Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-hfldf Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-05-16T23:21:49.676Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

A “Common Spectacle” of the Race: Garveyism’s Visual Politics of Founding

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 June 2021

ADOM GETACHEW Open the ORCID record for ADOM GETACHEW [Opens in a new window]
ADOM GETACHEW*
Affiliation:
University of Chicago
*
Adom Getachew, Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, University of Chicago, agetachew@uchicago.edu.
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The questions of what makes a people a people and how they are endowed with political power are central to political founding. Through the Universal Negro Improvement Association’s first annual convention, this essay reconstructs the central role of aesthetic practices to the constitution of a new people. The convention’s spectacular performances were a vehicle through which participants came to understand themselves as constituting the Universal Negro—a transnational and empowered political subject. Founding was tied to the development of “reverential self-regard,” which was a process rather than a singular moment. Central to this process was both the gaze of spectators whose affective responses confirmed the power of the people and the political leader who served as the people’s mirror. Focusing on a mass movement rather than canonical instances of constituting republics brings into sharp relief the reiterative labors of staging, enacting, and viewing necessary to the practice of founding.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 115 , Issue 4 , November 2021 , pp. 1197 - 1209
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the American Political Science Association

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Ackerman, Bruce. 1998. We the People: Transformations. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Angus, H. 1923 “Camaguey Division Holds Convention.” Negro World XV, no. 2, November 3, 1923.Google Scholar
Bauman, Richard, and Feaster, Patrick. 2005. “‘Fellow Townspeople and My Noble Constituents!’: Representations of Orality on Early Commercial Recordings.” Oral Tradition 20 (1): 35–57.Google Scholar
Bernal, Angelica Maria. 2017. Beyond Origins: Rethinking Founding in a Time of Constitutional Democracy. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Boone, Emilie. 2020. “Reproducing the New Negro: James VanDerZee’s Photographic Vision in News Print.” American Art 34 (2): 4–25.Google Scholar
Burke, Edmund. [1757] 2004. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful and Other Pre-revolutionary Writings, ed. Womersley, David. New York: Penguin Books.Google Scholar
Deane, W. A. 1927. “Why I Am a Garveyite.” Negro World XXI, no. 22, January 8, 1927.Google Scholar
Delany, Martin R. [1852] 1993. The Condition, Elevation, Emigration and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States. Baltimore, MD: Black Classic Press.Google Scholar
Du Bois, W. E. B. 1900. “The American Negro at Paris.” American Monthly Review of Reviews 22 (5): 575–77.Google Scholar
Du Bois, W. E. B. 1915. “The Star Ethiopia.” The Christmas Crisis: Pageant Number 11 (2): 91–93.Google Scholar
Du Bois, W. E. B. 1916. “The Drama among Black People.” The Crisis 12 (4): 169–72.Google Scholar
Du Bois, W. E. B. 1923. “Back to Africa.” Century 5 (3): 539–48.Google Scholar
Du Bois, W. E. B. 1926. “Criteria of Negro Art.” The Crisis 32 (6): 290–97.Google Scholar
Du Bois, W. E. B. [1928] 2007. Dark princess, ed. Gates, Henry Louis. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Edwards, Erica R. 2012. Charisma and the Fictions of Black Leadership. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Elkins, W. F. 1970. “A Source of Black Nationalism in the Caribbean: The Revolt of the British West Indies Regiment at Taranto Italy.” Science and Society 34 (1): 99–103.Google Scholar
Elmes, A. F. [1925] 1974. “Garvey and Garveyism—An Estimate.” In Marcus Garvey and the Vision of Africa, eds. Clarke, John Henrik with Garvey, Amy Jacque, 120–126. New York: Vintage Books.Google Scholar
Ewing, Adam. 2014. The Age of Garvey: How a Jamaican Activist Created a Mass Movement and Changed Global Black Politics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Frank, Jason. 2007. “‘Unauthorized Propositions’: The Federalism Papers and Constituent Power.” Diacritics 37 (2–3): 103–20.Google Scholar
Frank, Jason. 2010. Constituent Moments: Enacting the People in Postrevolutionary America. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Frank, Jason. 2014. “‘Delightful Horror’: Edmund Burke and the Aesthetics of Democratic Revolution.” In The Aesthetic Turn in Political Thought, ed. Kompridis, Nikolas, 3–28. New York: Bloomsbury.Google Scholar
Frank, Jason. 2017. “The Living Image of the People.” In The Scaffolding of Sovereignty: Global and Aesthetic Perspectives on the History of a Concept, eds. Benite, Zvi Ben-Dor, Geroulanos, Stefanos, and Jerr, Nicole, 124–56. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Freud, Sigmund. (1922) 1959. Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, trans. and ed. Strachey, James. New York: Norton.Google Scholar
Gates, Henry Louis. 1988. “The Trope of the New Negro and the Reconstruction of the Image of the Black.” Representations 24 (Autumn): 129–55.Google Scholar
Garvey, Marcus. 1923. “A Request to Discard the Propaganda of Alien Races.” Negro World XV no. 12, November 3, 1923.Google Scholar
Garvey, Marcus. [1925] 1987. “Governing the Ideal State.” In Marcus Garvey Life and Lessons: A Centennial Companion to The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers, eds. Hill, Robert and Blair, Barbara, 27–33. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Gillman, Susan. 2007. “Pageantry, Maternity and World History.” In Next to the Color Line: Gender, Sexuality , and W.E.B. Du Bois, eds. Gillman, Susan and Weinbaum, Alys Eve, 378–416. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Gilroy, Paul. 2000. “Black Fascism.” Transition: An International Review 81/82: 70–91.Google Scholar
Glassberg, David. 1990. American Historical Pageantry: The Uses of Tradition in the Early Twentieth Century. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.Google Scholar
Grant, Colin. 2008. Negro with a Hat: The Rise and Fall of Marcus Garvey. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Gray, Arthur S. 1927. “Why I Am a Garveyite.” Negro World XXI, no. 22, January 8, 1927.Google Scholar
Guridy, Frank. 2010. Forging Diaspora: Afro-Cubans and African-Americans in a World of Empire and Jim Crow. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.Google Scholar
Harold, Claudrena. 2007. The Rise and Fall of the Garvey Movement in the Urban South, 1918-1942. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Harrison, Hubert [1919] 2001. “Two Negro Radicalisms.” In Hubert Harrison Reader, ed. Perry, Jeffrey B., 102–05. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.Google Scholar
Harrison, Hubert [1920] 2001. “Race First versus Class First.” In Hubert Harrison Reader, ed. Perry, Jeffrey B., 107–109. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.Google Scholar
Hill Robert, A., ed. 1983a. The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers, vol. 1. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Hill Robert, A., ed. 1983b. The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers, vol. 2. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Hill Robert, A., ed. 1984. The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers, vol. 3. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Hill Robert, A., ed. 1985. The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers, vol. 4. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Hill Robert, A. 1994. “Making Noise, Garvey Dada, August 1922.” In Picturing Us: African American Identity in Photography, ed. Willis, Deborah, 181–205. New York: W.W. Norton & Co.Google Scholar
Hill Robert, A., ed. 2011. The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers: The Caribbean Diaspora 1910–1920, vol.11. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Hill Robert, A., and Bair, Barbara, eds. 1987. Marcus Garvey Life and Lessons: A Centennial Companion to The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Paper. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Honig, Bonnie. 1991. “Declarations of Independence: Arendt and Derrida on the Problem of Founding a Republic.” American Political Science Review 85 (1): 97–113.Google Scholar
Jagmohan, Desmond. 2020. “Marcus Garvey and the Politics of Self-determination.” Political Theory 48 (3): 271–302.Google Scholar
James, C. L. R. [1940] 1996. “Marcus Garvey.” In C. L. R. James on the “Negro Question,” ed. McLemee, Scott, 114–15. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.Google Scholar
James, Peter Samuel. 1924. “Banes, Cuba.” Negro World XVII no. 6, September 20, 1924.Google Scholar
Jenkinson, Jacqueline. 2009. Black 1919: Riots, Racism and Resistance in Imperial Britain. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.Google Scholar
Jonsson, Stefan. 2013. Crowds and Democracy: The Idea of the Masses from Revolution to Fascism. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Kwoba, Brian. 2020. “Pebbles and Ripples: Hubert Harrison and the Rise of the Garvey Movement.” Journal of African American History 105 (3): 396–423.Google Scholar
Laclau, Ernesto. 2018. On Populist Reason. New York: Verso.Google Scholar
Le Bon, Gustave. [1895] 2002. The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind. Mineola, NY: Dover.Google Scholar
Lloyd, Joseph. 1927. “Why I Am a Garveyite.” Negro World XXI, no. 22, January 8, 1927.Google Scholar
Locke, Alain. 1925. “The New Negro.” In The New Negro: An Interpretation, ed. Locke, Alain, 3–19. New York: Albert and Charles Boni.Google Scholar
Lumpkins, Charles. 2008. American Pogrom: The East St. Louis Riots and Black Politics. Athens: Ohio University Press.Google Scholar
Maloney, A. H. 1922. “Fundamentals of Leadership.” Negro World XII, no. 11, April 29, 1922.Google Scholar
Martin, Tony. 1976. Race First: The Ideological and Organizational Struggles of Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association. Baltimore, MD: Black Classic Press.Google Scholar
Martin, Tony. 1983. Literary Garveyism: Garvey, Black Arts and the Harlem Renaissance. Dover: Majority Press.Google Scholar
Mantena, Karuna. 2018. “Showdown for Nonviolence: The Theory and Practice of Nonviolent Politics.” In To Shape a New World: Essays on the Political Philosophy of Martin Luther King, Jr., eds. Terry, Brandon and Shelby, Tommie, 78–104. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Miller, Kelly. 1927. “After Marcus Garvey—What of the Negro?” The Contemporary Review 131: 492–500.Google Scholar
Mitchell, Ernest Julius. 2010. “‘Black Renaissance’: A Brief History of the Concept.” Amerikastudien/American Studies 55 (4): 641–65.Google Scholar
Morss-Lovett, Robert. 1923. “An Emperor Jones of Finance.” New Republic, July 11, 1923.Google Scholar
Moses, Wilson Jeremiah. 1978. The Golden Age of Black Nationalism, 1850–1925. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Moses, Wilson Jeremiah. 2004. Creative Conflict in African American Thought : Douglass, Frederick, Crummell, Alexander, Washington, Booker T., Du Bois, W. E. B. and Garvey, Marcus. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Nelson, Stanley. 2001. Marcus Garvey: Look for Me in the Whirlwind. Arlington, VA: PBS Video.Google Scholar
Oxford English Dictionary Online (OED). 2021. Oxford University Press. Accessed February 15, 2021. http://www.oed.com/viewdictionaryentry/Entry/7179;jsessionid=61494FA30F6628009908C800D2210718.Google Scholar
Olson, Kevin. 2016. Imagined Sovereignties: The Power of the People and Other Myths of the Modern Age. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Provost, Ernest. 1924. “Camaguey, Cuba: Grand Parade Staged in Metropolis.” Negro World XVII no. 6, September 20, 1924.Google Scholar
Quad, M. 1895. The Lime Kiln Club. Chicago: W. B. Conkey Company.Google Scholar
Raiford, Leigh. 2013. “Marcus Garvey in Stereograph.” Small Axe 17 (1): 263–80.Google Scholar
Randolph, A. Philip, and Owen, Chandler. (1920) 2008. “The New Negro—What Is It?” In The Harlem Renaissance: A Brief History with Documents, ed. Ferguson, Jeffrey B., 39–42. Boston: Bedford.Google Scholar
Romberg, Kristin. 2018. Gan’s Constructivism: Aesthetic Theory for an Embedded Modernism. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Rogers, Melvin. 2012. “The People, Rhetoric, and Affect: On the Political Force of Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk.” American Political Science Review 106 (1): 188–203.Google Scholar
Shelby, Tommie. 2005. We Who Are Dark: The Philosophical Foundations of Black Solidarity. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
M. E., Simons. 1927. “Why I Am a Garveyite.” Negro World XXI, no. 22, January 8, 1927.Google Scholar
Stephens, Michelle. 2005. Black Empire: The Masculine Global Imaginary of Caribbean Intellectuals in the United States, 1914–1962. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Stephens, Roland, and Adam, Ewing. 2019. Global Garveyism, eds. Roland Stephens and Adam Ewing. Gainesville: University Press of Florida.Google Scholar
Sullivan, Frances Peace. 2019. “‘No Surrender’: Migration, the Garvey Movement and Community Building in Cuba.” In Global Garveyism, eds. Stephens, Roland and Ewing, Adam, 59–88. Gainesville: University Press of Florida.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sultan, Nazmul S. 2020. “Self-Rule and the Problem of Peoplehood in Colonial India.” American Political Science Review 114 (1): 81–94.Google Scholar
Taylor, Diana. 2003. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Taylor, Diana. 2009. “Afterword: War Play.” PMLA 124 (5): 1886–95.Google Scholar
Tolstoy, Vladimir, 1990. “Art Born of the October Revolution.” In Street Art of the Revolution: Festival and Celebrations in Russia 1918-1933, eds. Tolstoy, Vladimir, Bibikova, Irina, and Cooke, Catherine, 11–16. New York: The Vendome Press.Google Scholar
Wall, Cheryl. 2018. Freedom and the Will to Adorn: The Art of the African American Essay. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.Google Scholar