Over the past thirty years, our knowledge of Marcus Garvey and especially Garveyism has grown, thanks to the diligence of Robert Hill and his acolytes at the Marcus Garvey Papers project and in the academy. At the same time, many of these new findings have been attached to new paradigms. An earlier generation situated Garvey and Garveyism within the history of pan-Africanism. The current one incorporates them into postmodern scholarship on the diaspora and global history. Adam Ewing's Age of Garvey is a useful book to determine what was gained and lost. While Ewing has drawn upon the secondary literature and done his own research in colonial and African national archives, the framework of diaspora, more than new facts, informs his work.

Ewing divides his book into two parts. The first is the story of the rise and fall of Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). The second, which he calls “The Age of Garvey,” offers selective histories of some US locals, but mainly African associations from eastern and southern Africa after Garvey's fall. Ewing argues that these organizations were the legacy of Marcus Garvey – a broad, discursive movement, which eventually produced African independence.

Part One retells a familiar story through the lens of the new paradigm. Ewing stresses a commonality of aims among those he sees as drawn to Garvey's movement. Although he recognizes that early twentieth-century pan-African elites disagreed about “tactics, the advisability of emigration to Africa, and the relative value (or lack thereof) of African indigenous and Afro-diasporic folk cultures” (22), he explores none of these issues. Earlier, he had asserted that pan-Africanism was “infused with an abiding scorn for black folk cultures” (17). Ewing agrees that World War I transformed Garvey's politics, but not because it offered blacks successful models – in Ireland and Russia – and new ideologies utilizing the masses – socialism, nationalism, and trade unionism. Instead, the war “acted as a catalyst in which old and richly drawn contests of authority and power were shifted on their axis, disrupted, transformed” (51).

Ewing's arguments that the UNIA accommodated the masses and the classes and that racial unity overcame class differences require some omissions. He celebrates the working-class leadership of the New Orleans division. He does not tell us that when these local leaders dissented from Garvey's authoritarian methods, Garvey staged a trial, which found T. A. Robinson, a longshoreman, and several other workers guilty of treason. Garvey replaced the working-class founders of the division with professors from a local Baptist college, a class shift that was not limited to the New Orleans UNIA in 1922.

In Ewing's telling, mundane signs of success, achievements, and even numbers are unimportant. Thus he informs us in one long paragraph that the UNIA in late 1921 was in “an accelerating and multipronged institutional crisis” (108). Indeed, membership fees for the year totaled less than four thousand dollars. Garvey acknowledged that only a few of the 480 divisions sent in reports. Ewing is uninterested in the developing differences among Garvey, A. Philip Randolph, Cyril Briggs, and others, the problems of simultaneously pursuing a business and politics, and the countless other issues that confronted the movement. He simply states that institutionally it was dead. Then, twenty-three pages later, he informs us that “[b]y the end of 1922, the UNIA had blanketed the [US], and Garvey stood abreast of the largest and most inclusive mass movement in African American history” (131). Although Ewing recognizes that “UNIA officials were prone to wild overstatement, embellishment, and at times outright fantasy” (59), sometimes the overblown rhetoric infects his analysis. He concludes that Garvey's struggles continued and deepened in and after 1922, but also, with little evidence, that he built “a workable mass politics” (125).

This “failure-is-success” measure explains Part Two of the book, which consists of mini histories of organizations in east and south Africa during the interwar years. After the destruction of the institutions of the UNIA, Ewing claims that Garveyism flowered locally with more modest aims – “rebranding” (125), he calls it. Not everyone followed Ewing's script. Garvey tried and failed to re-create the glory days of 1919–20. Many abandoned the movement for different politics – trade unionism, communism, other racial associations. Ewing does not discuss these alternatives but claims that Garveyism rose, “phoenix-like,” from the ashes of the UNIA's imperial dream (108).

By “framing their political aims internationally and by projecting their radical demands for African liberation forward into an undefined future,” Ewing suggests, “Garveyites sustained vibrant local communities of political activism amidst the decline of the national UNIA and constraints of Jim Crow America” (130–31). But from the very beginning, Garvey spoke of preparation, not immediate action. In August 1919, he declared that blacks should prepare for the next time the world became disrupted, as it did in World War I. Ewing's assumption is that politics do not stem from local situations but from grand dreams. In Africa, people “invested their hopes in Garveyism … because it invested their parochial politics with a diasporic identity and a global vision” (188), a point that Ewing asserts but does not attempt to prove. He believes that he can read his subjects’ “unstated desire” (192).

Garveyism, as well as socialism, trade unionism, Christianity, and traditional culture, was part of the stew of African organization in the interwar era. But instead of careful analysis, Ewing strains to find influence, even while he asserts Garveyism's dominance. Thus he uses such phrases such as “adopting the Garveyite rhetoric” (198), “appeared to be modeled on Garveyite principles” (206), or “mirrors Garveyist sensibilities” (226). Even when Kikuyus in East Africa chose ethnic nationalism, which Ewing calls “political tribalism,” he calls this “Garveyist politics” (229).

The notion of diaspora and global history has encouraged scholars to mine archives and enriched our accounts of the interwar period. But in this case it also carries a model of politics and historical method that does not advance the history of Garvey or Garveyism. By erasing traditional categories – class, region, ideology, etc. – it fails to analyze the diversity it presumes to represent.