Keisha A. Brown

Keisha A. Brown is a 2007 graduate from University of Notre Dame with a bachelor’s degree in American Studies and Chinese. In 2015, Keisha earned her doctorate in East Asian Languages and Cultures from the University of Southern California. Her dissertation, entitled “Representations of Blackness in Sino-African American relations, 1949-1972,” examines the representation of Blackness as conceptualized by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the influence of said representations within Sino-African American relations. Sino-African American exchanges created hybrid spaces where ideals about and demands for social transformation were communicated. Her research primarily uses Chinese source materials to explore the tensions and solidarity engendered in these transracial and transnational interactions. Her work complicates the current Sino-African American narrative through an analysis of the multiple ways race, as a lens for understanding the “other,” handicapped the possibility of this alliance to fully materialize via a focus on the representation of Blackness in the Chinese context. Keisha is currently an Assistant Professor of History at Tennessee State University in the Department of History, Political Science, Geography, and Africana Studies.