Marcus Garvey and the American Heartland, 1920-1980

FAIN: FA-252423-17

Erik S. McDuffie
Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois (Champaign, IL 61801-3620)

A book on the impact of Marcus Garvey (1887-1940) in the American Midwest in the 20th century.

Garveyism in the Diasporic Midwest: The American Heartland and Global Black Freedom, 1920-80 is the first book to connect the Midwest to transnational black political protest. Through Garveyism and the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), the largest black protest movement in world history, the U.S. industrial heartland emerged as an epicenter of black internationalism. Its global manufacturing centers and political infrastructures offered blacks opportunities that they could not find elsewhere – fertile ground for the region to emerge as a stronghold of the UNIA and subsequent black freedom movements. Attending to the paradoxes and gendered contours of Garveyism, my book uses the framework of the diasporic Midwest to globalize African American history and to reorient the study of the African diaspora by taking into account the significance of the American heartland in shaping the history of the twentieth-century black world.

Associated Products