Abstract: Yang Changxi's Heiren Wenxue (African American Literature), published in 1933, is China's first scholarship on African American literature. Yang's work focuses on works produced before and during the Harlem Renaissance in America, and his reading perspective is inseparable from China's historical context of the first thirty years of the 20^th century. This essay takes a comparative approach and studies the reading patterns that existed in the introduction and translation of African American literature from 1900s to 1930s, represented by Yang Changxi and Heiren Wenxue. In the meantime, by analyzing the misunderstanding revealed in Heiren Wenxue, this essay studies the historical and cultural gaps in the process of introducing and translating African American literature.

Key words: Yang Changxi, Heiren Wenxue, African American literature, translation and introduction