Popular Pan-Africanism

Global Garveyism ◽

10.5744/florida/9780813056210.003.0009 ◽

2019 ◽

pp. 205-225

Author(s):

Adam Ewing

Keyword(s):

United States ◽

West Africa ◽

The United States ◽

Cultural Traditions ◽

Universal Negro Improvement Association ◽

Pan Africanism ◽

Popular Knowledge ◽

South West Africa ◽

The Caribbean ◽

Intellectual Elites

The success of Garveyism in Africa, the Caribbean, the United States, and elsewhere in the African diaspora calls attention to the manner in which pan-Africanism has spread not merely through the flow of ideas, associations, and cultural traditions generated and sustained by intellectual elites, but through modes of popular knowledge production. Following the spread of Garveyism beyond the organizational limits of the Universal Negro Improvement Association and in the guise of rumor and millenial prophecy offers scholars a method of tracking the breadth and depth of the movement’s wide-ranging influence. It helps us understand precisely why white authorities across the colonial world viewed Garveyism (and its publication Negro World) with such alarm. It invites a larger rethinking of the trajectories of pan-Africanism as a political device and about the parameters of the black global imagination more broadly. This chapter pays specific attention to the dynamics of Garveyism’s spread in South West Africa (Namibia).

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Afterword

The Age of Garvey ◽

10.23943/princeton/9780691157795.003.0010 ◽

2014 ◽

Author(s):

Adam Ewing

Keyword(s):

United States ◽

The United States ◽

Universal Negro Improvement Association ◽

The Caribbean ◽

Labor Radicalism ◽

Political Association ◽

The Impact ◽

Garvey Movement

This concluding chapter reflects on the success of Garveyism in both the United States, Africa, and the Caribbean. It considers how the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) had offered a powerful ideological and political vehicle for African activists during the dark years of interwar European rule, and how the impact of Garveyism continues to be felt in the continent. In the United States, as in Africa, the efforts of American Garveyites to construct vibrant organizational containers during an inauspicious decade resonated through the years. Finally, in the Caribbean, the return of labor radicalism in the mid-1930s both eclipsed established modes of Garveyist political association and boasted a leadership that had been nurtured within the Garvey movement.

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The Age of Garvey

10.23943/princeton/9780691157795.001.0001 ◽

2014 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Adam Ewing

Keyword(s):

United States ◽

White Supremacy ◽

The United States ◽

Unified Framework ◽

Black Intellectuals ◽

Universal Negro Improvement Association ◽

Community Organizers ◽

African Descendants ◽

The Caribbean ◽

New Interpretation

Jamaican activist Marcus Garvey (1887–1940) organized the Universal Negro Improvement Association in Harlem in 1917. By the early 1920s, his program of African liberation and racial uplift had attracted millions of supporters, both in the United States and abroad. This book presents an expansive global history of the movement that came to be known as Garveyism. Offering a groundbreaking new interpretation of global black politics between the First and Second World Wars, this book charts Garveyism's emergence, its remarkable global transmission, and its influence in the responses among African descendants to white supremacy and colonial rule in Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States. Delving into the organizing work and political approach of Garvey and his followers, the book shows that Garveyism emerged from a rich tradition of pan-African politics that had established, by the First World War, lines of communication among black intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic. Garvey's legacy was to reengineer this tradition as a vibrant and multifaceted mass politics. The book looks at the people who enabled Garveyism's global spread, including labor activists in the Caribbean and Central America, community organizers in the urban and rural United States, millennial religious revivalists in central and southern Africa, welfare associations and independent church activists in Malawi and Zambia, and an emerging generation of Kikuyu leadership in central Kenya. Moving away from the images of quixotic business schemes and repatriation efforts, the book demonstrates the consequences of Garveyism's international presence and provides a dynamic and unified framework for understanding the movement, during the interwar years and beyond.

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FROM THE FRONTIER TO GERMAN SOUTH-WEST AFRICA: GERMAN COLONIALISM, INDIANS, AND AMERICAN WESTWARD EXPANSION

Modern Intellectual History ◽

10.1017/s1479244310000223 ◽

2010 ◽

Vol 7 (3) ◽

pp. 523-552 ◽

Cited By ~ 9

Author(s):

JENS-UWE GUETTEL

Keyword(s):

United States ◽

Native Americans ◽

West Africa ◽

American Indians ◽

The United States ◽

American Frontier ◽

Westward Expansion ◽

German Colonialism ◽

South West ◽

South West Africa

This article argues that positive perceptions of American westward expansion played a major (and so far overlooked) role both for the domestic German debate about the necessity of overseas expansion and for concrete German colonial policies during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. During and after the uprising against colonial rule (1904–7) of the two main indigenous peoples, the Herero and the Nama, of German South-West Africa (Germany's only settler colony), colonial administrators actively researched the history of the American frontier and American Indian policies in order to learn how best to “handle” the colony's peoples. There exists a substantial literature on the allegedly exceptional enchantment of Germans with American Indians. Yet this article shows that negative views of Amerindians also influenced and shaped the opinions and actions of German colonizers. Because of its focus on the importance of the United States for German discussions about colonial expansion, this article also explores the role German liberals played in the German colonial project. Ultimately, the United States as a “model empire” was especially attractive for Germans with liberal and progressive political convictions. The westward advancement of the American frontier went hand in hand with a variety of policies towards Native Americans, including measures of expulsion and extinction. German liberals accepted American expansionism as normative and were therefore willing to advocate, or at least tolerate, similar policies in the German colonies.

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