Dr. Selina Lai-Henderson (Research Assistant Professor University of Hong Kong)

“Langston Hughes, Harlem and Shanghai”

Fakultätssaal (Philosophicum)

June 21, 2016, 4-6 pm (c.t.)

Langston Hughes (1902-1967) was the first African American writer to ever set foot on Chinese soil. At the age of 31, he pioneered what none of his contemporaries or predecessors was able to achieve—rewrite the public image of African Americans in the Chinese cultural and intellectual imagination. Hughes’s sojourn in Shanghai and his encounter with Chinese writers shaped his body of work in profound ways that complicated the discussions of race, national identity, and global citizenship in a transnational arena.

Selina Lai-Henderson is Research Assistant Professor of American Studies at The University of Hong Kong. She was a Fulbright scholar at Stanford University in 2011-12. She is the author of Mark Twain in China (Stanford University Press, 2015), and she is currently working on black internationalism of Langston Hughes and W.E.B. Du Bois in China.

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