The Universal Race: Garveyism and the Practices of Pan-Africanism
Tue, 13 Dec
|NCAI, Rosslyn Riviera Mall, Nairobi
NCAI is excited to host Adom Getachew, an assistant Professor of Political Science at the university of Chicago, as she leads us through a conversation on Garveyism and the practice of Pan-Africanism


Time & Location
13 Dec 2022, 15:00 EAT
NCAI, Rosslyn Riviera Mall, Nairobi, Rosslyn Riviera Mall, Nairobi, Kenya
About the event
Named for Marcus Garvey, “Garveyism” is still recognized as the largest Black mass movement. This talk begins from the view that Garveyism occupied a distinctive position in the history of Pan-Africanism where older attachments to imperial forms and practices co-mingled with new forms of anti-colonial nationalism. In this context, self-determination was not yet associated with national independence. Instead, Garveyites advanced a conception of pan-African self-determination as a form of “soulcraft” an inward individual and collective project of reevaluating and revaluing blackness/Africaness. This was at the core of the Garveyite organization, the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). I track the project of self-improvement at the center of the UNIA through the visual images, poetry and writing in the organization’s weekly paper the Negro World.
Short Bio: Adom Getachew is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago. She is author of Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination and co-editor of W. E. B. Du Bois: International Writings.