Masking Global Blackness in Shanghai and Chongqing, ca. 1945

Date(s)： 2026/02/12

Time： 15:00~17:00

Venue： Archives 3rd Conference Hall

Speaker：何穎佳教授（美國麻省大學副教授）

Organizer： IMH

*英文演講
 
Abstract: 
This talk explores how images of global blackness were explored and deployed by artists in modern China. In particular, this talk focuses on the designer and publisher Zhang Guangyu’s Comic Journey to the West, published in late 1945. Curiously, the cartoon figure of Jim Crow – emblematic of American racial segregation – appears several times in Comic Journey to the West. This talk first considers the cultures of blackness in Shanghai, from performances of jazz, theater, animation, blackface minstrelsy to transatlantic racial performances that also traveled across the Pacific. I then turn to exploring images in which Zhang’s circle of print artists explicitly explored images of blackness as a cipher for global oppression. In the last part of this talk, I explore the implications of Zhang’s expropriation of blackness, which I will suggest informs another way to understand Monkey King’s trickster figure in radically inverting global order and envisioning new possibilities of relational belonging.