For students and scholars of Africa and its diaspora, it is an oft-repeated fact that Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) was the largest black mass movement of the twentieth century. Yet despite the pioneering work of Robert Hill, who over decades has produced thirteen volumes of the Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers, as well as the early interventions of Amy Jacques Garvey, Tony Martin, Rupert Lewis, and other scholars, Garveyism has remained at the margins of mainstream historiography.Footnote ¹ Partly as a result, this global movement continues to be wedded to the figure of Marcus Garvey and the iconography associated with Liberty Hall in Harlem where the UNIA had its headquarters in the decade after World War I.

Marking a new era of Garvey scholarship, the edited volume Global Garveyism features contributions by leading scholars of the movement that redress this marginalization. One way the essays do so is by offering a new cartography of the movement that decenters New York to emphasize alternative sites of Garveyism. While essays by Erik S. McDuffie and Ronald J. Stephens work through the concept of a ‘diasporic Midwest’ to unearth the lives and political projects of Garveyites in Chicago and Detroit, John Maynard reconstructs Garveyism's influence on Aboriginal politics in Australia. Between the American industrial heartland and Australia, other contributions focus on local iterations of the UNIA in Cuba (Frances Peace Sullivan), Jamaica (Nicole Bourbonnais), Trinidad (José Andrés Fernández Montes de Oca), and southern Africa (Robert Trent Vinson, Adam Ewing). This cartography of Garveyism makes visible the circuits of mobility West Indian migrant workers traversed (Sullivan) and the everyday forms of communication that facilitated the movement's globalization, from the pages of the Negro World to the powerful role of whispered rumors (Ewing). The volume is an exemplary contribution to global history for its careful attention to vernacular networks of transmission and reinvention, which relied on the modularity and flexibility of Garveyism. On the one hand, as Sullivan shows, the UNIA rulebook, combined with reiterative practices — including the formulaic sharing of news through the Negro World — facilitated the ‘cohesion of diverse and far-flung members of the British West Indian diaspora’ (75). On the other hand, Montes de Oca illustrates how the Trinidad Workingman's Association strategically deployed Garvey's indeterminate rhetoric of racial uplift while distancing itself from the local UNIA and maintaining an emphasis on class-based solidarities (254). The signs and symbols of global Garveyism thus carried a set of universal commitments that were instantiated in a variety of local forms.

This geographic proliferation of Garveyism also reconceives the central characters of the movement. Due to the masculinist performance of sovereignty Garvey embodied and the hierarchical structure of the UNIA in which women often held subordinate positions, women's contributions to the movement are often neglected or simply taken to embody traditional gender roles. Three essays in the volume complicate the gendered politics of Garveyism. Keisha N. Blain elucidates the intellectual contributions of Garveyite women such as Ethel Collins, Elaine Cooper, and Amy Jacques Garvey, who reimagined black self-determination during the 1940s, just as decolonization was on the horizon. Vinson looks beyond the charismatic Wellington Buthelezi, the dominant face of Garveyism in South Africa, and shows that women in the Transkei deployed discourses of ‘public motherhood’ to generate a robust movement around independent schools and religious institutions (196–7). In Jamaica, women such as Maymie L.T. Aiken were at the center of the UNIA's Harmony chapter and created space in meetings and publications to debate questions such as gender equality and birth control. Describing the interventions of Aiken and others, Bourbonnais argues, ‘whether or not one sees the UNIA as a space for women's empowerment or feminist expression … depends in part on when, where and at whom you look’ (141). Attending to local forms of Garveyism, as these essays do, illustrates how women navigated the contradictions of Garveyism to shape and promote their own political visions. Yet this process does not mean, as Blain makes clear, that they themselves did not embody these contradictions. For instance, while advancing the cause of anticolonialism, Garveyite women also ‘embraced imperialist and civilizationalist views’ toward Africa (179).

As in other black nationalist projects, Garveyism projected a romanticized vision of the continent and positioned diasporic subjects as its redeemers. Critics have often pointed to the essentialist and hierarchical character of this ‘Back to Africa’ discourse. Although cognizant of these tensions, Global Garveyism highlights the wide-ranging meanings and enactments of diasporic return. For instance, McDuffie traces how Reverend Clarence Harding, a Chicago Garveyite who settled in Liberia in 1966, gradually dropped his civilizational commitments and embraced the politics of more militant African liberation movements (105). Moreover, as Vinson and Ewing illustrate, the promise of diasporic return was not only a unidirectional projection of black people in the Americas, but one that Africans on the continent readily embraced in pursuit of their own struggles at home. For a diverse array of actors, prophetic declarations of diasporic return and an embrace of transnational ‘American’ identities expanded political imaginaries and recalibrated assessments of political opportunity (186, 211, 189).

The power of Garveyism even after its institutional decline, as documented in the opening and closing essays by Michael O. West, rested on the millions of people who embraced the demand — ‘Africa for the Africans!’ and ‘made that idea soar’ (221). In its geographic span and in the array of political projects it covers, Global Garveyism gives us a unique vantage point into the lives and visions of these everyday Garveyites who made the movement possible.