During the Cold War, America’s ideological competition with authoritarian regimes compelled American leaders to address their country’s own longstanding racial inequities, a frequent source of criticism by communist nations. While the Chinese Communist Party expressed solidarity with ideas of equality for African Americans, tensions as well as tropes around African Americans persisted in China.
What do Sino-African American and Sino-Black relations look like today? What roles do ideas of race and ethnicity have in US-China relations? What does this mean for a multi-cultural Australia?
The United States Studies Centre hosted an address on these issues by Dr Keisha A. Brown, an Associate Professor of History at Tennessee State University and expert on modern Chinese history and Sino-Black relations, followed by a discussion with USSC CEO Dr Michael Green.
Dr Keisha A. Brown
Assistant Professor of History, Tennessee State University
Dr Keisha A. Brown joined Tennessee State University as an Assistant Professor of History in the Department of History, Political Science, Geography, and Africana Studies in the College of Liberal Arts in 2015. Brown received her BA from the University of Notre Dame with a double major in American Studies and Chinese and her PhD from the University of Southern California. She is a historian of modern China, with allied interests in race and ethnic studies, postcolonial theory and social and cultural history in modern East Asia. Specifically, Brown is interested in modern understandings of what she has termed Sino-Black relations.
Dr Michael J. Green
Chief Executive Officer, United States Studies Centre
Dr Michael Jonathan Green is chief executive officer at the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney. Previously Dr Green was senior vice president for Asia, Japan Chair, and Henry A. Kissinger Chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) and director of Asian Studies and Chair in Modern and Contemporary Japanese Politics and Foreign Policy at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. He served on the staff of the National Security Council (NSC) from 2001 through 2005.
