"Black like Mao" : the utilization of African American literature in the 20th century China

Abstract

The historical and political relationship between Afro-Americans and Chinese was a critical inspiration to Chinese readings of Afro-American literature in the 20th century. But this inspiration often depended on and perpetuated readings of Afro-American literature and history as stereotypes of victimization. By looking at twentieth-century Chinese literary production that addressed the idea of Afro-Americans, I set out to examine the reading patterns and to understand the origins of these prevailing stereotypes. China’s transformations and crises from a feudal empire to a half-colonized nation, and its steps toward modernity and Communism, have generated anxieties over the basis of Chinese national identity. Chinese literary scholars and translators sought to establish and strengthen hard-won self-determination. These anxieties and goals led Chinese translators and readers to assert an imagined alliance with African slaves and Afro-Americans based on the endurance of pain and oppression. In this belief, they analogized colonial and imperialist oppression of China to the enslavement of Africans and the violent prejudice endured by Afro-Americans in a white-dominated society. Therefore, in China a key criterion of whether to translate and republish foreign literature was whether that literature addressed social problems and offered practical remedies to victimization. The Chinese intellectuals treated in this dissertation regarded the so-called “Negro problem” as evidence of the racially oppressive nature of capitalism and valued the Harlem Renaissance and the later Afro-American protest novel for document of this oppression. However, this utility-centered criterion led to numerous misreading of the social terms of racial oppression in the U.S., the regional dynamics of class discrimination, and the cultural depth of Afro-American literature. The dissertation begins with Lin Shu and Wei Yi’s 1901 translation of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The translators used it to represent the potential for Chinese suffering at the hands of Western imperialists, while highlighting slavery’s oppressive brutality. Their invented alliance was the foundation for subsequent intellectual interpretations of Afro-American literature. Yang Changxi tried to extract from Harlem Renaissance literature evidence of suffering in his 1933 Heiren Wenxue (Black American Literature). He searched for remedies that he hoped would fix problems that China faced in regard to imperialism. Stepping into the Maoist 1950s to 1970s, the Communist Chinese government transformed Afro-American literature into a weapon against dissent from revolutionary ideologies. By focusing on the protest novel, the translators overlooked themes related to Afro-American cultural expression and the aesthetic dimensions of texts translated. In the first published translation of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man in 1983, translators and editors overlooked crucial elements: Afro-American folklore, blues, jazz, and racial tensions within leftist political organization depicted in the novel. This utility-centered reading paradigm subordinated the literary aesthetics of Afro-American literature to political goals. It also instrumentalized Afro-American literature in the service of China’s building up and strengthening its national identity. In viewing the literary dynamics of translated texts under this paradigm, this thesis hopes to open a new perspective on the promise and limits of understanding race in an international literary context.