Associate Professor
American Literature & History
Duke Kunshan University
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Selina Lai-Henderson
"Throughout history, the powers of single blacks flash here and
there like falling stars, and die sometimes before the world has rightly gauged their brightness."
- W. E. B. Du Bois
“An artist must be free to choose what he does, certainly, but he must also never be afraid to do what he might choose."
- Langston Hughes
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Monograph 1
Mark Twain in China.
Stanford UP, 2015.
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2024. "Langston Hughes’s ‘China:’ Why the previously unpublished poem is a revelation.” The Yale Review (February 1, 2024).
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2023. “‘You Are No Darker Than I Am:’ The Souls of Black Folk in Maoist China.” PMLA. Contracted with Cambridge UP. Special Issue, Translation. Forthcoming, May 2023. ** ​Winner of the 1921 Prize in American Literature (tenured category), awarded annually by the American Literature Society to the “best article in any field of American literature.”
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2022. "Langston Hughes and the Shanghai Jazz Scene." Langston Hughes in Context. Ed. Vera Kutzinski and Anthony Reed, 223-231. Cambridge UP, 2022.
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2022. Co-editor, with Yuan Shu. Special Forum, "Teaching and Theorizing Transnational American Studies Across the Globe." Journal of Transnational American Studies, vol. 13, issue 2. Summer 2022.
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2021. Co-editor, with Shelley Fisher Fishkin, Ronald Jenn, Tsuyoshi Ishihara, and Holger Kerston. Special Forum, "Global Huckleberry Finn." Journal of Transnational American Studies. December, 2021.
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“Appendix B: Chinese Translations of Huckleberry Finn.” In “Global Huck: Mapping the Cultural Work of Translations of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” Co-ed., Fishkin, et al. Special Forum Introduction. Journal of Transnational American Studies. Dec 2021.
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2020. "Color Around the Globe: Langston Hughes and Black Internationalism in China." MELUS 45, 2 (Summer 2020). Oxford UP. In Print.
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2019. "Translation and International Reception." Mark Twain in Context. Ed. John Bird. Cambridge UP, 2019. 317-26. In Print.
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2019. “Alain Locke’s New Negro: Of Words and Images.” Rethinking America’s Past: Voices from the Kinsey African American Art and History Collection. Ed. Tim Gruenewald. Ohio: University of Cincinnati Press, 2019. In Print.
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2019. "American Studies Across the Pacific: Music, Film, and Literature." Reprise Editor's Note. Journal of Transnational American Studies 10, 2 (2019): 469-73.
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2017. "American Vandal: Mark Twain Abroad" by Roy Morris, Jr. Canadian Journal of History (Spring-Summer 2017).
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2015. "Mark Twain the Chinese Boxer: On the Iconic American Writer's Avowed Anti-Imperialism." Stanford University Press Blog (May 7).
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2010. “Andy Warhol.” Encyclopedia of the Culture Wars. Ed. Roger Chapman, 598-599. New York, London: M.E. Sharpe of Armonk. By Commission. In Print.
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2010. "Literature, Film, and Drama." With Peter Swirski. Encyclopedia of the Culture Wars. Ed. Roger Chapman, 324-26. NY and London: M.E. Sharpe of Armonk.​
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2009. “Lowbrow, Highbrow, and the Categorization of Art.” Columbia Journal of American Studies 9 (Fall 2009): 326-329.
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2007. "All Roads Lead to the American City." International Review of American Studies 2, 3 (Sep 2007): 34-36.
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2007. "From Lowbrow to Nobrow." International Fiction Review 34 (2007): 175-176.
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2006. “Monk's World.” Magill’s Survey of American Literature, Revised Edition. Ed. Steven G. Kellman, 171-172. California, Pasadena: Salem Press. By Commission. In Print.
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2006. “Harlem Renaissance & ‘Ghetto Renaissance’: Race Relations in the United States through the Poetry of Langston Hughes and Nasir Jones.” 4th Annual Hawaii International Conference on Arts and Humanities; Proceedings. CD- ROM. ISSN 1541-5899: 3340-3352.
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Articles / Book Chapters / Reviews
Monograph 2 in Progress
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“You Are No Darker Than I Am:”
Afro-Asian Encounters and the Afro-Asian Imaginary
The monograph stems from the desire to contribute to the burgeoning field of Afro-Asian Studies that illuminates the crossings of pan-Africanism, transnational American Studies, and East Asian Studies. The monograph fills a critical lacuna by probing the complex shifts of Afro-Asian discourses from late Qing through the early Maoist era, and the ways in which “blackness” travels across the literary and cultural landscape in these conflicting historical junctures. Delving into different articulations of an internationalist vision, the monograph activates concepts of race and the nation-state as vehicles of inter-cultural dialogue in the hope of transnational solidarity despite its challenges. It allows for the complex landscape of Afro-Asian engagements to unfold with unexpected insight.
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Reviewer for journals:
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PMLA
American Literary History
Asian Studies Review
Canadian Journal of History
International Fiction Review
Journal of Transnational American Studies
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