| Abstract |
"The Second Battle for Africa centers the role of Marcus Garvey, Garveyism, and the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) in the fight for global Black freedom. The book's "Diasporic Midwest" framework reorients the still frequent privileging of coastal and oceanic geographies in African diasporic and Black internationalist scholarship and identifies midwestern industrial cities like Chicago, Detroit, and Cleveland, and rural areas of the US heartland, as central and enduring incubators of Marcus Garvey's Black nationalist Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). Erik S. McDuffie considers how Midwest-linked Black thinkers, activists, and cultural workers from diverse locales became radicalized, joined the UNIA and its offshoots, impacted Black communities globally from the early twentieth century onwards, and advanced worldwide Black liberation, including Grenada-born pan-African organizer Louise Little, who is best known as the mother of Malcolm X; James R. Stewart of Cleveland who succeeded Marcus Garvey as UNIA president-general and emigrated to Liberia; Chicago educator Christine Johnson; and Chicago UNIA leader Rev. Clarence W. Harding Jr. This book is especially concerned with exploring the possibilities, limitations, and heteropatriachal contours of Black nationalism, radicalism, and internationalism through the UNIA and midwestern-linked Garvey-inspired movements--the Afro-American Institute, Ethiopian Hebrews, Moorish Science, Nation of Islam, Marcus Garvey Memorial Institute, and Revolutionary Action Movement. Drawing on more than 100 oral history interviews and utilizing original research conducted in Canada, Ghana, Grenada, Jamaica, Liberia, South Africa, Trinidad and Tobago, the United Kingdom, and the United States, The Second Battle for Africa charts new histories of Garveyism, the U.S. heartland, Black internationalism, nationalism, and radicalism, and the African Diaspora"-- Provided by publisher. |
