The Garveyite Idea of Africa

From the mid-nineteenth century into the twentieth, African for the Africans was the banner under which a range of pan-Africanists imaginaries and political projects were articulated. This lecture charts the transformations of the idea of Africa for the Africans, examining in particular the shifting conceptions of “Africa” in the first two decades of the twentieth century. In particular it tracks the debates within British West African periodicals to trace the emergence of a new conception of Africa in which the continent and its peoples were co-present and coeval with the African diaspora in the Americas. 

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Bio

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