Translating Booker T. Washington in China: Blackness, racial discourse and Chinese nationalism, 1903–1949

Abstract This article examines the racialised discourse on Booker T. Washington (1856–1915, African‐American educational pioneer) appropriated by diverse Chinese non‐state agents in 1903–1949, in relation to the vicissitudes of Chinese nationalism, as a window to look at the mutually constitutive relationship between racism and nationalism in twentieth‐century China. By paralleling Booker T. Washington's colour and his extraordinary success, Chinese intellectuals creatively established a role model that ran counter to the popular expectation of success. While exerting the sense of shame on Chinese, Booker T. Washington's success created unique rhetorical effects to regenerate China's atrophied national spirit that could otherwise not be done by a white figure. It argues that the conscious manoeuvres of Booker T. Washington's Blackness by Chinese intellectuals bring to view the dual contradictoriness embedded in Chinese nationalist thought, tangled and mutually reinforcing; While Chinese intellectuals' implicit adoption of the coloniser's racial ideology confronted their explicit nationalist statements, their celebration of the unique and timeless quality of being Chinese undermined their aspiration to embrace the world culture.