Stanford Humanities Center
Adom Getachew teaches in the departments of Political Science and Race, Diaspora and Indigeneity at the University of Chicago. She is a political theorist with research interests in the history of political thought, theories of race and empire, and postcolonial political theory. Her work focuses on the intellectual and political histories of Africa and the Caribbean. She is author of Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Self-Determination (2019) and co-editor, with Jennifer Pitts, of W. E. B. Du Bois: International Writings (2022).
SHC Project
The Universal Race: Garveyism and the Practices of Pan-Africanism
Garveyism, which was a transnational movement seeking racial emancipation in the twentieth century, is still recognized as the largest Black mass movement. While historians have produced wide-ranging studies of the movement, The Universal Race will be the first book length treatment of this movement within the fields of political theory and political philosophy. The Universal Race charts the intellectual, ideological, and political processes and practices through which a Black world came to be imagined and enacted in the early twentieth century through two broad strategies. First, Getachew will reconstruct how novel critiques of imperialism and diagnoses of the crisis of British imperial membership produced a new geopolitical imagination, which recast the “Negro” race as a subject of and agent in global politics. Second, she will track the reiterative political practices through which Garveyites produced new forms of identification and affiliation trough which they pictured themselves on the scale of the world. Both of these strategies are efforts to reconsider Garveyism’s place in the history of pan-Africanism as an interregnum formation. On the one hand, it carried into the twentieth century Victorian ideals of self-help and improvement. It also built on and reignited the dream of African redemption championed by advocates of emigration in the nineteenth century. On the other hand, Garveyism marked the reconstitution of pan-Africanism as a mass movement and incubated the anti-imperialism that would be central to the politics of decolonization in the middle of the 20th century.
