O Canadá Negro: Universal Negro Improvement Association, a Diáspora e a Amefricanidade

Resumo O artigo busca analisar as relações raciais no Canadá e a atuação da Universal Negro Improvement Association no país, nas primeiras décadas do século XX. Fundada por Marcus Garvey e Amy Ashwood, em 1914, na Jamaica, a organização desempenhará papel central tanto na consolidação da comunidade negra no Canadá quanto na influência de Garvey na América do Norte, após sua deportação dos EUA. Através do diálogo com autores canadenses contemporâneos dos campos da História, da Sociologia e da Literatura, o texto pretende revisitar a categoria de Amefricanidade, criada por Lélia Gonzalez, para construir uma análise dedicada ao conceito de diáspora. Destacando as tendências comparativas e transnacionais, a principal hipótese é a de que a efetiva inserção do Canadá nos debates sobre a diáspora oferece novos olhares aos fluxos e trânsitos de indivíduos negros e de suas ideias nas Américas pós-emancipação.

A Religious Movement on Trial: Transformative Years, Judicial Questions and the Nation of Islam

The Nation of Islam (NOI) is one of the most controversial political-religious groups in the United States. Some define it as an exclusionary race-based group, while others see it as a genuine empowerment movement. Although it has been viewed as an unconventional fringe group, NOI represents an important syncretic movement of its time. Its approach to Islam was marked by a range of currents from the anti-colonial interpretive framework of the Ahmadiyya to Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association forging a highly dynamic narrative to explain the racial injustices and individual and collective requirements of future emancipation. Despite its strong anti-establishment discourse, NOI operates within the parameters legal and judicial system and seeks to reach out to new groups. As NOI faces the challenge of balancing its clashing inner currents rooted in its commitments to orthodox vs. vernacularized Islam or anti-systemic vs. accommodationist policies and often stigmatized by outside observers, it constitutes one of the most promising and precarious black movement.

Garveyism, Communism, and Gender Trouble

In Theodore Ward’s Big White Fog, Vic Mason seeks a better life for his family in the Universal Negro Improvement Association. His son, Les, looks for answers in the interracial Communist movement. Both men and movements come undone for they rely on gender hierarchies which sustain racial capitalism in the United States. This chapter explores the controversy that began when Ward read a draft of his play before a South Side audience in January 1938 and continued through the Negro Playwrights Company’s staging of the play in Harlem in October 1940. Drawing on variant manuscripts, this chapter documents the role of the Black performance community in shaping the version of the play first staged by the Chicago Negro Unit at the Great Northern Theatre in April 1938. The responses of the local community make clear it was the staging of gender and racial divisions within Black families and political movements, rather than Communism, which made Big White Fog a provocative play in 1938. The sympathetic portrayal of the Garvey movement reminds us that communism was not the only radical path for African Americans in the 1930s, even if the legacy of anti-Communism has disproportionately shaped knowledge production about Black theatre.

‘Lower types of cranks, crooks and racial bigots’? The Universal Negro Improvement Association and black political violence in the United States, 1918–1930

This article examines the involvement of the black nationalist Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) in black political violence in the early-interwar period in the United States. Evidence suggests that the UNIA was the organisation most often involved in black political confrontations, and the article discusses how the state, the black and white press and other black activist organisations may have both benefitted from and perpetuated the UNIA’s reputation for political violence. The essay argues that the UNIA’s involvement in violence against other black organisations and groups can be explained partly by the intensity of the ‘war of words’ among prominent black leaders in the United States, such as W.E.B. Du Bois and Marcus Garvey. Furthermore, the article suggests that ethnic and gender differences within the American UNIA itself could exacerbate pre-existing tensions between different groups of Garveyites. Contextualising black political violence in these ways allows us to move beyond a reductionist view of grassroots Garveyites as prone to violence. Instead, this approach allows us to better understand the relationship between the famous ‘war of words’ and the kinds of tensions, confrontations and violence that sometimes occurred at grassroots level between supporters of different black organisations and groups. The article contributes not only to the growing historiography about the UNIA at grassroots level, but also to discussions about the militarisation of black protest during World War I and in the 1920s, including the use of self-defence and paramilitary-style tactics by people of African descent in the United States.

18. Race in world politics

This chapter examines the ways in which race can been understood as a fundamental ordering principle of world politics. It explores how the histories of European imperialism and colonialism are crucial for understanding the global impact of race, and whether contemporary world politics is less racist than it was in the past. It also considers the relationship between race, biology, and culture. The chapter concludes by discussing the historical processes that gave rise to race, some key debates around the conceptualization of race, and how race continues to order world politics. Two case studies are presented: the first is about the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League (UNIA-ACL) and the second is about caste and Dalits in India. There is also an Opposing Opinions box that asks whether racism emerged as a consequence of the slave trade.

Black Women’s Internationalism from the Age of Revolutions to World War I

Black internationalism describes the political culture and intellectual practice forged in response to slavery, colonialism, and white imperialism. It is a historical and ongoing collective struggle against racial oppression rooted in global consciousness. While the expression of black internationalism has certainly changed across time and place, black liberation through collaboration has been and remains its ultimate goal. Since the emergence of black internationalism as a result of the transatlantic slave trade and during the Age of Revolutions, black women such as the poet Phyllis Wheatley and evangelist Rebecca Protten have been at its forefront. Their writings and activism espoused an Afro-diasporic, global consciousness and promoted the cause of universal emancipation. During the 19th century, black women internationalists included abolitionists, missionaries, and clubwomen. They built on the work of their predecessors while laying the foundations for succeeding black women internationalists in the early 20th century. By World War I, a new generation of black women activists and intellectuals remained crucial parts of the International Council of Women, an organization founded by white suffragists from the United States, and the Universal Negro Improvement Association, a global organization formally led by Jamaican pan-Africanist Marcus Garvey. But they also formed an independent organization, the International Council of Women of the Darker Races (ICWDR). Within and outside of the ICWDR, black women from Africa and the African Diaspora faced and challenged discrimination on the basis of their sex and race. Their activism and intellectual work set a powerful precedent for a subsequent wave of black internationalism shaped by self-avowed black feminists.

“No Race Question”

In the past, authors have emphasized the importance of Marcus Garvey’s ideas and organization, the Universal Negro Improvement Association, in the development of the labor movement in Trinidad after 1919. In so doing, they have often overlooked a more complex reality on the ground. This chapter examines the ways in which the Trinidad Workingmen’s Association (TWA) combined Garveyism and labor politics, and how they navigated the potential contradictions between class-based and race-based organizing more broadly. It adds to the existing literature on Garveyism and race consciousness in Trinidad, a perspective that situates the TWA’s ideas on race and class as a local dialogue interacting with global discussions among black radicals about labor organizing, socialism, communism, black internationalism, and pan-Africanism.

Popular Pan-Africanism

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).