Adom Getachew: The Universal Race: Garveyism and the Practices of Pan-Africanism

"The Universal Race," also the title of Getachew's current book project, is concerned with interwar pan-Africanism especially through the lens of Garveyism. It asks (1) What intellectual and political contexts gave rise to Garveyism; (2) What conceptions of race and especially of “Blackness” did the movement advance? and (3) What institutions and political practices were central to the making of Garveyism as global mass movement? Drawing on the idea "Universal Negro” of the Universal Negro Improvement Association, the lecture is concerned with the constitution of blackness as a geopolitical category and political agent.

Adom Getachew is Neubauer Family Assistant Professor of Political Science 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 the author of Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination (Princeton University Press, 2019) and co-editor, with Jennifer Pitts, of the forthcoming W. E. B. Du Bois’s International Writings. Her public writing has appeared in Dissent, Foreign Affairs, the London Review of Books, The Nation, and the New York Times.