1963 marked another shift as the PRC made an outright public break with the USSR. This break resulted in a move to a more Chinese centered radicalism that did not take its ques from the USSR and viewed the Soviet Union as a rival. W.E.B. Du Bois and China W.E.B. Du Bois expressed interest in Asia as early as 1928 in his novel Dark Princess: A Romance. Japan’s defeat of Russia in the Russo-Japanese war (1904-05) led Du Bois and other Black internationalists to look to Asia, mainly Japan at that time, for possible viable models of resistance against American Imperialism and racism. In Dark Princess, Du Bois included China in his ideal of a colored alliance. Yet we also see Du Bois’ hesitation about internal racism within an international colored alliance as manifested through the experiences of Matthew Townes’, the novels’ protagonist. During a dinner party with colored and international dignitaries from around the world, Matthew experiences and witnesses the limited knowledge that other people of color had in regards to the struggle of American Blacks. While discussing a colored alliance and the involvement of different groups among colored peoples, the qualifications of American Blacks are called into question as the Japanese dinner guest states, It would be unfair to our guest not to explain with some clarity and precision that the whole question on the Negro race both in Africa and in America is for us not simply a question of suffering and compassion. Need we say that for these peoples we have every human sympathy? But for us here and for the larger company we represent, there is a 192 These nations include, but not limited to India, Egypt, and Indonesia. 94 deeper question—that of the ability, qualifications, and real possibilities of the black race in Africa or elsewhere. 193 Instead of his initial feelings of acceptance and joy at being surrounded by like-minded people of color, Matthew feels that he must defend not only his individual point of view, but also his race as a whole. After this questioning of Blacks’ ability to contribute to the toppling of racist imperialistic systems, there “now loomed plain and clear the shadow of a color line within a color line, a prejudice within prejudice, and he and his again the sacrifice.” 194 In the Souls of Black Folk (1903), Du Bois penned the infamous and accurate sentence “The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line,—the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea.” 195 However, in his conception of a united front combining Pan-Asianism and Pan-Africanism against imperialism, Du Bois took the problem of the color line one step further to express his fears that there may also be a color line amongst the colored peoples of the world. Even though Du Bois and other Black internationalists were looking to Asia, Du Bois highlighted a possible stumbling block to his ideas and ideals of Pan-internationalism. 196 In the above dinner exchange, it is interesting that the critique of Blacks comes from the Japanese guest, while the two Chinese guests remain virtually silent. The mute Chinese characters in contrast to the very vocal Japanese character in Dark Princess reflected Du Bois’ early views about Japan and China. From the end of the Russo-Japanese war until the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, Japan was seen as a possible model and leader in movements to 193 W.E.B Du Bois, Dark Princess, Dark Princess: A Romance (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 16. 194 Ibid. 195 W.E.B. Du Bois, Souls of Black Folk. (New York: Bantam Books, 1989), 10. 196 Bill Mullen, “Du Bois, Dark Princess, and the Afro-Asian International.” positions: east asia cultures critique 11, no. 1(2003): 218. 95 unify the darker races. Prior to 1941, Japanese imperialism in the Pacific, particularly East Asia, was covered in the American press. Yet, for many Black internationalists, it was difficult to reconcile the image of Japan as leader of the darker races with Japan the imperialist nation. Partially motivated in the persistent belief of unification amongst the darker races, Black internationalist such as Du Bois attempted to rationalize or justify Japan’s imperialist actions, even to the point of criticizing China. In 1936 W.E.B Du Bois embarked on a two month trip around the world after spending five months conducting research in Europe courtesy of funds from the Oberlander Trust. 197 Between his trips to the Soviet Union and Japan, Du Bois spent ten days in China; a trip which included stops in both Beijing and Shanghai. The China that Du Bois encountered in 1936 was an economically and politically weakened nation state due to inflation, corruption, natural disasters, and wars fought on domestic soil. While he was increasingly aware of the escalating tensions between China and Japan throughout his travels, Du Bois, in discussing the significance of Sino-Japanese relations for the future of the darker races, echoed Japanese rationalization of its imperialist desires. For Du Bois, Japan’s expansion and colonialism in Asia, particularly China, was aimed at preventing Asia from being colonized and dominated by Europe. Japanese imperialism was defending Asia from White European control. As such, Chinese resistance against Japanese aggression was seen as detrimental to the future unification of the darker races. Du Bois in 1937 criticized China: Even while China was licking the European boots that kicked her and fawning on the West; and when Japan was showing her the way to freedom; China preferred to be a coolie for England rather than acknowledge the only world leadership that did not mean color caste, and that was the leadership of Japan. It was Japan’s clear cue to persuade, 197 W.E.B. Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn: An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept (New Brunswick: Transaction Books, 1984), 323. 96 cajole, and convince China, but China sneered and taught her folk that Japanese were devils. […] Whereupon Japan fought China to save China from Europe, and fought Europe through China and tried to wade in blood toward Asiatic freedom. 198 Essentially, Du Bois pegged China as the Asian Uncle Tom by categorizing Chinese resistance to Japanese aggression as an affront to the Asian race. Du Bois views’ concerning China changed during and after World War II. Part of this transition can be attributed to Du Bois’ increasingly radical class critique. In the essay “Fifty Years Later” that prefaces the 1953 50 th commemorative edition of Souls of Black Folk (and the 1959 Chinese edition) Du Bois wrote: I still think today as yesterday that the color line is a great problem of this century. But today I see more clearly than yesterday that back of the problem of race and color, lies a greater problem which both obscures and implements it: and that is the fact that so many civilized persons are willing to live in comfort even if the price of this is poverty, ignorance, and disease of the majority of their fellowmen; that to maintain this privilege men have waged war until today war tends to become universal and continuous, and the excuse for this war continues largely to be color and race. 199 In the 1930s, during his initial trip in East Asia, race as a political category was Du Bois’ framework to assess the international state of affairs and imagine a future for colored people worldwide free from White supremacy of the “Nordic race.” 200 But, as he reflected on Souls in the early 1950s, Du Bois was more critical of how capitalist imperialism and race intersected. Du 198 Du Bois, W.E.B. 1937. “Forum of Fact and Opinion”. Pittsburgh Courier, February 27. 199 Du Bois, W.E.B. Souls of Black Folk: Jubilee Edition. New York: Blue Heron Press, 1953. 200 Yuichiro Onishi. Transpacific Antiracism. P 74-79 97 Bois’ reassessment of class affected his perceptions of China and also piqued the interest of Mao Zedong and the CCP, which ultimately led to the formation of political ties with Du Bois as part of the CCP foreign relations agenda. Another aspect of CCP foreign relations that contributed to their interest in reaching out to Du Bois involved the attempt to cultivate better relations with African nations. Prior to Du Bois first trip to the PRC, Zhou Enlai laid the foundation for establishing relations with African nations during the Bandung conference of 1955. In 1954-55, PRC foreign relations policy took a relatively modest approach that allowed CCP leadership opportunities such as the Bandung conference to bolster its international image. Capitalizing on the spirit of Bandung, by 1958 China had gained entry to and new contacts with various African nations. 201 There were many reasons the CCP sought closer ties with emerging African countries, one of which was the desire to get the PRC recognized as the legitimate government of China within the United Nations and thus also win a seat on the Security Council. Moreover, as the CCP’s views concerning various global affairs, such as those related to the emerging Third World, were distinctly different from the Soviet Union, the CCP needed allies other than the Soviet Union for political support. These potential allies included emerging African nations. But, the United States and the Soviet Union were also trying to gain traction with the emerging nations in Africa. In an attempt to hinder the Soviet Union’s influence outside of Asia and Europe, the U.S. government was working hard to make itself attractive to nations in Africa and Latin America. Both the U.S. and the PRC attempted to garner the support of African countries by espousing their interest in the cause of African freedom. 202 For China, such interest were conveyed through the CCP rapidly increasing contacts vis-à-vis foreign delegations, conferences, and newly created Sino-African 201 Bruce Larkin, China and Africa, 1949-1970 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 37. 202 Philip Snow, The Star Raft: China’s Encounter with Africa (New York: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. 1988), 108. 98 organizations between 1958 and 1960. 203 But the U.S. also pressed forward diplomatically. Both the CCP and the U.S. offered aid to various guerilla movements in Africa. 204 To further its own agenda and thwart that of the United States, the PRC needed a voice that could appeal to African nations concerning interests that those emerging independent nations would deem genuine and in solidarity. Enter W.E.B. Du Bois. W.E.B. Du Bois was important to the CCP ad he was able to assist in the facilitation and cultivation of cultural relations outside of diplomatic missions and economic support. Du Bois’ Pan-African political identity and political clout within the Pan-African diaspora aligned with the CCP foreign relations agenda of establishing stronger relations with African nations. His ideology concerning racial and economic equality and non-violence resonated with the principles put forth at Bandung. In this political juncture, cultivating relations with Du Bois was another link in the chain of building cultural relations with African nations because while the rhetoric of Bandung and the principles put forth at the conference were early catalysts in Sino-African relations, this ideology was not enough to sustain the continual evolution of these relations. Du Bois’ long-standing commitment championing colored solidarity propelled him into an important position within postcolonial, emerging third world movements, such as the Afro-Asian Writers Bureau, evidenced early on by his participation in the Afro-Asian Writers Conference in Tashkent (October 1958) and his “China and Africa” speech in 1959. As such, Du Bois was part of the CCP’s cultural apparatus to establish and foster Sino-African relations. In the early 1950s, following the establishment of the PRC as a strong and unified nation after decades of colonialism and civil war, W.E.B. Du Bois and other Black internationalists began to seriously consider China as a model for colored nations worldwide. Dong Biwu’s open 203 Ibid., 44-45. 204 Ibid., 108-109. 99 invitation extended in 1945 for Black Americans to come to China had led to some African Americans to envision China as a site of hope and a model of change in the battle against racism and imperialism. Du Bois’ trip in 1959 solidified and validated those early hopes and aspirations. Du Bois’ awe at China’s development was largely influenced by the PRC that he experienced on his 1959 state-managed tour of China to the cities of Beijing, Shanghai, Hankou, Guangdong, Chongqing, Chengdu, Kunming, and Nanjing. While in the PRC, foreign guests: were entertained by prominent Chinese of their own occupation and members of the association that invited them….the most important visitors invariably met Mao and other Chinese dignitaries as well. They were taken to impressive factories and public works from Manchuria to Canton, Almost every tour included a visit to a ‘reformed’ businessman and a ‘typical’ peasant village or commune. The exotic was added by trips to the historic Great Wall and such scenic attractions as West Lake at Hangchow. 205 These state guided tours allowed foreign guests, such as Du Bois, to “see” the successes of the rapidly developing Chinese state. In other words, the PRC that Du Bois witnessed was framed by his hosts to portray the image of a rapidly modernizing nation; an image that the CCP wanted to project internationally. Yet there was also a China that Du Bois was not made privy to by his CCP hosts, a China that was experiencing some of the early warning signs of the tragic economic woes and famine that were resulting from the Great Leap Forward (GLF). The GLF was a policy to encourage rapid modernization in the rural areas that, instead, led to widespread famine and death. By the time of Du Bois’ trip in 1959, the CCP was in the second year of the Great Leap Forward (GLF). The PRC’s launching on the GLF in 1958 had drawn ire and suspicion from its 205 William Ratliff, “Chinese Communist Cultural Diplomacy toward Latin America, 1949-1960,” The Hispanic American Historical Review 49, no.1 (1968): 60. 100 erstwhile ally, the Soviet Union. Moreover, the U.S.-led policies of embargoes and isolation further cast a negative shadow on the PRC. To combat some of the negative characterizations of Mao Zedong and the CCP as well as appease some of the uneasiness about radical initiatives such as the GLF, visits from foreigners such as W.E.B Du Bois were important as the widespread attention and dissemination of news about Du Bois’ trip, as well as his post trip writings that depicted the New China in glowing terms, comprised an important counter narrative to what was happening in China under the GLF initiative. Also during his trip in 1959, Du Bois attended a 91 st birthday celebration held in his honor at Peking University. At the birthday celebration, Du Bois recited his “China and Africa” speech in which he encouraged African nations to look towards China as a colored nation that developed without Western imperialist and capitalist influences. In Chinese press coverage of the event, Du Bois is quoted as saying “Africa, arise! Turn your face towards the rising sun! The Black continent can join China to achieve the most friendship and sympathy.” 206 The rest of his speech used similar language as he actively encouraged African nations to look to China. Du Bois’ interest in China and Mao Zedong stemmed from his belief that the rapid economic, political, and social developments that China underwent under the leadership of Chairman Mao was a model for many of the newly emerging nations in Africa that were still in the process of finding workable paths of development. This speech highlighted many of the themes that characterized Du Bois’ long-standing scholarship and activism as well as connected his new- found interest in China with his lifelong interest in Africa and the advancement of people of 206 Renmin Ribao. ”Duboyisi xiang Feizhou renmin fachu zhaohuan: Feizhou zhanqiali! Mianxiang shengqi de taiyang! Heise dalu keyi cong Zhongguo dedao zuiduo de youyi de tongqing. [Du Bois Issues a Call to the African People, Stand Up! Face the Rising Sun! The Black Continent could gain the most Friendship and Sympathy from China.”] February 24, 1959; Renmin Ribao.” Jiushi gaoling you fendou, heping zhanshi yong qingchun, shoudu renshi jubei wei Duboyisi zhushou [Continually a Struggle in his 90’s. the Peace Soldier is Forever Young; Figures in the Capital lift Glasses to Celebrate Du Bois’ Birthday”.] February 24, 1959. 101 color worldwide. 207 The language of the speech underscores why the CCP was active in cultivating political relations with African Americans in general and, at this time, Du Bois in particular. In addition to being part of a larger global struggle, the Black American experience could shed light on the masked racism hidden under the U.S.’s banner of democracy. In a less repeated quote from the same brief speech, Du Bois, in a simple and direct statement, summed up the ongoing issues afflicting African American when he uttered the sentiment that “in the U.S. I am still a ‘nigger’.” Du Bois did not expound on this, but it is an important moment in this event in terms of performativity of race. The below passage from Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail”, written four years after Du Bois’ “China and Africa” speech, details the frustrations of what it meant to be relegated to second class citizenship: [W]hen you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick, brutalize, and even kill your black brothers and sisters with impunity; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she cannot go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her little eyes when she is told Funtown is closed to colored children, and see the depressing clouds of inferiority begin to form in her little mental sky, and see her begin to distort her little personality by unconsciously developing a bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five- year-old son asking in agonizing pathos, ‘Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?’; when you take a cross-country drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading ‘white’ and ‘colored’; when your first name becomes ‘nigger’ and your middle name becomes 207 Renmin Ribao. “Jiushi ling you fendou heping zhanshi yong qingchun shoudu renshi ju bei wei Duboyisi zhushou [Ninety year old Peace Soldier still struggle for peace in birthday toast to Dubois.”] February 24, 1959. 102 ‘boy’ (however old you are) and your last name becomes ‘John,’ and when your wife and mother are never given the respected title ‘Mrs.’; when you are harried by day and harried by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never knowing what to expect next, and plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of ‘nobodyness’. 208 Du Bois’ moment of honesty in terms of the identity placed upon him in the U.S., expounded upon in the above quote by King, echoed Du Bois’ ideas in Souls concerning double consciousness and notions of how it felt to be “a problem.” In this brief insertion of race into a speech primarily concerned with economic development, Du Bois reminded his hosts and target audience that race is not simply a distorted manifestation of economic exploitation. In other words, there is something particular in the experience of racism that makes race and racial identities equally important as class. After using that moment to discuss how he and other African Americans are still unable to access full rights of American citizenship, Du Bois proceeded to discuss the future possibilities of Sino-African relations. He stated that he had no official authority on the topic, but that his views on steering newly-independent African nations away from following the developmental model of or political and economic relations with Europe and the U.S. came from his experiences as an African American male who, while regarded and held in high esteem internationally, was still seen first and foremost by his skin color in the U.S. In his persistence that Africa should turn and face China, Du Bois was not rearticulating tropes of inferiority or superiority along economic lines. Rather, Du Bois was, telling African nations to look to China and see where the PRC had succeeded where other nations, such as Haiti, had failed due to them 208 “Letter from Birmingham Jail [King Jr.],”University of Pennsylvania Africana Studies Center, accessed April 1, 2015, http://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html. 103 falling under the spell of Western sirens. 209 Yet, the statement “China is flesh of your flesh and blood of your blood. China is colored and knows to what a colored skin in this modern world subjects its owner” emphasized Du Bois’ romanticization of China and Africa both being part of a colored world with similar histories and a possible shared future. 210 Following his 1959 trip, Du Bois penned two short essays about his ten week journey in China. In these pieces, “DuBois was neither hesitant nor ambiguous in stating his appreciation and affinity to the Chinese people.” 211 The essays, entitled “Our Visit to China” and “The Vast Miracle of China Today”, not only cataloged the sojourn in China, but were imbued with political messages about socialism and the rapid development of China’s infrastructure that the Du Bois witnessed. These essays were aimed at African Americans with the hopes of getting them to understand how the struggle for civil rights in the United States connected to struggles internationally. Du Bois opened and closed “The Vast Miracle of China” with dramatic illustrations of the New China that he has just visited. He began, “I have traveled widely on this earth since my first trip to Europe 67 years ago. Save South America and India, I have seen most of the civilized world and much of its backward regions. Many leading nations I have visited repeatedly. But I have never seen a nation which so amazed me as China in 1959.” 212 This sense of amazement and wonder at the rapid developmental changes occurring in China is repeated in the concluding sentences: “Fifteen times I have crossed the Atlantic and once the Pacific. I have seen the world. 209 W.E.B. Du Bois, “China and Africa,” in W.E.B Du Bois on Asia: Crossing the World Color Line, ed. Bill Mullen and Cathryn Watson (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005), 196-201; Renmin Ribao. ”Duboyisi xiang Feizhou renmin fachu zhaohuan: Feizhou zhanqiali! Mianxiang shengqi de taiyang! Heise dalu keyi cong Zhongguo dedao zuiduo de youyi de tongqing.” February 24, 1959. 210 W.E.B. Du Bois, “China and Africa,” 199. 211 W.E.B. Du Bois, “Stratification and Struggle”, 1959, p 213 212 W.E.B. Du Bois, “The Vast Miracle of China Today.” National Guardian, June 1959, 1. 104 But never so vast and glorious a miracle as China.” 213 Although Du Bois also included some of the limited failings of 1959 China that he was allowed to witness, more so in “The Vast Miracle of China Today” than in “Our Visit to China,” the overall rhetoric and tone of the pieces was pro Mao Zedong, pro CCP, and pro Socialism. Additionally, the only failings of China that Du Bois discussed were in terms of material wealth and goods. Yet the lack of material wealth in the developing nation paled in comparison to the wealth of the people’s spirit and desire to create a better Chinese nation: China is no utopia. Fifth Avenue has better shops where the rich can buy and the whores parade. Detroit has more and better cars. The best American housing outstrips the Chinese and Chinese women are not nearly as well-dressed as the guests of the Waldorf- Astoria. But the Chinese worker is happy. 214 Whereas American cities had material wealth, New China offered it workers a different type of riches. Additionally, within these two essays, Du Bois repeatedly melds together his ideas about Pan-Africanism and Pan-Asianism so as to situate American Blacks within the various international solidarity movements. According to Du Bois, the Cold War being fought on the ideological lines of democracy versus socialism was doing more harm than good, especially for American Blacks as it was, in some crucial ways, politically isolating them from worldwide revolutions: “But just when knowledge of the rise of Socialism would have been most valuable, the ‘Cold War’ started and for ten years American citizens have been not only limited in their right to travel, but even in the right to learn the truth about the Revolution which is sweeping the 213 Ibid., 4. 214 Ibid., 3. 105 world.” 215 Du Bois linked the plight of American Blacks to that of other peoples of color through shared experiences of exploitation by Western imperialism. This connection was important because U.S. democracy and the Red Scare’s framing of socialism and communism disillusioned many Blacks from being associated with such ideologies which ultimately disconnected them from worldwide movements. Du Bois sought to reconnect that link for Blacks and the U.S. Civil Rights Movements. Du Bois’ visits to China also occasioned the PRC’s publication of the first translation of his groundbreaking work, Souls of Black Folk, into Chinese. Originally published at the dawn of the twentieth century, Souls was one of the first texts to articulate the emotional, psychological, and mental effects of systematic and rampant racism in the U.S. on American Blacks. While Du Bois’ astute observations were concerned with the wide ranging extent and pervasiveness of race in the twentieth century, his writings on topics such as double consciousness and the veil are also significant. Souls’ seamless yet thought provoking and intricate weaving of music, sociological and psychological observations, mythology, history, and literature has allowed for the text to be analyzed and framed in a myriad of ways in multiple genres since its original publication. One such context was China in 1959. The Chinese translation, based on the Souls (Jubilee Edition) published in 1953 to commemorate the 50 th anniversary of the text, stayed true to the language and style of the work. While the translation of some of Du Bois’ works, in particular Souls had the two-fold purpose of displaying Du Bois’ prowess as a scholar and as a sign of respect, it also shaped representation of Blackness in important ways. First, the content of the text provided glimpses and insight into the plight of American Blacks at the turn of the twentieth century, filling in 215 W.E.B. Du Bois, “Our Visit to China,” China Pictorial, March 20, 1959, 2. 106 historical gaps within the Chinese context. In terms of African American history in the Chinese context, the two main periods presented were slavery and the Civil Rights movement. Du Bois’ discussion and analysis of the post emancipation era added to that historical narrative. Additionally, the inclusion of music throughout the text as well as the discussion of it in the chapter “Of the Faith of Our Fathers” added more dimensions and contextualization to some of the emotional aspects of music like Negro Spirituals. For instance, Du Bois placed Negro Spirituals within the larger context of Black religious life, which included the functions of Negro religious music and the role of the church within the Black community. Lastly, in Souls, Du Bois asserted of Black agency in light of racial discrimination as he “located the nature of spiritual strivings, the transformative power of the expression of Black self-affirmation, which served as an essential guide to replot the narrative of racial struggles in world history.” 216 In the wake of the translation of Souls, Huang Xingqi, ( 黄星圻) in the People’s Daily article “The Voice from the Heart of Black People—Reading the Souls of Black Folk”, reviewed the content of the text and the purported lessons that Chinese readers and writers alike should take away from it. 217 One of the most important lessons for Huang was that Souls, despite having been penned 50 years earlier, could enable Chinese people to gain a deeper understanding of how racial discrimination has oppressed and still continues to limit African Americans. 218 A second lesson concerned the narratives within the text. Huang warned readers that said narratives within 216 Yuichiro Onishi, Transpacific Antiracism: Afro-Asian solidarity in Twentieth-century Black America, Japan, and Okinawa (New York: New York University Press, 2013), 7; Sterling Stuckey, Going Through the Storm: the Influence of African Art in History (New York: Oxford UP, 1994), 45. 217 Huang Xingqi. Renmin Ribao. “Heiren de xinsheng—du Heiren de Linghun [The Voice from the Heart of Black People.”] May 19, 1959. 218 Ibid. 107 Souls that depicted “Black Americans tragic lives ….have the power to touch reader’s hearts (meiguo heiren de beican shenghuo...liliang dadong duzhe de xin ). 219 In spite of the emotional appeal, Huang’s approached and critiqued Souls through a pushing of the CCP party line. This line of the CCP articulated that the complete liberation of Black Americans would happen by following the examples of and lessons from “revolutionary Chinese peasantry.” 220 While this reading of Souls can be seen as reductionist, there are still important lessons and insights in terms of representations of Blackness that can be gleaned from this reading. 221 Huang’s approach, while not unique, was important because pushing the Party line in relation to the text connected the plight of Blacks to that of the larger global colored proletariat. Additionally, a reading of Souls vis-à-vis the Party line attempted to address the persistence of racism in the U.S.; a reality for Black Americans that was just as relevant in 1959 as it was in 1903 when Souls was first published. Yet, in spite of some of Huans’s insights, are some of the Party-line tropes that the CCP repeatedly invoked when trying to make cultural and historical connections with African Americans that were problematic. In particular, the drawing of parallels between Black Americans and Chinese peasants. As we have seen, these parallels were not new, but were also made during Pankey’s travel and concerts in China as well. In the case of Pankey, the connection was made between Negro Spirituals and Chinese folk music. But in the analysis of Souls, the parallel drawn advanced the strongly held argument that the Chinese Revolution was the best model for colored peoples worldwide and that African Americans as a people must follow along a similar trajectory in order to bring about a successful end to their just and resolute struggle. 219 Ibid. 220 Yunxiang Gao, “W.E.B. Du Bois and Shirley Graham Du Bois in Maoist China,” Du Bois Review 10, no. 1 (2013): 74. 221 Ibid.,74-75. 108 As demonstrated within the previously discusses parallel between African Americans and Chinese peasants, CCP rhetoric within Sino-African American relations simultaneously rendered race visible and invisible. For instance, the rhetoric repeatedly conflated issues of race for African Americans with those of the economic/class concerns of Chinese peasants. Yet, the performativity of race by Du Bois, not only in his “China and Africa” speech, but also within the pages of Souls reinserted how race in and of itself differed from class struggles. In Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois, at times, described his own experiences facing racism and how racial discrimination created both personal and professional hardship. This first person personal narrative about racism was quite rare in the Chinese context. Here, the retrospective of Black American life in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century provided in Souls in conjunction with Du Bois own experiences led to more nuanced and detailed discussions about the social, economic, and psychological dimensions of racial discrimination. Moreover, Souls connected Du Bois’ early twentieth century ideas of solidarity among the darker races to his involvement with Afro-Asian solidarity, exemplified by his participation in the Afro-Asian Writers Bureau. At the 1959 Afro-Asian Writers Conference in Tashkent, Du Bois speech, “I am an American—I am an African”, reiterated his Blackness and American identity as well as the continual legacy of his Pan-African ideas and identity. Souls’ and Du Bois’ articulations of ideas such as double consciousness reinserted discussions of race and stressed the agency of African Americans. In spite of Du Bois’ repeated insertion of more nuanced discussions of race, some pre- 1949 stereotypically racist images of African Americans persisted within China. An example is found in the the children’s book entitled I Am an American Black Child (Wo shi ge Meiguo heiren haizi) published in 1960, a year after the translation of Souls. The purpose of this 1960 text, according to the brief explanation provided, was to help primary-aged school children study 109 and practice pinyin and phonetics; hence the body of the text being written in Chinese characters with pinyin and phonetic notations. But the subject matter of the text also taught the children reading the book a very tragic depiction of the lives of Black American children through the plight of the story’s main character Jake (Jiake). From the opening paragraph to the concluding sentences, Jake’s life as an eleven year old Black child in the U.S. is filled with tragedy and hardships. Early on, readers learn that Jake’s father died a violent death (killed in war) and that he and his Mom scratch out a meager existence based on his Mother’s job as a toothpaste factory worker. Yet their life in a major American city is dangerous and difficult. 222 If their hard life was not sad enough, Jake’s mother dies in a factory machine accident. Jake is now an orphan. Some of the workers from his mother’s factory are able to convince the factory boss to meet with Jake in order to help him earn some money by possibly doing small jobs around the factory. While the boss does hire Jake, it is for him to wear a toothpaste advertisement around the city partly because it is an easy job and partly because Jake has beautiful teeth. However, this opportunity does not last long because Jake is cornered and attacked in an alley by some White men. The fight leads to Jake being fired from his job as some of his teeth are knocked out or broken in the attack. The story concludes: Wo de baba dazhang dasi le, wo de mama bei jiqi ya si le, wo yao bian ge xiao yaofan de le. Wode mingzi jiao Jiake, wo shi ge Meiguo heiren haizi! (My father died in the war, my mother was crushed by a factory machine, [and now] I must become a beggar. My name is Jake, I am an American Black child! While the book is clearly a language development tool, there are also lessons about the CCP as well as African Americans within its pages. While this children’s story is not the only evidence of changing depictions of African Americans (see footnote 41 for a list of newspaper 222 The story simply states that he lives in a major city; the name of a specific city that is the setting for the story is never provided. 110 articles), it is a great example of how these narratives permeated multiple groups within Chinese society. Also exemplified in the story are some racist stereotypes that persisted into the 1960s, such as the fetishization of Jake’s teeth and lips (see image 1), even though the CCP was aggressively advocating a political ideology that is egalitarian and enlightened. While trying to stir consciousness about the plight of African Americans, the children’s story relied on racist stereotypes and exaggerated narratives of victimization. (Image 1: Cover of book I Am a Black American Child) In addition to the re-circulation of pre-1949 images and depictions, the story combined elements of the narratives found within in W.E.B. Du Bois’ Souls and aspects of Huang’s reflections on Souls. Du Bois’ reflective and insightful discussions on the emotional and 111 psychological impact of racism are amplified in the tragedies that the young child Jake had to encounter and endure. Huang’s words concerning the ability of the narratives of Souls to move the hearts of readers seem especially applicable here. Moreover, the lesson from Souls and reiterated by Huang in his review involved the pervasiveness of racism in limiting opportunities for African Americans, a lesson depicted in the story through Jake’s teeth being broken by White men who attack him resulting in the loss of his job. Lastly, the characterization of Jake’s parents follows the CCP Party line of the proper family background for the idealize elements of the “masses;” his parents are Black American versions of the two most revolutionary elements according to CCP ideology: the soldier (his Dad, who died in combat) and the worker (his Mother, the toothpaste factory worker). Du Bois was invited back to China to celebrate the thirteenth anniversary of the founding of the PRC. The trip in October of 1962 would be his last before his death on August 27, 1963. As in 1959, Du Bois met with Mao and other leading CCP officials. In addition to his new official membership with the Communist party (joined in 1961), what also made this trip historic was that Du Bois was the first American invited to watch the National Day parade from the central rostrum with Mao Zedong and other Party leaders. 223 W.E.B. Du Bois, in 1962, was not the only American in China nor was he the only African American in China. However, the public and political display of Du Bois on the central rostrum physically aligned next to Mao and other CCP leaders at such a significant event was important in the continual cultivation of foreign relations with American Blacks. This was one of the earliest politically positive and public representations of America in the PRC and it was in the embodiment of a Black American. Moreover, the positioning of Du Bois and Mao on the rostrum was a physical reiteration that the 223 Dan Green and Kenneth Ray Young, “Harbinger to Nixon: W.E.B. Du Bois in China,” Negro History Bulletin 35, no. 6 (1972): 127. 112 struggles of Blacks in America were linked to that of Chinese people and other peoples of color within a larger colored solidarity movement. Du Bois’ presence helped frame the CCP’s thirtieth anniversary, for both China’s domestic audience and for audiences abroad, as an event of significance to a global movement. W.E.B. Du Bois’ scholarship as well as his physical presence in China was in sync with the shift in the dominant representations of Blacks from objectified victims to subjects working towards equality, freedom, and civil rights. Mao said that Du Bois was “a great man of our time. His deeds of heroic struggle for the liberation of the Negroes and the whole of mankind, his outstanding achievements in academic fields and his sincere friendship toward the Chinese people will forever remain in the memory of the Chinese people.” 224 Although this quote was a eulogy to Du Bois, it captured the essence and tone of how W.E.B. Du Bois, and African American by extension, were represented in the PRC presses. 225 In the Chinese press, many articles printed from 1959 to 1963 depicted American Blacks’ ongoing battles against racism and racial inequality as opposition against U.S. Imperialism. These articles focused on the escalating Civil Rights Movement with an emphasis on non-violent protest methods employed, such as the student sit-ins at lunch counters and Freedom Riders, as means of gaining access to American citizenship rights. Du Bois’ commitment to civil rights as well as international peace was reflected in the articles concerning Blacks and the Civil Rights Movement in the U.S. Although the reporting of Blacks was along the ideological lines of Du Bois’ politics, reportage of the actions of Blacks in the U.S. and the momentum of the movement were repeatedly connected back to representations of Blacks as victims of American imperialism 224 Gerald Horne, Black and Red: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Afro-American Response to the Cold War, 1944-1963 (New York: State University of New York, 1986), 324. 225 Huang Xingqi. Renmin Ribao. “Heiren de xinsheng—du Heiren de Linghun [The Voice from the Heart of Black People.”] May 19, 1959. 113 to better fit the CCP narrative of Blacks as one of many metonymic sites within the colored struggle against U.S. imperialism. W.E.B. Du Bois’ presence in China and his discussion of the condition of Blacks in America stimulated Chinese interest in the Civil Rights struggle of Blacks in America. This bourgeoning interest was exemplified in the February 29, 1960 article entitled “Oppose Racial Discrimination and Strive for Equal Rights: Black Southerners Launch Large Scale Struggle.” 226 The Chinese author provides a brief overview of current demonstrations and protests activities that Black Americans were engaging in as means to combat racism in the United States. 227 The article focuses on the student lunch counter sit-ins in North Carolina which were not only a new form of protest within the Civil Rights movement but were also one of the first large scale movements spearheaded by college aged students. In the article, the actions of four students are chronicled as follows: On February 1 st in Greensboro, North Carolina, four Black students entered a White owned restaurant to dine, the restaurant had racist personnel that rudely ordered the students to stand up. Those students solemnly refused that request and continued to sit at the side of the restaurant table. 228 The piece goes on to call the student’s actions heroic before chronicling other non-violent protest demonstrations occurring in other cities in the American South. While the article begins on an empowering note, the piece concluded with discussing some of the setbacks that Blacks in Tallahassee and Nashville were experiencing. The article states that police were wantonly arresting and frequently beating Black protestors. 229 The detailed discussion of the specific types of repression that Black protestors faced in the U.S. 226 Renmin Ribao. “Fandui zhongzu qishi zhengqu pingdeng quanli Meiguo nanbu heiren zhankai da guimo douzheng. [Racial discrimination against blacks for equal rights for the southern United States launched a massive fight.”] February 2, 1960. 227 Ibid. 228 Ibid. 229 Ibid. 114 aligned with the CCP’s continual shaping of African Americans as victims of American imperialism. During the period of Du Bois’ close political ties with the CCP, the new victimization narrative concerning Blacks and their ongoing struggle detailed the specific types of persecution that Blacks faced to both distinguish and connect their struggles to that of other colored peoples. An extensive article from the People’s Daily “Struggle of American Blacks Opposing Racial Discrimination,” looks in some depth at race relations in America and the rising tide of non- violent demonstrations. 230 The first few paragraphs discuss specific demonstrations that occurred in the weeks prior to the articles publication on March 14 th before delving into a brief yet detailed history of racism in the United States. 231 The article weaves a teleological narrative of racial oppression in the United States in the section, “The Course of Suffering”, then provides a brief discussion of slavery in the United States and concludes in the fifth section, “The Fast Unfolding Struggle”, which discussed the momentum of the Civil Rights movement. 232 This article is commendable for articulating some of the roots of racism in America and the social, economic, and political struggles that Blacks endured because of skin color. More importantly, the author acknowledges that even though racism in the States was not limited to Blacks, they suffered the most serious forms of discrimination and persecution. Du Bois’ verbal and written performances of race while in China illuminated the role of racism in placing Black Americans on the margin of American society. This position of marginality in America aligns the struggle of Blacks within the larger worldwide struggles led by 230 Renmin Ribao. “Duiyu bei yapo de quru diwei renwukeren Meiguo heiren zhankai fan zhongzu qishi douzheng [The humiliating position of intolerable oppression of African Americans is expanding the fight against racial discrimination.”] March 14, 1960. 231 Ibid. 232 Ibid. 115 people of color as depicted in the August 13, 1963 article “Black Americans Begin Large Revolutionary Struggle to Fight for Liberation, Speech of China’s People Organization representative, Chairman of the National Chinese Federation of Trade Union Liu Ningyi.” 233 The article is a reprint of a speech given by Liu. In the speech, Liu offered words of encouragement declaring that all the world’s people supported American Blacks in their struggle against racial discrimination. 234 Liu’s speech, delivered only days after Mao Zedong’s unprecedented August 8, 1963 speech “Call Upon the People of the World to Unite Against the Racism of American Imperialism, Support American Blacks in their Struggle Against Racism,” borrowed much of its rhetoric and structure of Liu’s speech is similar to the content in from Mao’s statement issued just days prior to the March on Washington. Liu, like Mao, recounted historic events in the Civil Rights Movement and criticized the Kennedy administration for the continual and conscious deception of Black Americans. 235 Although the reporting on Blacks within the Chinese press resonated with ideological lines of Du Bois, reportage on the actions of Blacks in the U.S. and the momentum of the movement were never completely disconnected from CCP’s dominant narrative of Blacks as victims of American imperialism. 236 While just and resolute in their struggle against racist oppression and 233 Renmin Ribao. “Meiguo heiren kaishi le zhengqi jiefeng de weida geming douzheng—Zhongguo ge renmin tuanti sai biao, zhonghua quanguo zong gonghui zhuyi Liu Ningyi de jianghua [Black Americans Begin Large Revolutionary Struggle to Fight for Liberation, Speech of China’s People Organization representative, Chairman of the National Chinese Federation of Trade Union Liu Ningyi.”] August 13, 1963. 234 Ibid. 235 Ibid. 236 Renmin Ribao. “Duiyu bei yapo de quru diwei renwukeren Meiguo heiren zhankai fan zhongzu qishi douzheng [For the humiliating position of intolerable oppression, Black Americans to expand the fight against racial discrimination.”] March 14, 1960; “Meiguio heiren fandui zhi neng ge zhongzu qishi de douzheng [Black Americans fight against ethnic discrimination.”] March 14, 1960; “Daochu juxing shiwei jihui fandui zhongzu qishi Meiguo heiren douzheng riyi kuoda [Demonstrations held to oppose racial discrimination of Black Americans growing daily.”] 28 March 28 , 1960; “Dui zhongzu qiahi de tiaozhan—Meiguo nanbu de ‘ziyou chengke yundong [Challenging racial discrimination—‘Freedom riders’ in the American south.”] June 29, 1961; “Meiguo heiren shenghuo zai shehui de zui diceng [Black Americans lives are at the bottom of society.”] June 8, 1962; “Mao Zhuxi Liu Zhuxi he shoubu baiwan qunzhong tong waiguo pengyou yiqi huandu guoqing zhi ye[Chairman Mao and President Liu lead millions of foreign friends in celebrating National Day].” October 2, 1962. 116 discrimination, Black Americans, although no longer enslaved, were now victims of U.S. imperialism. 1963: Changing Global Landscapes If 1968 has been pegged as the year that the world caught fire, then one could make the case that the international events surrounding civil, economic, and politic rights and shifting ideologies ocurring in 1963 ignited the slow burning fuse that would eventually erupt five years later on a global level. As Matthew Johnson has argued, “[t]he year 1963 was a momentous moment in relations between the PRC and the black internationalist movement, as it represented a decisive shift in Beijing’s attention from African Americans associated with transnational peace organizations and the CPUSA to more militant figures who, like Williams, had emerged from the frustrations of the US civil rights movement.” 237 1963 saw monumental marches, deaths of world leaders, a controversial atomic bomb test ban treaty, and the U.S., China, and the Soviet Union all vying for influence in the third world. Racism, in terms of economic exploitation and the systematic oppression of American Blacks, was an ongoing cancer within American society. In addition to the impact of WWII on the Black American psyche, the growing influence of worldwide broadcasts of news and events throughout the 1950s and the increasing momentum and visibility of the Civil Rights movement led to African Americans gaining international support. As King wrote in 1963: Oppressed people cannot remain oppressed forever. The urge for freedom will eventually come. This is what has happened to the American Negro. Something within has reminded him of his birthright of freedom; something without has reminded that he can gain it. Consciously and unconsciously, […], and with his black brothers of Africa and his brown 237 Matthew Johnson, “From Peace to Panthers: PRC Engagement with African-American Transnational Networks, 1949-1979,” Past and Present, Supplement 8 (2013): 246. 117 and yellow brothers of Asia, South America, and the Caribbean, he is moving with a sense of cosmic urgency toward the promised land of racial justice. 238 This international dimension of the Civil Rights Movement intensified the pressure on the U.S. government to start addressing issues of racism. Racism against African Americans was increasingly becoming a factor in American foreign relations. 239 During the Cold War, the United States foreign policy was geared towards the spread of democracy and market capitalism to the newly emerging independent nations of the Third World. The U.S. government presented itself as promoting the virtues and promises of democracy to push back shadows cast by the “Iron Curtain” and socialist ideologies. In trying to court foreign diplomats, especially African nationals, race discrimination negatively affected these potential Cold War alignments. While traveling in the U.S. Black foreign diplomats often faced discrimination, for example, being refused service at restaurants in major cities such as Miami or along Maryland’s Highway 40. 240 While the narratives of discrimination varied, the underlying point stressed in international press coverage of such incidents was how the U.S.’s “rampant racism has ‘exposed’ the savage nature of American freedom and democracy.” 241 Communist nations such as China and the Soviet Union also eagerly covered the plight of African Americans in order to critique the fallacies between American democracy and the plight of African Americans. The Soviet Union covered racial discrimination in the U.S. primarily to embarrass the United States and highlight racism as the Achilles heel of American democracy as seen in the below image (see image 2). 238 “Letter from Birmingham Jail [King Jr.],”University of Pennsylvania Africana Studies Center, accessed April 1, 2015, http://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html. 239 Mary Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 157. 240 Ibid., 167-168. 241 Ibid., 152-153; 160; 167-168. 118 (Image 2) Drawing published in Russian cartoon book 'Krokodil' (Crocodile) illustrates Moscow's growing preoccupation with the American Civil Rights movement. Cartoon shows student being stopped by police at entrance to American university. In background, angry segregationists brandish fiery crosses and signs which read: 'There's the Nigger,' 'no colored allowed,' 'lynch him,' 'we want segregation,' and 'colored man on your knees.' 242 In the cartoon, the artist depicts the resistance African American students confronted when trying to integrate schools in the United States. Segregation was still the custom of the land despite the fact that the landmark Supreme Court decision in the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka had ruled that separate but equal was unconstitutional. Yet, as shown in the 1963 cartoon, undoing decades of custom was not easy as racial tensions escalated. In addition to covering integration, by 1963 the Soviet Union increased its coverage of incidents related to 242 http://www.corbisimages.com/Search#rdr=1&mrc=41,398&p=1&q=soviet+political+cartoon+&ColorFormat=2&clq=soviet+political+cartoon +&clt=soviet+political+cartoon+&pcl=china%3A%3A%28%28CID%3A34277+OR+CID%3A67300%29%29%3A%3AChina+%28Country%29 119 racial discrimination that included the civil rights march of Black youth in Birmingham in the spring of that year, the March on Washington, and the bombing of Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama on September 15 th , shattering some of the worldwide hope that the March on Washington had stirred. May of 1963 witnessed the convening of the Conference of African Heads of States and Governments at the request of Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia. The objective of the conference was to chart the future of African politics: We stand today on the stage of world affairs, before the audience of world opinion…Africa is today in mid-course, in transition from the Africa of Yesterday to the Africa of Tomorrow…The task on which we have embarked—the making of Africa—will not wait. We must act to shape and mold the future and leave our imprint on events as they pass into history. 243 Although the African leaders convened were focused on the future of African nations, events in Birmingham just prior to the convening of the conference were still on their minds. Many of the leaders at the conference wrote letters to President Kennedy and collectively drafted a resolution expressing their feelings concerning racial discrimination in the United States. While no African nations broke diplomatic ties with the United States over these issues, letters like these alerted the State Department to the interconnectedness of domestic civil rights and international events through colored solidarity movements and organizations formed post-Bandung. In terms of Chinese foreign relations, while there were many important events in 1963, there are two particularly important and interconnected ones that merit discussion here: the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty and Zhou Enlai’s diplomatic mission to ten African nations. 243 Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights, 171. 120 The 1963 Nuclear Test Ban Treaty was viewed by the CCP as a targeted action aimed at the PRC to bind China to the Soviet Union’s policies in spite of the sharpening ideological differences in the Sino-Soviet alliance. 244 The strength of the Sino-Soviet alliance had been steadily declining since 1958 due to both external pressures and internal ideological differences. Some of the external pressures included the persistent and restrictive embargoes placed on the PRC by the United States (and its allies) as well as what Mao perceived as a growing political and diplomatic rapprochement between the Soviet Union and the United States. Internal ideological differences between Mao and Khrushchev concerning the Party line, relations with the U.S., and Moscow’s discomfort with the more radical domestic and foreign relations polices that Beijing was enacting (such as the Great Leap Forward, escalation of tension with Taiwan) had driven a sharp wedge between the two Socialist powers. In 1960 the Soviet Union withdrew approximately 1400 technicians and specialists from China, abruptly ended more than 200 on-going collaborative science and technology projects, and also refused to leave blueprints and equipment in China. 245 This decisive action of the USSR unilaterally terminated economic and technological agreements between the two nations. While the alliance had been strained for a number of years, neither nation nor their respective Communist parties publicly attacked each other. Prior to 1963, each used coded language and terms, such as “revisionists” or “splittists” to critique each other. But in 1963, the coded language to conceal seething discontent changed to open verbal attacks on each other. 246 The Nuclear Test Ban treaty of 1963 was, from the CCP’s perspective, affirmation that the USSR was no longer upholding the Marxist-Leninist line and was allying more and more with 244 Alaba Ogunsanwo, China’s Policy in Africa, 1958-71 (London: Cambridge University Press, 1974). 245 Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals, Mao’s Last Revolution (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006), 7. 246 https://www.marxists.org/history/international/comintern/sino-soviet-split/ 121 the U.S. China of course was just on the brink of testing its first nuclear weapon. It would do so in 1964 but without the aid of its former Soviet ally that had withheld nuclear technology that the CCP hoped the USSR would share. The 1963 test ban was designed diplomatically to frame China’s nuclear program as aggressive and undermining world peace. The PRC responded rhetorically: The indisputable facts prove that the policy pursued by the Soviet Government is one of allying with the forces of war to oppose the forces of peace, allying with imperialism to oppose socialism, allying with the United States to oppose China, and allying with the reactionaries of all countries to oppose the people of the world. 247 Part of this change, was the implications and impact of the test ban treaty on CCP foreign relations. Many of the African nations that the CCP was trying to curry favor and establish alliances with were planning to endorse the treaty. The CCP leadership believed that, for the sake of Sino-African foreign relations, it was best not to try to dissuade African nations from signing the treaty but rather to initiate direct talks to “persuade African government leaders that China’s intentions, even her intention of testing nuclear weapons, were peaceful.” 248 The Nuclear Test Ban Treaty was one of the important issues that motivated Zhou Enlai’s trip to ten African nations. Often referred to as “Zhou Enlai’s safari, the trip, from December 1963 to February 1964, marked an important development in China’s diplomatic relations with African nations. 249 According to Zhou, the aims of the trip were to develop friendship between 247 “Anti-China Plot, ‘Breakthrough’ in East-West Relations,” Peking Review, August 9, 1963, 35-36. 248 Larkin, China and Africa, 68-69. 249 The ten nations that Zhou visits are the United Arab Republic, Algeria, Morocco, Albania, Tunisia, Ghana, Mali, Guinea, Sudan, Ethiopia, and Somalia. [Emmanuel Hevi, The Dragon’s Embrace: The Chinese Communists and Africa (New York: Frederick Praeger publishers, 1966), 141.] Zhou had originally planned to visit African nations that recognized China, yet disturbances in East Africa altered his plans leading to visiting the aforementioned countries. (W.A.C Aide, “Chou En-lai on Safari,” in China Under Mao: Politics Takes Command, ed. Roderick MacFarquahr (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1966), 462n1. 122 China and the peoples of African nations. Additionally, some of the larger, geopolitical aims of the trip were to “win friends and allies in the bid to end China’s political isolation; repair the damage done to China’s image and reputation by her imperialism in Tibet and unprovoked attack on India; make a bid for the leadership on ‘we coloured peoples’; present China as the sole champion of the Third World, and Russia as a betrayer of the cause of the oppressed peoples; take advantage of Africa’s political fluidity; seek new trade partners outside the Soviet orbit.” 250 The tour built upon the CCP’s principle of peaceful co-existence and aimed at continuing to set the PRC apart from U.S. imperialism and Soviet hegemony. As for Sino-African American relations, 1963 marked a metaphorical passing of the baton from W.E.B Du Bois to Robert Williams. Although Williams and Du Bois were never in China at the same time, in 1963 their connections in China overlap. In 1963, Du Bois was concerned about the friction within the Sino-Soviet alliance: [g]iven his solidarity with the Socialist camp, it was natural that Du Bois would be disturbed by Peking’s breaking away from the world communist movement. […] In 1963 he drafted a letter to leaders of both Peking and Moscow setting forth his dimly understood grasp of the issues; yet he sincerely tried to bridge the gap: ‘The Russians must remember that the Chinese have suffered long and are very sensitive. The Chinese must remember that the Russians first made Communism a workable form of society. …The joy of the imperialist is great as they see differences arising in Communist leadership. 251 In August, Chairman Mao released his statement of support of the Black struggles in the United States and therein named Robert Williams as pivotal in encouraging him to do so. Later that 250 Hevi, The Dragon’s Embrace, 142-143. 251 Horne, Black and Red, 328-29. 123 month on August 27, 1963 Du Bois died in Ghana at the age of 95. In September of 1963, Williams’ Negroes with Guns, originally published in 1962, was translated into Chinese and published in China. 252 And in October, Williams went to Shanghai. The overlap of these men in the year 1963, combined with the first major effort of outreach to Black Americans represents a symbolic changing of the guard as articles and other printed and visual materials concerning Blacks became more aligned with Williams’ stand supporting armed self-reliance against the violence and brutality of racism. Similarly, one notices a general shift in representations of Blackness from that of non-violent subjectivity to one of more violent radicalism. This shift in alliances from Du Bois to Williams symbolized larger changes within movements and politics on both sides. While the case of the PRC in 1963 has been discussed, within the Civil Rights movement by 1963 were new attitudes and ideologies concerning Black radicalism that sprang from as well as departed from earlier ones. The idealistic teenagers of the 1960s had become the steely veterans of racial reform. If white liberals blocked proposals for gaining a decent material life for the masses of poor blacks, then they would have to leave our organizations […] If nonviolence could not win the white racists to biracial democracy and justice, then their brutal terror would be met, blow for blow. If equality was impossible within the political economy of American capitalism, that system which perpetuated black exploitation would have to be overturned. No more compromises; no more betrayals by Negro moderates. 253 252 In the Chinese translation of Negroes with Guns, there are three additional essays appended to the book in place of the original text’s postscript. Of the three, two are translated speeches of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the third is an essay by Truman Nelson. One of King’s speeches included in the appendix was one given at the National Press Club (Washington, D.C.) in July 1962. This speech is worth noting because on this occasion King made history as the first African American to give a speech at the National Press Club. (http://www.press.org/news- multimedia/president/2015/02/mlks-day-npc-and-return-visit-wasnt ) 253 Marable, Race, Reform, and Rebellion, 85. 124 As a result, seeds were planted for what would later become more radical groups and movements such as the Black Panther Party and the Black Power Movement. Within Sino-African American relations, in 1963, the confluence of cultural and political changes both internationally and domestically led to reform being supplanted by rebellion. Robert F. Williams and China In October 1963, Williams and his wife Mabel were invited to Shanghai by the Chinese People’s Committee for Defending World Peace (CPCDWP Zhongguo Renmin baowei shijie heping dahui). 254 When originally established in 1949, the CPCDWP was closely tied to the Soviet bloc. 255 But, beginning in 1952, the CPCDWP hosted “small group[s] of foreigners designated in English as ‘permanent guests of the Peace Committee.’ These were foreigners who often for political reasons were unable to or chose not to return to their home countries, who involved themselves in ‘peace’ activities such as writing propaganda and attending international peace conferences.” 256 Many of these foreign visitors, while still representing their own country, would echo the CCP Party line. Both Du Bois and Williams echoed the Party line in their political publications pertaining to the “New China.” Indeed, the CCP encouraged Williams to continue publishing his journal The Crusader, resulting in its increased distribution from 15- 16,000 while Williams was in Cuba to 30-40,000 while living in China. 257 Every issue of The 254 “Luobute Weilian he furen dao hu—Shanghai ge renmin tuanti fuzeren dao jichang huanying [Robert Williams and his wife arrive in Shanghai—Representatives from Shanghai people’s organizations welcome them at the airport.”] October 17, 1963;Wenhuibao. “Shanghai gejie renmin jihui huanying Luobute Weilain fu ren, jianjue zhichi Meiguo heiren fandui zhongzu qishi douzheng [People of all walks of life gather in Shanghai to welcome Mrs. Robert Williams, and strongly support the African American struggle against racial discrimination.”] October 19, 1963 ； Jiefang Ribao. “Shanghai gejie longzhong jihui relie huanying Luobute Weilain fu ren, zhichi fandui Meidi, zhichi Meiguo heiren Zhengyi douzheng [Grand assembly in Shanghai warmly welcomes Mrs. Robert Williams, firmly oppose US imperialism, support the just struggle of African Americans.”] October 19, 1963. 255 Anne-Marie Brady, Making the Foreign Serve China: Managing Foreigners in the People’s Republic (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2003), 89. 256 Ibid., 89. 257 Robeson Taj Frazier, “Black Crusaders: The Transnational Circuit of Robert and Mabel Williams,” in The New Black History: Revisiting the Second Reconstruction, ed. Manning Marable and Elizabeth Kai Hinton (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 94. 125 Crusader published during Williams’ stay in China included multiple quotes of Mao Zedong and glowing discussions of Maoism. Robert Williams and his wife Mabel made their first excursion to China in 1963, visited again in 1964, and finally, accompanied by their two sons, resided in China from 1966-1969. 258 Before relocating to China at the invitation of Mao Zedong, Williams and his family had been living in exile in Cuba. The Williams’ had fled to Cuba following an incident in Monroe, North Carolina where Robert Williams had been president of the local National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP; Youse renzhong xie jin hui) chapter. In that capacity, Williams had organized protests against the injustices that Black residents in Monroe faced, such as the inability of Blacks to access and use local resources such as the public swimming pool. Under the threat of violence from the local Ku Klux Klan and other White town residents, including the local police force, the numbers of the local chapter dwindled. As a result, Williams recruited more working class Blacks to join the local chapter. The stirring of consciousness among local residents, the organizing of protests, combined with Williams’ belief in armed self- defense marked him as a threat to the racial hierarchy and established order of the area. While accounts vary as to what happened, Williams was charged with kidnapping a White couple, the Stegall’s during an incident of tense street protest in Monroe (the couple, held briefly but was released voluntarily and unharmed after the protests ended; Williams always claimed that he held them to protect them from the angry crowd). 259 Due to the fact that Williams was out of state when the indictment was handed down, he was placed on the FBI’s most wanted list. Williams 258 When the Williams’ relocated to China in the mid-1960s, they traveled through Vietnam rather than the Soviet Union. While there was no one travel path to China, many previous African Americans, including the Williams’ when they first came to China in 1963, made their way to China via the Soviet Union. While there is much to be said about this fact, the main point that I wish to make here is that in spite of changes to geographical spaces associated with this transnational network, actors associated with and influential in Sino-African American relations persisted in finding avenues and paths to travel and circulate their ideas. 259 Williams, Negroes with Guns, 46-53. 126 and his family fled the United States and relocated to Cuba, where they were granted political asylum. From Cuba, Williams began forging a political relationship with Mao based upon transnational correspondence. 260 Transnational correspondence, according to Bill Mullen, refers to “Black America’s call to Asia, and Asia’s reciprocal response” during the internationalism of the 1940s-1960s.” In his letters, Williams discussed his revolutionary ideas and the situation of Blacks in America. Though Mao Zedong’s two important statements of solidarity with Black Americans were timed to high points of Civil Rights activism linked to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.—his first statement in 1963 preceded King leading the March on Washington; his second statement in 1968 followed King’s assassination—in both cases Mao responding to Williams’s suggestion; hence these famous statements are examples of this process of transnational correspondence. What comes across in these exchanges is that Mao’s ideas of continual revolutionary struggle aligned with Robert Williams’ ideas of armed self-reliance. William’s ideas on the topic were clearly articulated within Negroes with Guns, a manifesto style text. Within the text, Williams laid out his political philosophy of armed self-reliance for Blacks and buttressed his ideas through examples his experiences in Monroe. While Negroes with Guns was not the only text that Robert Williams wrote, it was the one that gained the most international popularity and had a lasting impact on various movements, including the Black Power movement in the U.S. Negroes with Guns was translated into Chinese in 1963, a year after the text was originally published. While the text is a close translation of Williams’ text, the translator’s notes provide a sense of the book’s place within evolving representations of Blackness in China. In the preface, translator Lu Ren discusses 260 Bill Mullen, “Transnational Correspondence: Robert F. Williams, Detroit, and the Bandung Era,” Works and Days 39/40, 20. No. 1&2 (2002): 191. 127 William’s political stance in relation to Booker T. Washington. The comparison of Washington and Williams is not as great a departure as it might appear. Within the Chinese context, Washington was first introduced through W.E.B. Du Bois. In Souls Du Bois devoted a chapter to Booker T. Washington criticized Washington’s accommodationist stance. Huang Xingqi highlighted this argument in his People’ Daily review of Souls. Similarly, Lu Ren claimed that Booker T. Washington’s advocacy that African Americans develop a patient disposition was harmful to the plight of Black Americans. Although Du Bois is not explicitly mentioned within Lu Ren’s preface, the placing of Booker T. Washington’s ideas in opposition to Williams placed Du Bois and Williams in the same category of leaders whose ideas have aided in the progress of African Americans, in spite of racial discrimination. Additionally, the pictures included (or omitted) in the Chinese translation of Negroes with Guns is significant. In the original text, Williams included an assortment of pictures cataloging the events from his personal life. These pictures included those of him and other men within the local NAACP chapter organized and armed to protect fellow member Dr. Perry as well as pictures related to the Kissing case. In the Chinese translation, the latter is omitted. Other pictures omitted included those of Williams teaching his wife Mabel to shoot a weapon and a group photo that featured a smiling Lorraine Williams Garlington, a Black woman, with gun in hand sitting near Dr. Perry and two others amidst an arsenal of rifles (see images 3 and 4). 128 (Image 3) Robert coaching wife Mabel on forearm use and gun safety in Cuba, ca. 1962 (Negroes with Guns, 18; omitted in Chinese translation) (Image 4) Arms in Perry living room in Monroe. North Carolina. Dr Perry at right; others from left to right are John H. Williams, Lorraine Williams Garlington , and Edward Williams. (Negroes with Guns, 18; omitted in Chinese translation) 129 (image 4) Photograph of Robert and Mabel included in Chinese translation in lieu of image 2 above. Image of couple in Cuba in March 1962 Initially, one could conclude that the omission of Black women was done to frame Black American engagement with the PRC or Black Nationalism as masculine. However, this is not the case as we will see in Chapter Four. The selection and inclusion of certain pictures of Williams probably has more to do with how the CCP wanted to frame him and for what purposes. Just as W.E.B. Du Bois was a voice and face that helped facilitate China’s relations with African nations, Williams, especially by the time he and his family relocated to China in 1966, useful to the CCP for two reasons: he helped increase the CCP’s engagement with African Americans and he provided an international voice or voice from within China that praised and helped legitimize the Cultural Revolution. Williams’ political ideology, his experiences in exile, and his continued interaction with African Americans vis-à-vis The Crusader and other media all assisted the CCP in their agenda. In 1964, during Williams’ second trip, from late September to mid-November, the Williams’ travels in the PRC were more extensive and the family had the opportunity to meet with Chinese people from a variety of backgrounds. Like other foreign guests such as Aubrey Pankey, the organization that invited and organized the Williams’ trip compiled a travel dossier 130 that included a schedule of events as well as notes on the family’s, primarily Robert Williams’, comments and impressions of the New China they were shown. In 1964, the CPCDWP was the organization responsible for the welfare and travels of Robert, Mabel and their sons John and Robert Jr. In the documents that covered the Williams’ travels in Beijing and Shanghai, from September 23 rd through October 26 th , are discussions ranging from impressions of landmarks such as Workers Stadium in Beijing to more personal insights such as the situation of Williams’ siblings still living in the U.S. 261 In addition to being a record of what the Williams’ experienced during their trip to China in 1964, the dossier provides insights into Robert Williams’ performativity of race beyond his speeches at mass rallies or words etched in the pages of his book. The documents also contain detailed information about how to approach Williams so as to give him a favorable impression of China. The first two pages are instructions for how his handlers in China should approach him, including suggestions as to where to take the family as well as demanding that those put in contact with Williams and his family be updated on recent events in the Civil Rights movement. In the dossier, each day of the trip is documented. There are two to three page summaries or debriefings that detail each day’s scheduled events as well as what was deemed interesting or useful commentary from Robert Williams. Unlike the Pankey travel dossier that is more of a schedule of events with Pankey’s thoughts and comments intermittently added, these daily summaries or debriefings (waibin qingkuang huibao) are mostly comprised of Robert Williams’s thoughts or opinions on particular subjects that briefly mention the day’s events. In other words, Pankey’s dossier focuses on what he did, whereas William’s dossier focuses on what he said. 261 Zhongguo Renmin baowei shijie heping Waibin qingkuang huibao Meiguo Luobote*Weilian p 1-105. The Williams’ arrive in Beijing on September 23 rd and travel in and around Beijing, nearby cities, and other places in North East China until they depart for Shanghai a month later in October 23 rd . The sons do not go to Shanghai with their parents. 131 Unsurprisingly, considering the historical and political context of 1964, there are two subjects that feature prominently in Williams’ dossier: the plight of African Americans and the situation in Cuba. 262 In nearly each daily debriefing, Williams discussed issues related to one or both subjects. While the opportunity for Williams to speak in China about the plight of Black Americans may have been motivated by the CCP political agenda that wanted to encourage Williams to seek political asylum in China, Williams used those moments to advance his brand of Black Nationalism. A Chinese newspaper article (10/24/64) describing Williams’ activities since arriving in Shanghai, mentions a moment of solidarity shared between the Williams’ (Robert and Mabel) and the workers at a Shanghai factory. After having the chance to meet with some of the workers, before Robert and Mabel depart, the workers sing “We Shall Overcome”. 263 How the workers came to know the song is not stated in the article (or the travel dossier documents), but the message reiterated is the linking of the struggles of African Americans and Chinese people because “we are brothers” (women shi xiongdi!). 264 In terms of Cuba, much of the discussion centered on Castro and Cuba’s relations with the Soviet Union. On September 29 th , just a few days before China’s National Day, Williams discussed the Cuban situation as well as debated whether or not the Soviet Union deceived the Cuban people (Sulian qipian Guba renmin). One way that Williams addressed the deception issue was through a comparison of goods imported from the Soviet Union compared to some from England and France. Williams remarked that Cuba, at the time, had just started importing 262 This is not to suggest that these are the only topics. There are segments that show his family side through concern for his son’s educations or his wife’s comfort. For example, on September 24 th , a day after Robert and his family arrive in Beijing, one of the first topics addressed was Robert Williams’s two major requests, one of which was the opportunity for his sons, aged 14 and 16 at the time, to study abroad in China. (Waibin qingkuang huibao Meiguo Luobote*Weilian ,3.) 263 Wenhuibao. “Luobute Weilian he furen di hu [ Robert Williams and his wife arrive in Shangahi.”] October 24, 1964. 264 Ibid. ;Zhongguo Renmin baowei shijie heping Waibin qingkuang huibao Meiguo Luobote*Weilian, 53-54. 132 French and British goods, yet it was apparent that these goods were both cheaper and better quality than those imported from the Soviet Union. 265 In addition to the discussion of Soviet- Cuban relations, when asked to remark on CCP relations with Cuba, Williams does not purport to speak for Castro but repeatedly responds that as far as he knows Castro remains inclined to Beijing, but Castro is faced with many difficult situations/issues. Moreover, when addressing Cuba’s lack of support for radical movements, Williams is quite nuanced: Cuba supports them, but the support for their organizations (such as the Revolutionary Action Movement) is a bit hesitant. According to Williams, Cuba’s hesitation should not be interpreted as Cuba being soft or “revisionist”, but simply reflected how cautious Cuba was forced to be due to America’s policies towards them. 266 In addition to Williams’s thoughts, insights, impressions, and opinions, the travel dossier included two other important documents: a write up about Williams entitled “Briefing on Robert Williams” and a one page “Brief Introduction to the NAACP.” 267 The biographical information of Williams in the long opening paragraph reads like a timeline emphasizing particular dates and events that chronicle the evolution of his political ideas. For example, the biography jumps from his birth in 1925 to him joining the NAACP in 1955. From there, the briefing describes his political ideas, much of which seems to come out of the translated Negroes with Guns. The only information about her is in relation to Williams and the NAACP. The trip is not just focused on Williams deepening his favorable impressions of New China, but on enticing Williams to seek political asylum in China (xiwang neng dao Zhongguo lai zhengzhi binan). 268 265 Waibin qingkuang huibao Meiguo Luobote*Weilian , 15. 266 Waibin qingkuang huibao Meiguo Luobote*Weilian, 9. 267 Waibin qingkuang huibao Meiguo Luobote*Weilian ,45-47;105-106. 268 Ibid. 133 Since the trip is focused on Robert Williams, the China that he “sees” during the trip is orchestrated. Prior to his arrival in China for the 1964 visit, the waishi has a list of suggestions that would hopefully make that wish a reality. The list included (but was not limited to): meeting Chairman Mao; while in Beijing, the opportunity [for Williams] to hold a press conference to introduce Black Americans fight against racial oppression; and the chance to visit various parts of China, [such as] visiting people’s communes, schools, and electric plant (dao wo guo gedi fangwen, canguan renmin gongshe, xuexiao, he dianchang.) 269 The “Brief Introduction of the NAACP” document is a five paragraph essay whose purpose was to introduce the Williams’ Chinese handlers and translators, to the NAACP. The essay begins with the origins and history of the organization before discussing current developments in terms of membership and local branch numbers. However, in discussing the founding of the NAACP in 1909, W.E.B. Du Bois’ role in the organization’s history is absent, a remarkable elision in light of Du Bois’ relationship with China and an omission that signals that this is not an impartial or objective history of the NAACP. In the remaining paragraphs, Du Bois is mentioned, yet, he is mentioned as means for the CCP to criticize the NAACP for not shielding and protecting both Du Bois and Williams from Anti-Communist policies in the U.S. 270 The rest of the essay includes similarly scathing critiques of the NAACP, including the claim that the leaders of the NAACP (not named in the essay) did not support the 1963 freedom march in Washington D.C. The essay concludes by juxtaposing China against the NAACP through the example that around the time of the freedom march, China and its people were supporting Black Americans in their struggle against racial discrimination, while the NAACP is portrayed as shrinking from action. From the outset, this brief introduction of the NAACP is a 269 Ibid. 270 Zhongguo Renmin baowei shijie heping Waibin qingkuang huibao Meiguo Luobote*Weilian, 47. 134 biased and reductionist. The NAACP in cast in an imperialist light, thereby helping to emphasize China’s important role as a model for and supporter of Third World movements in general and of African Americans’ fight to overcome racial discrimination in particular. At the 1955 Bandung conference, the CCP staked an early claim to being the ideal leader of the postcolonial Afro-Asian nations. Yet by 1963, and more so by the time Williams' left China in 1969, the PRC seemed to be heading down a path of greater international isolation largely due to its own internal upheaval and radicalism. One way that the CCP attempted to counter and confront criticisms was through the continual placing of African Americans within a larger colored solidarity movement, the parading of African Americans such as Williams, and the perpetuation of this rhetoric in speeches. The harboring of an exiled fugitive fleeing Cuba could signal that the PRC's staunch ideological stance, in light of the U.S. and Soviet Union criticisms, was the side to lean to. As the ideological writing on the wall regarding the impending Sino-Soviet split became increasingly apparent, the PRC was anxious about which direction Castro would lead Cuba. While the CCP was actively trying to persuade Williams to relocate to China, efforts were increased after Cuba decided to side with the Soviet Union in spite of earlier relations with the PRC. Williams’s eventual acceptance of the CCP’s offer of political asylum in China was a snub to the U.S., the Soviet Union, and Cuba. While Williams did seek political asylum in China in 1966, it was due to a number of international events; the decision was not just based on his 1964 trip. Regardless of the circumstances, the end result was the advancing of certain themes from the 1964 trip, such as the notion that Chinese people are brothers to African Americans in the struggle against racial discrimination. This familial referential appears on numerous occasions including Williams’ 1966 speech at a rally commemorating the third anniversary of Mao’s 1963 “Statement 135 Supporting the American Negroes in Their Just Struggle Against Racial Discrimination by U.S. Imperialism.” 271 In the speech, Williams begins by addressing the audience as “Brothers, Sisters, Patriots, Revolutionaries: Once again I want to thank Chairman Mao Tse-tung and our brothers, the great Chinese people for their support of our struggle.” 272 Between 1966 and 1969, Chinese depictions of the Civil Rights movement changed as well, moving away from King’s advocacy of non-violent struggle to Williams calls for armed self-defense. These changes not only occurred because Williams and his family were living in the PRC during this time span, but also because these were the early years of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. The Cultural Revolution, in theory, was about renewing revolution in China “in order that China might avoid the perils of revisionism and complacence [Mao] observed in the Soviet Union.” 273 For Mao, “debate and struggle in the cultural sphere could be an effective weapon in preparing the ground for political struggle.” 274 Out of this protracted struggle emerged an important theme that impacted Sino-African American relations: mass struggle. However, the radicalism of mass struggle that Mao and the CCP was advocating during the Cultural Revolution had a different meaning than Williams’ version. For Williams, radicalism was about Black power. In the 1966 speech, Williams defined Black power: Black Power means that black men want to have some control over their own lives, to have a respected voice in public affairs that affect them […] Black Power is the vehicle 271 “Zhichi Meiguo heiren fandui Meidiguozhuyi zhongzu qishi de zhengyi douzheng de shengming [Statement Supporting the American Negroes In Their Just Struggle Against Racial Discrimination by U.S. Imperialism, 8 August 1963 in 《Zhongguo gongchangdang zhongyang weiyuanhui zhuxi Mao Zedong tongzhi zhichi Meiguo heiren kangbao douzheng de shengming [Comrade Mao Zedong Chairman of the Communist Party of China statement supporting the Black American struggle ]》。Beijing ：People’s Press, 1968, 2-13. (English and Chinese versions) ; Robert Williams, “Speech by U.S. Negro Leader Robert Williams,” Peking Review August 12, 1966. [<www.massline.org/PekingReview/PR1966/PR1966-33P.htm> ] 272 Ibid. 273 Paul Clark, The Chinese Cultural Revolution: A History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 1. 274 MLM Revolutionary Study Group in the U.S, “Evaluating the Cultural Revolution in China and its Legacy for the Future,” March 2007,13. 136 by which we hope to reach a stage wherein we can be proud black people without the necessity of an apology for our non-Anglo Saxon features. The dominant society in racist America is reactionary, imperialist, racist, and decadent as we wish to disassociate ourselves from it. 275 Here, radicalism was about race. But Williams’ Black Nationalist ideas reflected in the above Black power definition was also pushing a specific Black identity that was far from moderate. Mao and Williams’ ideas of radicalism were different in terms of what ends they used radical thought as a means for. But each man did, during this era, define identities within very narrow and rigid boundaries. In the case of Williams, it was no longer about nonviolence, and more about using violent self-defense. The assassination of Dr. King in 1968 was used, especially within the PRC context as a further example that Williams’ armed self-defense political stance was the best way for African Americans to proceed in their continual struggle against racism. In numerous articles published that year, King’s philosophy of nonviolent resistance was deemed by both Mao and Williams as a deciding factor in his untimely death. His death signaled that one could not use nonviolence against a system that was inherently violent and exploitative. According to Mao, “yong geming de baoli duifu fangeming de baoli” (use violent revolution against counter-revolutionary violence). 276 275 Williams, Peking Review. 276 Renmin Ribao. “Meiguo heiren de zhuyi douzheng yiding yao shengli—jinian Mao zhuxi 《zhichi Meiguo heiren fandui Meidiguozhuyi zhongzu qishi de Zhengyi douzheng de shengming 》fabiao si zhounian [Black Americans must triumph in their struggle--Annals published on the fourth anniversary of Chairman Mao’s 《Statement Supporting the American Negroes In Their Just Struggle Against Racial Discrimination by U.S. Imperialism 》statement.”] August 8, 1967. 137 In terms of CCP foreign relations at this time, race was used as a connective tissue to articulate that African-Americans were part of the international colored solidarity due to them also being “victims” of American imperialism. While race and racism was used to critique American democracy, American imperialism, it was also a gateway to discuss issues of class. While race initiated discussions, class struggle was used as a framework for drawing parallels between African Americans and Chinese people. Conclusion: Although the reasons for both W.E.B. Du Bois and Robert F. Williams being invited to China on numerous occasions are important, the unintended resulting changes to Black representations are equally significant. In addition, the idea of comrades in struggle against American imperialism was validated by these two men’s status as exiles. Moreover, their lives in exile reaffirmed Chinese conceptions of the plight of American Blacks and allowed for the CCP to continue propagating the rhetoric of a Sino-Black alliance against American imperialism. Bringing racism and the plight of African Americans to the global stage undercut the early popularity of the U.S. government and aided in furthering Sino-African relations. The CCP further capitalized on how the plight of Black Americans illuminated inherent contradictions between foreign relation promises and domestic realities. Yet, Williams and DuBois’s writings concerning race and colored international solidarity as well as their physical presence in China aided in evolving representations of Blackness that relocated Black Americans from a position of objectification to subjectivity and later to that of violent radicalism. In spite of the fact that neither Du Bois nor Williams spoke Chinese, they were both connected to and ideologically aligned with Mao Zedong. Their travels and writings produced during their respective stays in China not only allowed for the continual spread of Maoism to American Blacks and others in the 138 Pan-African diaspora, but was able to stir a consciousness about American Blacks and representations of Blackness in China. 139 Chapter 4: Black Femininities in Representations of Blackness Shirley Graham Du Bois, Victoria “Vicki” Garvin, Claudia Jones, Eslanda Robeson, and Mabel Williams comprised the cohort of African American women discussed in this chapter due to their interest in and engagement with the PRC discussed in this chapter. This cohort had to navigate the political, social, and economic spaces of the PRC between two dominant discourses: gender equality initiatives geared towards Chinese women and solidarity with African Americans that focused on class and (intermittently) race. 277 To interrogate representations of African American women, this research locates the in-between spaces in which these women’s unique insights and positionality were situated and how their performativity of race and gender disrupted said representations. In doing so, analyzing how their individual assertions and articulations of race and gender disrupted mainstream narratives that led to insights concerning gaps between the propagation and practice of solidarity. It is in these moments of performativity that demonstrated the correlation between representations and performativity, even if momentarily, as well as what tropes, including pre-1949 ones discussed in Chapter One, were still impactful as a means of understanding and depicting the plight of African Americans. This chapter focuses on the intersections of class, gender and race in Maoist China through the travels of these four women. Recent scholarship on these women examines their travels in China as a part of a larger narrative of their lives, works, and political ideologies. 278 Yet, there is limited analysis of the Chinese context that these women navigated during the Cold War era. 277 While Shirley Graham Du Bois and Mabel Williams travel to China with their respective husbands (discussed in Chapter Three), following Gerald Horne’s and Yunxiang Gao’s scholarship on Shirley Graham, I uncouple these two women and place their experiences and roles with discourses on how these Black left feminists alter the landscape of representations of Blackness in Sino-African American relations. 278 Scholarship includes: Gerald Horne’s Race Woman, Radicalism at the Crossroads by Dayo Gore, Yunxiang Gao’s “W.E.B. Du Bois and Shirley Graham Du Bois in Maoist China”, The East is Black by Robeson Taj Frazier, Eslanda by Barbara Ransby, and Kathleen Cleaver’s Self Respect, Self Defense, and Self Determination: Mabel Williams and Kathleen Cleaver in Conversation. 140 Following Erik McDuffie’s recasting of the term, I categorize these women as Black left feminists. For McDuffie: “The Communist Left served as a principal site and viable alternative for black women radicals to agitate for black freedom and black women’s dignity outside of women’s clubs, the church, and civil rights and black nationalist groups.” 279 While McDuffie uses the terms Black left feminists and Black Communists women interchangeably, I use the term Black left feminists because not all of these women politically identified as Communist even though they may have worked in Communist countries or with Socialist organization. I use this framing to articulate these women’s performativity of race and gender within the highly class and (increasingly) gender conscious Chinese context. Accordingly, this framing allows me to locate these women’s performativity within transnational spaces and global networks. These Black left feminists were drawn to the PRC because of the CCP’s progressive policies and laws geared towards gender equality. Victoria Garvin, at a 1968 International Women’s Day event held in Shanghai, provided a description of Black American women’s intersectionality: They have been the beasts of burden in the plantation fields and the unwilling concubines of the slaveholders. They have witnessed their children sold into slavery, while they were compelled to nurse the babies of wealthy white wives and mistresses. At the very bottom of ladder economically and socially, Negro women remained firm and courageous in constant battle against their oppressors. 280 279 Erik McDuffie, Sojurning for Freedom: Black Women, American Communism, and the Making of Black Left Feminism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 3. 280 Untitled Speech, 1968, box 2 flr. 22, Victoria Garvin Papers, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. 141 Garvin’s words pertaining to the state of the African American women reiterated Claudia Jones’ concept of intersectionality. Jones astutely postulated that African American women, concept later named intersectionality, articulated by Claudia Jones. Based on her own lived experiences and frustration with the Communist Party of the U.S. (CPUSA) at the organization’s inability or unwillingness to address both the “woman question” and the “Negro question.” Jones argued that Black women are oppressed along the vectors of class, race, and gender. Addressing the triple oppression of Black women could topple the systems that had, in the words of Garvin, placed Black women at the bottom. Based on their initial impressions of and writing about China, these women imagined the PRC as a site of an incipient revolution that could have worldwide ramifications, including dismantling the exploitative systems of oppressions that thricely oppressed Black women. Judy Wu’s concept of radical orientalism captures how some American activists romanticized and identified with revolutionary Asian nations and political figures. 281 In particular, it is Wu’s application of this concept to gendered relations that is useful in this chapter. In terms of gender: “women of varying racial backgrounds from the West also exhibited a deep sense of admiration for their Asian ‘sisters.’ Through travel and correspondence, they learned to regard Third World female liberation fighters as models of revolutionary womanhood. These idealized depictions exemplified a radical orientalist sensibility.” 282 As such, I will use the concept of radical orientalism to address what attracted these Black left feminists to China and Maoist ideology as a means of analyzing the ideal of China in terms of gender and racial equality. 281 Judy Wu, Radicals on the Road: Internationalism, Orientalism, and Feminism during the Vietnam Era (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013), 4. 282 Ibid., 7. 142 The chapter compares and contrasts these women’s experiences and impressions of the PRC to address how their insertion of gender, class, and racial identities were both destructive and creative to discourses about representations of Blackness. To best address the varied landscapes within in the PRC that these Black leftist feminists navigated, I divide the chapter into three sections: Gender in the Mao Era, Images, and the Politics of Language. This division reflects the different, yet sometimes overlapping, economic, social, and political spaces within the PRC that these women encountered. Section one, Gender in the Mao Era, contextualizes gendered politics within the Mao era and Song Qingling (Soong Ching-ling; Madame Sun Yat-sen) within said context. Images, the following section, begins by addressing the question posed in Chapter Three concerning the omission of photos of African American women with guns in the translation of Negroes with Guns (1963). From there, the section analyzes an image of a Black American woman on a Chinese propaganda poster to discuss the importance of the image within the Chinese context and the Sino-African American relations at that moment in 1968. The final section, the Politics of Language, centers on Eslanda Robeson, Shirley Graham Du Bois, Claudia Jones, and Victoria Garvin to analyze the politicization of language in their interactions, whether it was through meetings mediated by interpreters, teaching a foreign language, or public speeches delivered while living in the PRC. I argue that these women’s performances within the two main discourses underscores the lack of discussions of gender as it pertained to the plight of African Americans. It is in this gap that these women’s discussions about or attendance at event’s focused on the rights of women in general and Black women in particular created space within Sino-African American relations to discuss issues specific to the struggles of African American women that occurred in terms of class, race, and gender. In those momentary spaces, the intersectionality of Black women led to questions concerning identities within the larger 143 group of Black Americans and authority (such as who can speak on behalf of or represent African Americans). Focusing on the role these Black left feminists played in altering of representations of Blackness, I place these women’s thoughts about and experiences in China between 1949 and 1972 in dialogue and consider them within discourses of gender in Maoist China. Gender in the Mao Era Maoist gender equality rhetoric drew correlations between Women’s liberation, economic advancement outside the home, and land reform. According to the CCP, a socialist revolution would inevitably bring about the liberation of women in China. Gender equality, it was argued, would be best attained through women being able to fully participate in the work force; all other matters related to gender inequality would be transformed in the wake of such an economic transformation. Therefore, the CCP actively aimed at increasing women’s labor opportunities in the urban workforces and the rural agricultural sectors. In addition to increased work opportunities, new legislation was passed, such as the Marriage Law of 1950, to challenge the previous status quo of women under patriarchal and patrilocal systems. 283 Moreover, in the early 1950s, the CCP actively encouraged women to train in trades formerly exclusively male such as tractor drivers, airline pilots, engineers, and electricians. 284 While the new legislation applied to all women nationwide, women in the urban areas benefitted more from these new laws in terms of educational and economic opportunities. However, while many women wanted to work, there 283 The Marriage Law of 1950: prohibited forced marriage and marriage of young girls, bride prices, domestic abuse, and gave women the right of divorce [Susan Mann, Gender and Sexuality in Modern Chinese History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 76-79; Della Davin, “Gendered Mao: Mao, Maoism, and Women,” in A Critical Introduction to Mao, ed Timothy Cheek (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 208-209.] 284 Tao Jie, Holding Up Half the Sky, Chinese Women Past, Present, and Future (New York: Feminist Press at the City University of New York 2004), xxvi. 144 were limited opportunities to meet the employment demands of women because of China’s weak industrial base. 285 The Great Leap Forward’s (GLF) emphasized dramatically increasing agricultural production in the second five year plan with the goal of out producing first world nations led to considerably more women entering the labor force. In the state run communes and work units in both urban and rural China, the CCP called upon women to participate in productive labor outside of the household. 286 In order to assist the transition from home to work force, nurseries and kindergartens were established. For women living in urban spaces, while there were more jobs available, women were assigned jobs (and work units) and were not able to choose their job. During this period, while the scope and quality of women’s employment increased, women still had little input in job choice or placement. 287 In the 1960s, however, there was significant roll-back and backlash at including women in the workforce. Some of this roll-back was evidenced by many women in the workforce being re-categorized as dependents (jiashu). Also, in the rural areas where work points were awarded, women were typically awarded less points then men even though both sexes were engaged in laborious field work. Additionally, since class was the primary analytical tool, women’s issues were not seen as separate or fully understood as such. 288 While slogans such as “women hold up half the sky” presented one image of China becoming a gender equal society, the reality was using Marxism-Leninism, which framed the equality of women in terms of class struggle, did not 285 Other laws implemented during the early years of the PRC include Regulations on Labor Insurance of the People’s Republic of China (revised in 1953), Regulations on the Protection of Female Workers (1956). 286 Tao Jie, Holding Up Half the Sky,.xxvi; Jiang Yongping, “Employment and Chinese Urban Women Under Two Systems,” in Holding Up Half the Sky: Chinese Women Past, Present, and Future ed. Tao Jie, et al. (New York: Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 2004), 207. 287 Jiang Yongping, “Employment and Chinese Urban Women,” 207. 288 Justina Tsui, “Chinese Women: Active Revolutionaries of Passive Followers? A History of the All-China Women’s Federation, 1949 to 1996,” (Master’s thesis, Concordia University, 1998), 11. 145 address issues specific to women. Their liberation movement, particularly gender specific issues, were subsumed under the larger class struggles. The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution saw the emergence of new forms and expressions of gendered liberation. Changes in political attitudes and attire led some women to adopt more militaristic hairstyles and clothing for the sake of rejecting bourgeoisie makeup and western attire. Yet the rejection of fashion designated as feminine along class lines ushered in a new gendered standard: masculinity as the normative. 289 Advocating the adoption of male traits as a form of gender liberation gave new meaning to the Maoist slogan “the times have changed; men and women are the same.” 290 Two examples of this shift are the Iron Girls and the female youth of the Red Guards. Iron Girls were, “strong, robust, muscular women who boldly performed physically demanding jobs traditionally done by men—were celebrated in newspapers, pamphlets, and posters.” 291 Liberation, for these women, came through the ability to be in employed in professions previously dominated by men or being depicted resembling their male counterparts. But, in spite of the accomplishment of this cohort of women, they were still referred to as Iron Girls and not Iron Women. While the propaganda of the Iron Girls as model female workers capable of performing dangerous and heavy work as men, but, as former Iron Girls brigade members recall, women tended to be “allocated work that was both shunned and arduous. Those working in urban areas, for example, were often assigned transportation work, which was held in low esteem.” 292 While propaganda images of women, such as the Iron Girls, 289 Bret Hinsch, Masculinities in Chinese History (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2013), 154-155. 290 Ibid., 155. 291 Emily Honig, “Maoist Mappings of Gender: Reassessing the Red Guards,” in Chinese Femininities/Chinese Masculinities: A Reader, ed. Susan Brownell and Jeffrey Wasserstrom (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 255.. 292 Paul Bailey, Women and Gender in Twentieth Century China (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2012), 123-124. 146 depicted gender equality in the workforce, the reality was that the division of labor nor gender norms within Chinese society were fundamentally restructured. The Red Guards are another example of the propagation of the masculine ideal. The female youth who participated in the Red Guards and engaged in the violent radicalism of the Cultural Revolution did so wearing the Red Guard uniforms. For these young women, the only real beauty “was a revolutionary beauty, not a physical but a political manifestation.” 293 But even though the Red Guards called for androgyny and equality, the female guards were organized in homosocial units and their uniforms differed from those of male Red Guards in subtle ways, including tighter fits in the waist or different number of pockets. 294 The enactment of new laws and the increased economic and educational opportunities did move the PRC toward the goal of gender equality. However, laws cannot, and did not, suddenly change long held attitudes. As a result, while women had new rights, it was difficult for some women, especially those in rural areas, to exercise said rights. Additionally, while more and more women were seeking employment outside of the home, household work was still considered women’s work. Thus, women worked the double shift: household work and employment outside the home. The All-China Democratic Women’s Federation (ACDWF; later renamed the All-China Women’s Federation or ACWF in 1957) was established in 1949 as a vehicle through which the CCP mobilized women and promoted Chinese women’s social and political status. 295 The ACWF had four main functions, “implementing Chinese government policies relating to women; leading the Chinese women’s movement; promoting children’s welfare; and being the 293 Rebecca Karl, Mao Zedong and China in the Twentieth-Century World (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 126-127. 294 Bailey, Women and Gender, 123. 295 Tsui, “Chinese Women: Active Revolutionaries of Passive Followers,” 2. 147 international representative of Chinese women.” 296 Song Qingling was designated honorary president of the Chinese Women’s Federation on four separate occasions due to her activism on behalf of women and children. 297 Additionally, her international reputation made her a prominent Chinese figure whom the CCP called upon to meet with international guests, especially women or officials of organizations devoted to the causes of women and children. 298 To facilitate these meetings between her and foreign visitors, Song “had a special budget to invite foreign heads of state and prominent foreign friends for ‘intimate’ dinners at her official mansions in Beijing and Shanghai.” 299 It was in this capacity that Song met with Eslanda Robeson, Mabel Williams, Claudia Jones, and Shirley Graham Du Bois. Soong, in the CCP and the New China, was a valuable asset in terms of soft diplomacy. Her history of involvement in charitable organizations devoted to the welfare of women and children, devotion to philanthropic endeavors, such as the China Welfare Fund, as well as being the widow of Sun Yat-sen established her international reputation and made her one of the highest profile woman in Chinese politics. Instead, her past, was both helpful and a hindrance as she was never fully integrated into CCP politics nor the CCP for that matter. As a result, Song became a high profile figure head with positions such as honorary president of the ACWF and vice-chairman of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Congress (CPPCC). Additionally, Song was associated with establishing friendships between other nations or peoples and China. For example, she was the head of the Sino-Soviet friendship organization. 300 Maoist gender 296 Ibid., 77. 297 Israel Epstein, Woman in World History: Life and Tomes of Soong Ching Ling (Mme. Sun Yatsen) (Beijing: New World Press, 1993); Soong Ching Ling Foundation, Soong Ching Ling (Beijing: China Reconstructs, 1984), 19; Chen Tingyi. 《Song Qingling quan chuan 》[Biography of Song Qingling.] Jiazhou shi ：Qingnian chubanshu [Bluebird Publisher]:1996. 298 Brady, Making the Foreign Serve China, 94. 299 Ibid., 9; 94. 300 Epstein, Woman in World History, 483. 148 rhetoric and Song both represented the CCP’s deployment of women’s bodies and stories to promote New China as egalitarian and new narratives of female subjectivity. It was in this larger context of promotion and representation that Song was the individual that many of the Black American women discussed in this chapter met. While Song did meet with male and female foreign visitors alike, it was the women visitors that the CCP explicitly wanted Song to meet and interact with. For the CCP, Song represented inclusiveness, compassion, welfare for women and children, and friendship thus making her an asset in the party’s soft diplomacy arsenal. Song was placed in figurehead positions or dispatched by the CCP to engage in people-to-people diplomacy with foreign visitors. It was these discourses of gender that not only attracted this cohort of Black left feminist to China, but framed these women’s experiences in China in terms of gendered discourses. Public Bodies As noted in Chapter Three, the photographs of African American women, including Mabel Williams, with guns were omitted from the Chinese translation of Negroes with Guns (1963). The omission of the photographs, and the lack of other visual images of African American women in the PRC combined with the protracted and public political engagement of Shirley Graham and Mabel Williams with the CCP demonstrated that the articulations of solidarity and the metanarrative that it propagated overrode distinct experiences of African American women. In other words, the role of the larger category of African Americans as a metonymic part of the greater colored solidarity ideal was greater than the groups that comprised that comprised the African American population. Moreover, there were few images of Black women in the Chinese context. Therefore, locating the Black American woman, whether in photographs or propaganda posters, is important in terms of performativity of race. 149 Throughout the Maoist era, there was an internationalist component to the policies of the CCP. But during the Cultural Revolution, the CCP firmly and aggressively asserted their solidarity with other colored peoples and movements worldwide. While Sino-African American relations from 1949 to 1972 is the focus of my research, the height of these transnational relations was in 1968. While, as argued in Chapter Three, 1963 was an important year in terms of transitions within Sino-African American relations, 1968 was the year that Mao issued his second statement of support. Additionally, 1968 witnessed more nuanced discussions of the plight of African Americans, in terms of ideologies, leaders within the movement, as well as locating Blacks in many different geographical locations within the U.S. In terms of public bodies, it was in 1968 that many of the existing posters depicting African Americans and the fight against racism were produced. As previously mentioned, Mao Zedong’s 1942 “Talks at Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art” was a guiding principle directing the production of art in the PRC. In light of which, propaganda posters were a serious political and artistic concern. In the Cold War era context, the posters in circulation capitalized on easily recognizable or comprehensible cues as Cold War political capital. In relation to Sino-African American relations, these posters promoted the CCP foreign affairs agenda of colored solidarity that American Blacks are one metonymic part of a global movement. These posters, by and large, depicted the developing discourses about African Americans, including those pertaining to Black women. From the posters depicting African Americans, one poster in particular that depicted a Black American woman as an advocate of self-reliance (see below). 150 (Image 3: 1968, “The evil system of colonialism and imperialism arose and throve with the enslavement of Negroes and the trade in negroes, and it will surely come to its end with the complete emancipation of the black people. Mao Zedong”) 301 In the above poster, in the bottom right corner, the Black American woman, like others within the photograph, is armed for battle. The placing of the gun in posters that depicted an image of the Black women occurred in 1968 for many reasons. First, the CCP alliance with Robert Williams ushered in a new political ideology within Sino-African Americans: that of armed self- protection. In the wake of the assassination of Dr. King in April 1968, the proclamation of armed self-protection and armed self-reliance took on a new significance. The violent death of a man who championed non-violent resistance, in the Chinese press, was characterized as both the destructive extent of American imperialism and that non-violence cannot combat an inherently violent system. Additionally, in the same year, at an International Women’s day speech, Garvin stated: At the very heart of the struggle of the Negro people are the millions of working class Negro women who have historically since the days of slavery shouldered a major share of responsibility and leadership, including that of armed resistance. 302 301 Lincoln Cushing and Ann Tompkins, Chinese Posters: Art from the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2007), 98. 302 Untitled Speech, 1968, box 2 flr. 22, Victoria Garvin Papers, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. 151 While it is unclear whether or not Garvin’s words impacted the creation of the above poster, what is important is that there is a correlation between the words spoken and the image produced. What this tells us is that, in 1968, there were new discourses pertaining to African American women in the Chinese context that were echoed in the words of Garvin and the images of propaganda posters. Equally interesting is that by 1968, the Cultural Revolution was underway. Armed self-defense, as depicted in the omitted photographs from Negroes with Guns and the brief historiography provided by Garvin, was not new for African American women; but what was new was its depiction in Chinese propaganda posters beginning in 1968. Also in the above poster, there is also a shift away from African Americans being depicted as rural. There are two main factors for this change with the first being Williams’ discussions of the geographical diversity of African Americans. While Williams is not the first African American to do so, his discussions concerning the plight of African Americans nationwide, in concert with the nationwide riots following Dr. King’s assassination, altered depictions in the Chinese context (see image 2 below). 303 303 Robert Williams, “Speech by U.S. Negro Leader Robert Williams.” Peking Review, August 12, 1966, 24-27. 152 (Image 1: 1968 “Statement in Support of American Black People's Anti-Repression Struggle”) 304 Second, the shift from rural had to do with the revolutionary consciousness and actions taken by African Americans. Previously, parallels had been made between African Americans and Chinese peasants. This comparison had to do with the idea that African Americans, as an exploited people, were ready for revolution and should follow the example set by rural, Chinese peasants. But, as the Civil Rights movement deepened and intensified, African Americans are no longer ready for revolution; they are engaged in it. 304 Cushing and Tompkins, Chinese Poster, 99. 153 Politics of Language In December of 1949, Eslanda Robeson traveled to the PRC; a trip that made quite an impression on her. That month she traveled without Paul to the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and the People’s Republic of China […] The purpose of Essie’s trip was to attend both the Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF) Conference in Moscow, and the Asian Women’s Federation meeting in Peking (later Beijing). […] Essie traveled with her New York acquaintance Ada Jackson, a Black Brooklyn-based American Labor Party (ALP) activist. According to the Amsterdam News, Essie and Ada were the ‘first African American wom[e]n to visit China since the defeat of the Chiang Kai Shek government and the establishment of the new Chinese government, on October 1, 1949. The FBI carefully monitored their trip, which Essie expressed to friends, in her usual upbeat manner, as an absolutely enlightening and ‘marvelous experience’. 305 Not only was her trip to the PRC historic (and carefully monitored), but it was also for a historic occasion: the Asian Women’s Federation meeting. The CCP pulled out all stops for this conference because it was the first major international event to be held in the newly established PRC. Participants from all over the world were convening in Beijing. The Chinese press coverage of the conference was quite extensive as a number of publications covered all aspects of the impending conference, such as conference preparations, daily conference highlights, and a post conference follow-up. “The conference, which consisted of a series of lectures and panel presentations delivered in Chinese but simultaneously translated through earphones for international guests, gave participants an overview of the new Chinese government’s vision and 305 Barbara Ransby, Eslanda: The Large and Unconventional Life of Mrs. Paul Robeson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), 197-198. 154 strategy for rebuilding the vast country, and of the political and economic changes under way.” 306 By the conclusion of the conference, Eslanda returned to the U.S. optimistic about the young PRC, as exemplified in her speeches given nationwide. Discussions concerning what lay ahead for the PRC did not end with the conference. After the conference concluded in Beijing, Eslanda traveled “around the country, seeing centuries-old landmarks like the Great Wall and various palaces and temples. In addition to Peking and Shanghai, her itinerary included a short stay in Nanking, then a visit to the northern city of Tientsin (Tianjin). The Chinese revolution was still young, just two months old. So Essie was able to witness a socialist experiment in the making as local committees grappled with how to reconstruct their society after the ravages of civil war, and with political differences and social cleavages that were still very real.” 307 Not only was she captivated by what she saw during her trip to the PRC in 1949, but her meeting with Song Qingling also made an impression on Eslanda. In 1949, Song was appointed vice chair of the new PRC as well as honorary president of the All China Women’s Federation. Eslanda and Song met a total of three times while she was in China: Song was part of delegation that greeted Essie’s train on December 21 st ; dinner at the Golden Gate Hotel after Chen Yi’s lecture on December 22nd; and December 23 rd , Essie and Song met for lunch. At lunch, they talked “at length about world politics, the revolutionary changes taking place in China, and especially the condition of women. Essie recalled that Song Qingling pointed out to her the importance of the new Common Law Article 6, which gave new rights to Chinese women.” 308 In these meetings, one can see Soong’s role in person-to-person diplomacy. Yet, these meetings were mediated through controlling language. Although Song was 306 Ibid., 198; Other sources covering the conference include news articles in the following Chinese newspaper: Renmin Ribao, Jiefang Ribao, Funu Gongzuo. 307 Ransby, Eslanda, 199. 308 Ibid. 155 known to speak perfect English, the CCP controlled these meeting through language, more specifically, through translators. In arranged meetings, “it was necessary for Chinese citizens to speak with foreigners through an interpreter, even if they were fluent in the language of their foreign guest.” 309 This level of control reflected the importance of language and its role in creating favorable and lasting impressions of China for foreign visitors. In the case of Eslanda, the politics of language was crucial considering who she was and the timing of her trip. She traveled to China, just two months after the founding of the PRC to attend the first international event held in the PRC. The efforts of the CCP were successful because Eslanda, upon return to the U.S., gave a series of talks and lectures praising the efforts of the CCP for gender equality and their interest in the plight of African Americans. 310 While it “is unclear what kind of questions Essie asked or whether she was at all skeptical about any of the new developments she witnessed, but in her public statements after she returned, her accounts were glowing and supportive of the revolution’s aims.” 311 Additionally, in these mediated interactions between Eslanda and Soong, the language that bonded these two women’s conversation echoed that of radical orientalism. In the convening of these women of color, in this early, if not the first, Sino-African American relations interaction, issues of race are subverted as the discussion emphasized ideals of sisterhood and hopes of economic progress that predates Bandung. Shirley Graham Du Bois (1896-1977), described as outgoing and talkative, was a staunch supporter of the CCP whose pro-Beijing stance shaped her and, by extension, W.E.B. Du Bois’ 309 Brady, Making the Foreign Serve China, 93. 310 Renmin Ribao. “Meiguo funu shiwei zai lianheguo zong bumenwai shiwie qianze lai yi zhuzhang qianlue xingiwei [American women protest outside the headquarters of the United Nations to condemn the demonstrations facilitating acts of aggression.”] July 17 1950; “Mrs. Robeson Back from Asia, Lauds Chinese Reds, ”Philadelphia Tribune, January 28, 1950.; “What is Communism? Mrs. Robeson Searches for Answer Across World; Gets the Same Reply,” Afro-American. July 8, 1950. 311 Ibid. 156 political ties to China and the CCP. Her early trips to China were with her husband, W.E.B. Du Bois. From 1959 to 1963, the CCP was invested in forming political relations with W.E.B. Du Bois and, although she accompanies him on these trips to China, he was the focus of their attempts at currying political favor. While Shirley was an accomplished author, playwright and scholar in her own right, by the time she and W.E.B. traveled to China she acted as a caregiver to her husband. She stated that after their marriage in 1951, “I gave up all of my own work: whatever I was doing seemed so insignificant compared to what he was doing that I let it all go so I could devote myself to him and his needs.” 312 Yet, during one of their trips to China, she was reminded that she too was accomplished by some of the women she encountered in China. She recounts: While in China she met women who couldn’t believe she was spending her days doing housework and waiting on her husband. ‘Look at yourself,’ they said, ‘you’re a teacher, a writer, a musician, and you’re giving up all these things for washing dishes,’ ….’Well you know,’ Shirley said with a grin, ‘those Chinese women laid me right out! I went back home and hired a housekeeper and immediately I became an editor of a magazine!’ […] She had returned with a more feminist outlook, apparently influenced by her encounter with Chinese women. 313 The radical orientalist language within the above passage is repeated within a 1959 article where Shirley told Black American women to look East to China for models of feminism. Within the 1959 article “Better to See Once Than Hear a Hundred Times; Facts Speaks Louder than Empty Words”, Graham stated: 312 Horne, Race Woman: The Lives of Shirley Graham Du Bois (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 23. 313 Ibid., 160. 157 Today, I have seen the People’s Republic. I would like to announce to all the black sisters in the United States, West Indies, and Africa, that there are [sic] a new phenomenon in the world now that could inspire your heart and fill it with hopes. 314 In addressing her “Black sisters”, she is being more than what Horne and other scholars have characterized as a “de facto feminist”. A “de facto feminist” exemplifies “the struggle for women’s equality even when she was not proclaiming this principle from the barricades.” 315 But here and in the previous quote, Graham is clearly reaching out to women of color to encourage them to look to Chinese women for feminist models, even if the language, at times, was laden with orientalist undertones. Out of the women discussed within this chapter, Shirley Graham had the largest public persona in China. Her time and travels in China are chronicled in the Chinese press and, by 1968, her support and endorsement of Mao’s 1968 speech recognized her political ties to China, as well as her bourgeoning international clout. 316 Within Sino-African American relations her niche was outreach in terms of gender, one that her husband was not as engaged with. As a result, “these host governments [China and USSR were] beginning to recognize that she was a major intellectual and political force in her own right.” 317 While W.E.B. Du Bois was the one that the CCP originally pursued, by the time of her death in 1977, she had established her own cultural and political ties with the CCP, so much so that her death was mourned in China as she was laid 314 Yunxiang Gao, “W.E.B. and Shirley Graham Du Bois in Maoist China,” 71; 83. 315 Horne, Race Woman., 22 316 Renmin Ribao. Mao zhuxi de shengming youli de guwi Meiguo heiren douzheng Meiguo heiren bixu na qi wuqi ba douzheng tui xiang qian zou—Luobute Weilian he Duboyisi furen relie huanhu Mao zhuxi zhichi Meiguo heiren kangbao douzheng de shengming [Statement of Chairman Mao strongly encouraged Black Americans to take up arms in their the struggle—Robert Williams and Mrs. Du Bois fervently acclaim Chairman Mao’s Statement Supporting American Blacks struggle.”] April 18 1968. 317 Ibid., 159. 158 in state; an honor only bestowed on high level CCP officials and dignitaries. 318 The process of Shirley going from, in the Chinese press, being referred to as Du Bois’ unnamed wife (Duboyisi furen) in 1959 to Du Bois’ wife Shirley Graham (Duboyisi de furen Xieli* Geleimu) exemplifies her initiative in creating her own political ties to China and the recognition of her intelligence and political clout. 319 Victoria “Vicki” Garvin lived in China from 1964 to 1970. Her time in China during those years highlights the politics of language through her job as an English teacher in Shanghai. For two years, September 1964 to July 1966, Garvin taught English at the Shanghai Institute of Foreign Languages. 320 Garvin was not the only American teacher in the PRC, but she was unique in two ways: She was the only African American women teaching in the PRC and she was the only teacher using African American history to teach English. Garvin’s conscious decision to use African American history as the means of teaching English was a political one motivated by a meeting she had with Malcolm X in Ghana as well as the teaching objectives given to her by the Party. In the meeting, Garvin stated that she promised Malcolm X that she “would spread as much information as I could about our struggle in the U.S.” 321 The CCP also had a political agenda that Garvin, as their teacher, was to push in her lessons. The Party’s instructions were: 318 Ibid., 16-17. 319 Ibid., 228. 320 Summary of Teaching Experiences in PRC, 8 July 1966, box 2, flr. 25, Victoria Garvin Papers, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. 321 Celebrating Women’s History Month with Vicki Garvin at North Carolina: Women’s Commission Black Workers for Justice, 1998, box 1 flr. 1, Victoria Garvin Papers, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. ; Although Malcolm X does not travel to China, he was discussed within the Chinese press. The July 1964 People’s Daily article discussed different aspects and phases of the Civil Rights movement (such as “From the courts to the streets” and “from non-violent ideology to armed self-defense”) to provide a more nuanced understanding of the Civil Rights movement, including ideologies, leaders, and other actors involved. In the article, Malcolm X ( 马尔科姆* 埃克斯) is described as a famous Black American leader whose ideas reflected a larger trend away from the nonviolent resistance ideology of Dr. King. To emphasize this point, Malcolm X, in regards to the Civil Right Law, is quoted as saying that the Civil Rights law is hypocritical. (Renmin Ribao. “Qipian he zhenya ezhi buliao Meiguo heiren de douzheng [Deception and repression will not stop the struggle of Black Americans.”] July 9, 1964.) 159 [S]tudents must strive to become ideologically sound and professionally competent, placing politics in the forefront, to develop into worthy successors to the revolution, and to master language as a weapon in the class struggle, nationally and internationally. 322 While the CCP directive was one in which Garvin did not stray from, she approached the task at hand through Black American history. In addition to fulfilling an earlier promise made to Malcolm X, teaching English through African American history also aligned with the continuous calls of solidarity with and support for Black Americans in their struggles against racial discrimination and American imperialism. So, while a radical and unexpected departure, her teaching material followed the Party teaching directive, CCP foreign relations agenda, and upheld her promise to Malcolm X. Additionally, two of Garvin’s speeches stressed the connection between performativity and authority. At an event in commemoration of the Sixth Anniversary of the National Liberation Front, Garvin began: “As an American and on behalf of my fellow expatriates present, I pay deep but humble tribute to the glorious National Liberation Front on the Sixth Anniversary of its founding.” 323 Garvin’s assertion of her American identity is important because while she is an American, within the U.S. at this time, she still would have been relegated to a second class status. So to purport that she, as an African American woman is speaking on behalf of other Americans in China is a bold declaration of her national identity. Moreover, the content of the speech in conjunction with her assertion of both identity and authority furthers the significance of performativity. The remainder of Garvin’s speech focused on parallels between Vietnamese people and African Americans. After listing seven points that drew parallels 322 Summary of Teaching Experiences in PRC, July 18, 1966, box 2 flr. 25, Victoria Garvin Papers, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. 323 In Commemoration of the Sixth Anniversary of the National Liberation Front, 1966, box 2 flr. 22, Victoria Garvin Papers, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. 160 between the struggles of the two peoples, Garvin concluded that the 20 million Black Americans are drawing inspiration from the Vietnamese in their struggle, brought together by Mao and the CCP’s proletarian internationalism. Vicki Garvin, at a public rally held in Shanghai in April 1968, also enthusiastically supports Mao Zedong’s speech. Again, Garvin’s performativity is mingled with notions of authenticity and authority as she proclaims to speak on behalf of a group. While in 1966, it was on behalf of American expats in China, this time it is “on behalf of the revolutionary black people of the United States and their like-minded white allies.” 324 The above points concerning Garvin’s assertions of identity in terms of nationality support the argument that she created a space to question American identity. Mao’s 1968 speech and the responses from Shirley Graham also illuminated connections between performativity and authority. As early as August 1963, Robert Williams was described in the Chinese press as representing the views and speaking on behalf of African Americans. 325 The placing of Williams in this position as representing African Americans and being the face of the Black American struggle within the Chinese context is interrogated by a People’s Daily article in 1968 that enlisted words of support for Mao’s speech from both Williams and Shirley Graham Du Bois. 326 While Shirley had continued her political relationship with the CCP following W.E.B.’s death in 1963, the pairing of her and Williams in the same article emphasizes her importance to the CCP in terms of Sino-African American relations. In the article, in eliciting 324 Speech of Vicki Garvin, Black American, April 1968, box 2 flr. 22, Victoria Garvin Papers, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. 325 Guangming Ribao. “Song jiao Mao zhuxi guanyu zhichi Meiguo heiren douzheng de shengming [Chairman Mao Support the struggle of Black Americans.]August 8 1963. 326 Renmin Ribao. “Mao zhuxi de shengming youli de guwi Meiguo heiren douzheng Meiguo heiren bixu na qi wuqi ba douzheng tui xiang qian zou—Luobute Weilian he Duboyisi furen relie huanhu Mao zhuxi zhichi Meiguo heiren kangbao douzheng de shengming [Statement of Chairman Mao strongly encouraged Black Americans to take up arms in their the struggle—Robert Williams and Mrs. Du Bois fervently acclaim Chairman Mao’s Statement Supporting American Blacks struggle.”] April 18 1968. 161 Williams’ and Shirley Graham’s glowing support for Mao’s 1968 speech, the CCP is using the words and status of these two individuals to, in some ways, authenticate the sincerity of Mao’s calls of support. Shirley Graham’s performativity here leads to different assertions and questions of authenticity. Conclusion: These Black American leftist feminist were drawn to Maoist ideology and the PRC because of the CCP’s initiatives implements and laws established to create a gender equal society and nation. In spite of some of the contradictions between and inadequacies within Maoism and its policies geared towards gender equality, the cohort of Black American leftist feminist discussed within the chapter, offered glowing praises of Maoist China because, in spite of the contradictions, China was still the best option as the site of a socialist revolution to disrupt racial, gender, and class systems of oppression. In spite of these Black female activists discussing the intersectionality of race, gender, and class in the Chinese context (Eslanda with Song in 1949, Graham Du Bois on occasions, and Garvin in a 1965 speech in Shanghai), the plight of Black female plight was discussed in terms of larger global discussions of class and gender, while obscuring those of race. Being a metonymic part of a larger struggle, while advantageous, also had limitations. For Black leftist feminists in China, being a part within a larger narrative obscured issues of class, race, and gender specific to the lives of Black American women. Yet, the performativity of these women in China allowed them to assert their identity and insert said identities into the larger narrative. 162 Conclusion Since my first trip to China in 2002, I have always been struck by the simultaneous curiosity of yet lack of understanding about African Americans. So, when I began to try and locate other African American visitors within Chinese history, one can imagine my surprise and excitement when I learned that since the founding of the Peoples Republic of China (PRC) and throughout the Mao era, a cohort of African American performers, activists, and intellectuals visited or lived in the PRC for many reasons and with varying degrees of domestic and international publicity. However, recently that this cohort’s sojourns in China have been the subject of research and demonstrated in the case of Aubrey Pankey, some figures influential in shaping this transnational network, are still in the margins of history. While the interactions within Sino-African Americans relations is interesting, the larger implications of these transnational relations is significant in terms of history, political science, cultural studies, and race and ethnic studies. In spite of the significance of researching African Americans within the Chinese context, two questions that are often asked of this research are: “How does this research relate to contemporary Sino-African relations?” and “Did anyone, in the Chinese context, completely and fully understand the plight of Blacks in America?” While both are valid questions, this dissertation explores representations of Blackness with Sino-African American relations to demonstrate the significance of studying this transnational network in and of itself. Sino-African American relations makes many important interventions within current scholarship on East Asian history and culture. In the case of my research, it examines the ways in which African Americans impact and shape Chinese history during the Maoist era. Traditionally, the role of the Black other in the field of East Asian studies is not interrogated or is seen as 163 peripheral. Yet here, I centralize the role of African American in shaping Cold War era Chinese history, impacts of which that have had a lasting effect, among them W.E.B. Du Bois’ role in establishing and solidifying Sino-African relations. Sino-African American relations helps recast our Cold War era history narratives. Interactions within the transnational network of Sino-African American interactions highlights the myriad of unconventional ways in which people and ideas were circulating in this era as well as an internationalist dimension of many political and social ideas that we typically approach from the perspective of national histories. Both sides of Sino-African American relations were attracted to narratives of the other that resonated with their own experiences at that moment. For instance, Chinese citizens in the late Qing and Republican era were attracted to narratives of enslaved Blacks/Black American oppression because of Chinese sufferings at the hands of Whites; or the appeal of Maoism for African Americans because it was viewed and understood as a political ideology that could hopefully bring about economic, social, racial, and gender equality. These examples demonstrate that, in spite of some misgivings, the bilateral desire to find inspiration in the plight or ideas of the other. Additionally, within this research, I situate African Americans and the CCP as actors involved in Sino-African American relations to interrogate their agency. While many of the interactions within this transnational network may have been motivated by a political agenda, the actors involved manifested their agency in a myriad of ways. In the case of African Americans, I analyze their agency in terms of performativity of race and the resulting impact. For example, Aubrey Pankey’s inclusion of Negro Spirituals in performances in China resulting in discussions about the musical genre in the Chinese context. 164 Moreover, in terms of CCP foreign relations in the Maoist era, race was used as a connective tissue to articulate that African-Americans were part of the international colored solidarity due to them also being “victims” of American imperialism. While race and racism was used to critique American democracy and American imperialism, it was also a gateway to discuss issues of class. Mao states on numerous occasions that he believed the struggle of African Americans against racism in the U.S. would lead to a larger struggle of class that would ideally lead to the implosion of American imperialism. While race initiates discussions, class struggles is used as a framework for drawing parallels between African Americans and Chinese peoples/Chinese struggles. In this context of Sino-African American relations, discourses of race are distant second to those of class. The reliance on old tropes was another limitation within Sino-African American relations. In trying to identify with each other, both groups, sometimes unconsciously, relied on outdated tropes to establish connections. For instance, the persistence of the trope of victimization. While Black Americans were faced with oppression, relegating them to the status of victims implies that they were passive. Or, in the case of Jake in the children’s book Wo shi ge Meiguo Heiren haizi, he is a perpetual victim of circumstances and racism. But it is also in the story, especially in the visual depiction of the character, that we see the persistence of racist Blackface tropes. Additionally, one of the largest obstacles in researching Sino-African American relations is the lack of criticism of the PRC by some of the African Americans who traveled to or lived in China. While some of the visitors witnessed contradictions between practice and theory of Maoism or the atrocities committed against people during the Cultural Revolution, this information was not disseminated. While there are a number of personal and political reasons for 165 doing so, the result was the perpetuation that Maoism and the CCP were models of change against oppression in the U.S. Moreover, the CCP continuously pushed the argument that the complete liberation of African Americans would come about through following the example of the CCP. In order to make this argument, African Americans were compared to Chinese peasants. In doing so, the CCP was asserting that like Chinese peasants pre-1949, African Americans have been continuously exploited and are primed for revolution. Yet, what this parallel does not do is take into account the differences between the exploitation of African Americans and those of Chinese peasants. While there are some similarities, the CCP wants to make these groups the same so as to fit a particular model of revolution: the Chinese revolution. Lastly, the category of Black Americans (Meiguo heiren) is never deconstructed to reflect or discuss the myriad of identities, groups, or struggles within the larger grouping of African Americans. The performativity of race and/or gender momentarily elucidates some of the unique struggles, such as those of African American women. Also, between 1966 and 1968, posters and news articles begin to depict the geographical diversity of the 20 million African Americans living in the U.S. Even still, the complexities and differences between regions and cities is not discussed. In other words, there is no questioning of how struggles in the South differ from those in the North or the West, or how the plight of African Americans in Atlanta differed from that of Blacks in Detroit or Los Angeles. Yet, those struggles and difference are still subsumed or are reinserted into the narrative of African Americans struggles against American imperialism and racial discrimination. This metanarrative worked to a degree, but the failure to see beyond the macro level hindered more in-depth analysis or discussions about the plight of African Americans. 166 African Americans within Sino-African American relations also relied on convenient depictions of the China. China, for some of these individuals, becomes more of a symbolic space than an actual place. Meaning, the ideal of China as a site of revolution that could topple oppressive systems was more significant than the physical place. Yet, the persistence of this narrative also has to do with the flow of information coming from the CCP concerning some of its domestic issues, including the successes and failures of initiatives taken. For example, the realities of the revolutionary violence occurring during the Cultural Revolution or the roll back on polices aimed at gender equality was not shared beyond the Chinese borders. Yet, I believe that even if that information reached the eyes and ears of African Americans, the hope of a better future and the belief that China and the CCP would lead the revolution that bring that dream to fruition would have still overridden the less idyllic present realities. This is not to suggest that African Americans were blindly allegiant to China, but in choosing between the two evils of China and the U.S., China would have been preferred. The fact that there was not a complete understanding of the other in Sino-African American relations does not diminish how this area of research raises other questions from which insights can be gleaned from this transnational network. Or, to put it another way, “[a]cknowledging the ambiguities of transnational analogies should not obscure the fact that a range of historical actors who struggled against injustice found insight and inspiration in connecting struggles across national borders.” 327 In light of both the interventions and limitations of this dissertation research into Sino-African American relations, this transnational network, at its core was predicated on the basic need for one’s humanity to be recognized. While Mao’s calls 327 Nico Slate, Colored Cosmopolitanism: The Shared Struggle for Freedom in the United States and India (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011), 4. 167 for solidarity were not backed by any material or financial support, those declarations of support were important in terms of helping to place the Black American struggle within the international context, but, more importantly, the CCP recognition of the plight of Black Americans. While flawed, such as in their understandings of race, the CCP offered the possibility of change and models for dismantling oppressive regimes. With that in mind, I close with a quote by Vicki Garvin discussing civil rights versus human rights that articulates the importance of understanding the plight of African Americans as both a human rights and an international issue: Civil rights actually keeps the struggle within the confines of America. It keeps it under the jurisdiction of the American government. On the other hand, human rights go beyond, and are international [..] When we label it human rights it internationalizes the problem and puts it at a level that makes it possible for any nation or any people anywhere to speak out in behalf of our human rights struggle. 328 328 “New Thoughts on Black Internationalism, January 28, 1965” Victoria Garvin papers, box 2 Folder 22. 168 Bibliography Archives Charles L. 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Creator Brown, Keisha A. (author)

Core Title Representations of Blackness within Sino-African American relations, 1949-1972

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program East Asian Languages and Cultures

Publication Date 07/27/2015

Defense Date 05/20/2015

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Cold War era,modern Chinese history,OAI-PMH Harvest,Race relations,transnationalism

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Language English

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Advisor Goldstein, Joshua L. (committee chair), Bernards, Brian (committee member), Frazier, Robeson Taj (committee member), Johnson, Matthew (committee member), Wilson, Francille Rusan (committee member)

Creator Email keishab241@gmail.com,keishabr@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c3-608925

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Legacy Identifier etd-BrownKeish-3711.pdf

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Document Type Dissertation

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