Dr. Keisha Brown

Blackness in Exile: W.E.B. Du Bois’ Role in the Formation of Representations of Blackness as Conceptualized by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)

Phylon (1960-), vol. 53, no. 2, 2016, pp. 20–33.

An analysis of W.E.B. Du Bois' relatioship with Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in the Peoples Republic of China (PRC) in terms of representation of Blackness as it relates to African Americans is the focus of this article.

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You think about Dubois, the first thing that comes to mind I've had people is the quote, "The problem of the 20th century, the problem of the color line," or his discussion about double consciousness and the veil in the souls of black folks. We have certain traditional narratives we think about his work. But I think in the last 5 or 10 years, as there's been more scholarship about black internationalism in general, that his work as well as that of other individuals, and then rereading these texts about aligning with different people that goes beyond, say Europe, or goes beyond ... Even in cases of African nations in how to look into Asia for this idea of what we can look for.

I think his work talking about China and Mao and those particular speeches and things that he wrote were definitely overlooked because you have to ... like Gerald Horne who wrote a book about black and red, in 1986. It was there, but it's gaining a new resurgence of interest right now and thinking through internationalism and there's more scholarship devoted to it. I think that's where it is. But with the Dubois, I mean, you can pick so much from his work. You can just think about his academic writings, his literary writings. I mean, you can frame him in so many different ways. I think for him, especially, it was a matter of what we picked and chose about his work and focus on and highlight. A lot of times, unfortunately, the discussions about China get lost.

I mean, the same thing about, say Paul Robeson. He was very much about Afro Asia and had those ideas of Afro-Asian collaboration. But we don't always think about that first, thin, about Robeson, think about the performer, and think about other things about him, but not about that discussion about Asia as well. I think it happens a lot in some of these individuals who have such a huge profile and have so much to choose from that a lot of times that discussion about Asia got swept under and other narratives. Now we have a resurgence of people looking at this scholarship and saying, "Okay, what can we learn from these lessons?" Especially thinking of how we rethink, say, cohort studies, or even in this particular moment right now thinking a lot of questions about what can we learn from what happened then and now. Now this is a time as well where people look back to these writings and thinking through it as well.

That's how I think about Dubois' work. But again, there's so much to choose from with Dubois, where it's like, "Well, where do you ..." He changes and evolves as he goes throughout. Because I mean, even his early writings in the 1930s, when he went to China, he's very much like pro Japan and China should follow the rules, the model of Japan. Let Japan be this larger Pacific nation that's leading all the other Asian nations. Then he comes back in the 50s and 60s like, "I was wrong. But I'm here now." Even he evolves and changes his ideas over China as well. It's kind of how do we think through what he was talking about as well?

I think part of it, too, is that in recent years with the rise of China's role in African affairs, political economic affairs, there's also been more scholars looking at the history of these relations, like how do we get here? Because if you look at Chinese history, I mean, you can go back to writings about this kind of darker person that go back as far as some of the Tang Dynasty literature. Then you have, in the Ming Dynasty, you have giraffes in the Chinese imperial court. How do you get giraffes to China? How Zheng He, in his voyages in the Ming Dynasty, was going to places on the continent. There are these collaborations there, but I think a lot of that, it's getting a resurgence in interest because of what's happening between China and these various African nations, in terms of their political-economic relationships in those as well. I think that's also part of it too, where now people are trying to figure out where does all this fit in and how do we see this and how did this happen, and then where do we go from here?

I think one of the best examples about Dubois' racial performativity is his discussion and his speech in 1959, his China and Africa speech that he gives on the anniversary of his 91st birthday. It's in Beijing at Beijing University, Beida, which is a premiere university in China's ... The creme de la creme, the Harvard of China, basically. He's their invited guest. He gives a speech. In this speech, one of the best phrases I think about how he thinks about and thinks to himself is ... I'm pulling the speech for myself, go back and look at it.

But in his speech, he says, "I speak with no authority, no assumption of age, nor rank. I hold no position. I have no else. One thing alone I own, and that is my own soul. Ownership of that I have even while in my own country, for near a century, I have been nothing but a n*****. On this basis and this alone, I dare speak, I dare advise."

For me, I love that passage where he speaks to how he sees himself in that moment, what he sees his role as. But also he brings into the equation the racial component. Think about it, by 1959, just four years before his death, dubois is accomplished the world over. Yet he still ... Even in my own home country, I'm still relegated to this second-class, third-class position in how they see me and how they see people look like me.

I think him being vulnerable enough to say that in this huge audience really speaks to how he's trying to engage with discussions about race, because he didn't have to do that. He could've said a lot of other things. But the choice to actually put that in the speech in the second paragraph, early on at the beginning, is a very conscious choice of how he sees himself, but also how he understands how blackness is understood in other spaces.

Another good example is the UMass Amherst has a really good collection of materials related to Dubois, both him and his wife. They actually have a video from ... I think it was the 1959 trip. In that video, they actually have, at one of the receptions, Dubois and his wife actually choose to sing Negro spirituals. Why are you making that choice to sing that particular type of music? What are you trying to say in that particular moment? Does it go back to his roots and connections to Fisk University, which is another HBCU here in Nashville and their infamous Jubilee Singers. Does it go back to his understanding of how he thinks about black people or what is the connection? But he's making a conscious choice, him and his wife, to engage in that performance.

What happens is how does the audience understand them? Does it give the audience a more three-dimensional understanding of black people in black lives in America? Because I think that's one of the things that he really does is he makes a more nuanced perspective about being black in America in some ways and how his role and what he's doing in those two [inaudible 00:12:36] were thinking through, and his scholarship about it, and how he's trying to engage in a Chinese audience who may have never had an encounter with an African-American prior to this.

If they had, it had been a long time. Because the last time we had a whole cadre of African-Americans in China was in 1920s Shanghai, right before we saw the Second Sino-Japanese War, we had the invasion by Japan in Nanjing. It might've been a while since they had an influx of African-Americans and it went beyond, say, the music scene. A lot of those were jazz musicians. Now we have this other individual who's coming to speak about what it means to be black and giving a more maybe nuanced perspective of what that means. I think his choice to make certain actions and what they're choosing to do and how they're choosing to present themselves based on how they identify, how they see themselves, is also part of how we see these shaping narratives of what it means. I think in my own experience, it really make me rethink this idea, because I was using it, but not really thinking through it, if that makes any sense.

But it wasn't until one of my last research trips in grad school where I was hanging out with some friends and they had some friends over and we were celebrating summertime, Beijing, hanging on the patio. It's a good time for everybody. One of the guys who was there, he was a Chinese guy was like, "I love you and I love all black people." I was like, "Whoa." It hit because I was like, "I might be the first person they might have ever met. Maybe my energy ..." because I think I'm cool. I like me. "Maybe it was just my energy." But it made me really think like, "Oh. What are the magnitudes? It's not just about myself anymore." It's also about how you're being perceived, where a lot of times it happens in the US where you're not yourself. You speak somewhere, to say you're speaking for myself.

But in China it was a different weight because they had no other space to gauge how other black people interact. What they were doing, how you have to maybe take some time to be self-aware and self censor and be self-conscious about what their actions were and what they were doing, in very invisible or in closed spaces. That made me think about more deliberately, "What are they doing and what choices are they making as they're engaging in these public spaces and being invited by China. Why did you take the invitation? What does that mean for that level of understanding of why you want to do certain actions and how you're representing and putting your ideas about blackness out there in a space where they might not have a lot of the other tools, because you might be the first person who might have ever really engaged with on this level."

And so in her book, she kind of breaks down these different organizations and what their function is and what they're trying to do. And the idea ... and one of the things that she mentions that a lot of other scholars mention as well is that the PRC is this new China. They were a new country that was born in 1949. They're trying to make their name known on the scene. And it was written in the kind of context of the Cold War, and how we think about what China is doing, and how we think about China as this kind of actor on this particular stage, and not necessarily they see themselves as the emerging third world, because they weren't "fully colonized" in terms they still had their own Ching Dynasty government. But they did have colonial interference in the form of, say, port cities and treaty cities and those kinds of concessions in major cities.

So they did have some colonial influence and consequences as a result of the series of Opium Wars. But they don't see themselves in the same way. And so the actions of China, how they're shaping what's going on, but also how they have a two-prong formulation's agenda. The idea is to want to be seen as a legitimate government of China. Because again, in many cases they were looking to the Republic of China, which we know of as Taiwan, because the former Kuomintang had to flee China, mainland China, and go to Taiwan. And so many different nations, including the United States itself, was still recognizing the Republic of China as the representative of all of China. So this one island representing this huge land mass known as China. They're trying to be seen as legitimate. We are the legitimate government of the new China. This new China.

Then, two, trying to build some clout in the new political scene. How do people form collaborations and alliances that in many cases go just beyond leaning to one side? I How can we build other alliances globally that kind of build up our own global formulation's agenda, where we're seen as, in some ways, kind of a player on a global stage as well. And so Dubois helps them do both of those because he has such a huge presence globally, whether it's in the United States or it's within various African nations. He's also part of all these other different Afro-Asian writers groups and things.

So he has a huge global presence and has an audience. And so the PRC is really trying to tap into that audience that he has because they know that he as an individual has traveled the world and people know him, his scholarship, and they know, in some ways, kind of an unofficial official endorsement by him would go a long way for what they're trying to do is in building relationships with emerging third worlds, countries in Asia and Africa that are coming out of this colonial moment, post World War II. And so that's what his speech, again, in the 1959 speech does for them. It kind of says, these countries, he tells Africa, look to China. He specifically says, look to China as this example, because China was trying to offer different resources, loans, even guerrilla warfare training, Mao's little book, On Guerrilla Warfare, they had a small training camp in South China. It was interesting. But it's this idea of, they're trying to use this clout.
So they want to be seen as legitimate and they also want to be seen as forming their own alliances, outside of just the one that they have with the Soviet Union. And so he does both of those. He knows in many cases that there is an agenda here, but I think it's also important that he also has his own agenda in why he's going to China and what he's doing as well. And so I think, again, this idea going back to performativity, why did he take the invitation? What is he trying to do himself in that moment when he and his wife go in '59? And they go, I think, in '61 again, and I think maybe one other time before he dies in '63. So I think that's part of it. And what we see is that his work leads to ... it taps into what Mao's doing, Mao's formulations agenda, but it also taps into the work being done by, who was ... [Joanne Lai 00:34:03], who was then the minister of foreign affairs, who was making different trips to Africa to go visit different nations as well.

And so they were already kind of laying the foundation and then Dubois' coming in saying to the various nations, actually look to China as its model, actually kind of builds that [inaudible 00:34:20] foundation actually gives them that almost credibility they're looking for in terms of this legitimacy they want to have, and also in terms of building allies outside of the Soviet Union.

What tropes of Blackness did Black Americans traveling in Cold War China have to contend with?

So even the kind of victories, like we see in the speeches, he talks about the moves and the victories of the Civil Rights Movement, but it's still under this guise of fighting against American imperialism, fighting against oppression. So you'd never see this idea of moving beyond oppression for Black Americans in this kind of Chinese narrative, whether it's racial oppression, economic oppression, social issues. It's never beyond this idea of Black people as oppressed, and a lot of that is part of the narrative. That's not the only part of what it means to be Black American, Black American history, but that is the part that is really highlighted in those particular discussions of African-American life and work in China in certain places.

I'm not sure if it was because one of the first books translated talking about African Americans was Uncle Tom's Cabin in 1901 by Lin Shu, it was Uncle Tom's Cabin written by Harriet Beecher Stowe, and how that translation process in and of itself was a little problematic. But the idea is that it comes from that narrative of understanding about slavery and then we jumped to civil rights and it's like there's more than just oppression that navigates the Black American landscape. What about culture? What about different literary things? And so there are moments that are dotted with this in the early 20th century, but the overall narrative is about oppression and how we can use that language and tools you all have been using to talk about our own oppression and think about it, but this was the idea of Black Americans and an idea of oppression and never moving beyond that.

I think the second trope is one of just lack of understanding. There's limits to understanding, whether it's through the translation of a scholarship, whether it's through engagement or whatever the case may be. There's just not a lot of understanding and so you have these very one dimensional or two dimensional kinds of understanding of African-American experience. They might know some things, but not a lot. I think one of the things that, not just Du Bois, but another research subject is Penkay who went in the 1950s. And he goes to China, he's a classically trained baritone. He's a contemporary of Paul Robeson, but he's not as well known. Because of his politics, he gets kind of basically just run out of the kind of mainstream American narrative, but when he goes to China, one of the printed programs from his performance actually has a two-paragraph blurb in the back, kind of a write-up about what Negro spirituals are and kind of talking about slavery since there is an understanding about slavery.

So he kind of gives it something else, "You know about slavery? Here's another dimension to it. Give you some cultural understanding of how we get this unique sound known as Negro spirituals." He translates some of the spirituals. He comes from Hampton Institute now known as Hampton University. He goes to Oberlin, he gets trained in Boston Conservatory, goes overseas to Vienna, he studies. And so he also knows how to translate and transcribe some of this music and compose it as well, and so it was very close to him. And so he also kind of changed the African narrative about what it means to be Black by adding to the existing understanding and frameworks that are there.

But those two big ones, the one of oppression, you never see it moving beyond this idea of Blacks as oppressed. You never see anything speaking beyond that and even the positives are framed under this trope of oppression and Blacks always being oppressed. And then the second one is just a lack of understanding, and so you're going into a space where whatever you do might be seen as new and you might be educating someone unknowingly, and how that might also be some kind of other way of how do you navigate China in the COVID era in this way?

They're being invited to China, but what does that mean? I mean, invited to China. And then you have in that discussion, two different dimensions. Those who are invited who come to China and stay in Beijing are guests of the state, so they see a limited view of China themselves, and those who come but they're not necessarily invited guests like Vicki Garvin who was now teaching in Shanghai before she moved to Beijing, and how even her navigation through China might be different from say Du Bois and his wife, or Robert Williams and his wife, because they're navigating different spaces depending on the state involvement with them. I think regardless of what level of engagement they have, they still had those two big tropes of dealing with, one, the narrative of oppression that's just always there, and then, two, the idea of just a lack of understanding of African-American history and Black culture and all those other parts of it as well.

We still see a little bit today. Back in the sixties, it was very politicized. They had a different political way of talking about it, but even today it's very one dimensional based on kind of globalization and pop culture where somehow... I don't know if you've ever been, but the hip hop clubs in China are very interesting, and it is [inaudible 00:23:55] of two spaces and so, just like the idea of what they think Black culture is, seeing some random fashions every now and then was like, "I don't know what this means but okay." But again, it's the idea of just attaching to certain pieces without necessarily knowing what's behind it, and I think that's something that we're still kind of grasping with today, even in spite of the internet and everything else.

And so I think what happens is, Dubois' kind of work, he's talking to his, by this point, he's living in Ghana, holds a lot of weight to where we see in 1971, there is a vote issue where up until this point in the United Nations, the seat for what was representing China was actually the Republic of China, which is what we know as Taiwan. It was not until 1971, that China as the PRC actually gets recognized as the legitimate body governing China on the global scene. And many of those votes came ... this was not the first major vote but this was the first vote where China became ... the PRC became recognized as China and many countries who voted for it this time around were African nations they had relationships with. And it wasn't just political relationships, they started to have economic relationships where you have, later in the seventies, they're up building up say, the [inaudible 00:36:41] railway, all these other projects of development are happening, have collaborations going on where they start to build that.

But I do agree that Dubois was part of that because he gave China some form of credibility, in a way, through his endorsements, unofficial endorsement, by saying, I believe in what they're doing. I have seen the new China for my own eyes. I've come in to basically, the belly of the beast, if you will. And I've seen the development they're doing, how they're building factories, how this new China is pushing for progress, how they're pushing for mottoes of when the women hold up half the sky. So they're pushing for gender equality. So he was impressed by what he saw. Him and his wife wrote a piece after their first trip. And I think one of the things that stood out to me was like, we saw this development project. This girl was working on this heavy machinery, but she had pigtails.

So this girl in pigtails was working this huge machinery, like the tractors and ... but it's like, they were very impressed by what they saw in development. I think that gave a different level of authenticity to what China was saying. But again, he was very much propagating the PRC's new ... the new China myth. I think what he did see was good, but he also had a very constructive view of China, what he saw because he was a guest. And while he was very much endorsing China, you have others who did not. Like I said, Aubrey Pankey went in the fifties and he was like, yeah, you keep showing me the same school. I've seen the same school three times. I've seen the same factory twice. Is there nothing else?

And so we don't see him kind of being held up as this same kind of champion when he goes live in the German Democratic Republic, because he was very, he was much more critical of what you are showing me? I've seen development. What else is there other than these few spaces you're showing me as a guest? So there's a different level of what they're both trying to do. And I think for Dubois, he had his own agenda as well, but I think it was the one that was useful for the countries for their development, because they were able to, in some ways, use the resources of the PRC and form some alliances. Now where it is today is a little bit different in terms of relationships now. But I think early on it was with the idea of showing another model of development, kind of in this post-1955 Afro-Asian moment, that everyone was kind of thinking about colored nations as this alliance and that alignment movement, so these kind of non-traditional ways of organizing.

To go to the other part about kind of Maoism and the Pan-African diaspora, there's a lot of really good scholarship, thinking about Maoism and its attractiveness. And it was, if you think about people such as Claudia Jones, who unfortunately was deported from the US, but how she was very much into thinking about ideas of Maoism and kind of all those ideas as well. And so you have a lot of different individuals who, the ideas of Maoism are attractive because they are in some ways open to interpretation. How you can think about this idea of a model of resistance and pushing back against the systems that be. How democracy in some ways is not really supporting people. How democracy has failed some of these individuals and nations and organizations. And so Maoism becomes this ideology that, combined with other ideologies, becomes very attractive to different people within the diaspora, as you can kind of see in people such as Nkrumah in Ghana where he's using some of Maoist language as well.

So there's attractiveness, this idea of what Mao was saying about the role of say, propaganda and propaganda art that becomes useful for people like say, the Black Panthers and others. But what he's saying is his ideologies are open to where you can insert your own ideas. And so Mao was very good in terms of writing and in terms of orating, to where his ideas could gain traction beyond just being China specific. And they do hold weight because not only what he's saying, but also because people are looking at China and saying, hey, you're saying this, and also we see this backed up by what we see being propagated by the new China development, what we're being able to see in terms of what China is doing in terms of on development. So I think those two parts led to Maoism being attractive in the diaspora in terms of how people were thinking about his ideas combined with the fact that there was some or what they saw some images or examples of the work following the words.

How did your own travels in China inspire you to conduct this research?

And I was really confused, why can't I be black and American? What is the issue here? How do we get to these understandings about Black people, and how does that in some ways inform how we think about these other histories? And so it wasn't until grad school when I took a course with Professor Wilson, and it was an African-American grad course, but it was through American Studies Program. And we read about the Panthers and they were selling Mao's Little Red Book. And I was like, "Wait, hold on. Wait, what happened?" And so I started taking a step back and looking and then kind of came across through Du Bois' writings, and from there just kind of really went into this whole kind of Cold War, 1950, 1960 era of all these white people going to China, what is really going on and how to be understood and perceived and how do we get from there to here today?

And so that's kind of where I started with this kind of understanding. And I was very surprised because when I started the research, there was very little of this in the modern Chinese history courses. There's very little discussion about this moment. So about the Cold War era, you don't talk about the transnational relations they're building with African-Americans or with African nations. It's not there in those narratives and I'm like, "Well, why not?" And so I think for me kind of trying to figure out why those narratives are excluded and how if we research those individuals, how that changes our understanding of that period as well.

And so that's kind of where I started with this kind of understanding. And I was very surprised because when I started the research, there was very little of this in the modern Chinese history courses. There's very little discussion about this moment. So about the Cold War era, you don't talk about the transnational relations they're building with African-Americans or with African nations. It's not there in those narratives and I'm like, "Well, why not?" And so I think for me kind of trying to figure out why those narratives are excluded and how if we research those individuals, how that changes our understanding of that period as well.

So I think for me, that's kind of how I got to this moment of, one, addressing anti-Blackness, and two, also de-centering whiteness in my research. We decenter whiteness, especially in Chinese foreign relations, it opens up a larger narrative where we don't start in 1500 with the rise of European imperialism. We start before that, because you had this whole Afro-Asian trade centered around the Indian Ocean prior to that. So how do we go from that knowledge to that historical amnesia?

So my own kind of travels and just trying to figure out how people did not know or believe that I was American.