Adam Ewing, "The Age Of Garvey: How A Jamaican Activist Created A Mass Movement And Changed Global Black Politics" (Princeton UP, 2014)

Summary

Adam Ewing acknowledges the enduring, if reductive, image of Garveyism - "the parades and shipping lines and colonization schemes" - in its early, Harlem-based incarnation, but focuses The Age Of Garvey: How A Jamaican Activist Created A Mass Movement And Changed Global Black Politics (Princeton University Press, 2014) on tracing the myriad manifestations of this "organic mass politics" beyond the larger-than-life figure at its center, to shed scholarly light on a diffuse movement observable throughout the African diaspora in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Ewing explains why Garveyism is so much more than Marcus Garvey, not an ordinary strain of pan-Africanism nor merely an extension of (Booker T.) Washingtonianism. In fact, he asserts, it is precisely when the more notorious initiatives of the United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) fail, that the age of Garvey truly begins.

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