Between Race and Nation: Marcus Garvey and the Politics of Self-Determination

Date01 June 2020
DOI10.1177/0090591719897569
Published date01 June 2020
Subject MatterArticles
https://doi.org/10.1177/0090591719897569
Political Theory
2020, Vol. 48(3) 271 –302
© The Author(s) 2020
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DOI: 10.1177/0090591719897569
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Article
Between Race and
Nation: Marcus Garvey
and the Politics of
Self-Determination
Desmond Jagmohan1
Abstract
This essay argues that Marcus Garvey held a constructivist theory of self-
determination, one that saw nationalism and transnationalism as mutually
necessary and reinforcing ideals. The argument proceeds in three steps.
First it recovers Garvey’s transnationalist emphasis by looking at his
intellectual debts to other diaspora struggles, namely political Zionism
and Irish nationalism. Second it argues that Garvey held a constructivist
view of national identity, which also grounds his argument that the black
diaspora has a right to collective self-determination. Third it explicates
Garvey’s further contention that the right to self-determination and the
persistence of oppression give the African diaspora a pro tanto claim to
an independent state, which he considered essential to vanquishing white
supremacy and realizing collective self-rule.
Keywords
Marcus Garvey, transnationalism, nationalism, self-determination, sovereignty,
black nationalism, political Zionism
1Assistant Professor of Political Science, University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA
Corresponding Author:
Desmond Jagmohan, Assistant Professor of Political Science, University of California,
Berkeley 94705, CA, USA.
Email: jagmohan@berkeley.edu
897569PTXXXX10.1177/0090591719897569Political TheoryJagmohan
research-article2020
272 Political Theory 48(3)
The New Negro desires Nationhood.
—Marcus Garvey1
On March 14, 1891, eleven Italian Americans were lynched in New Orleans,
Louisiana. Outraged, the Italian government insisted that those responsible
for the crime be brought to justice and reparations be paid to the victims’
families. The United States agreed, and President Benjamin Harrison autho-
rized the payment of $25,000. Journalist Ida B. Wells responded to this act by
asking her readers a rhetorical question: What if African Americans had a
government that valued black lives in the same way?2 In that same year, 169
African Americans were lynched by white mobs.3
An activist and political theorist named Marcus Garvey (1887–1940) took
Wells’s question seriously and sought to realize an independent state that
would secure and improve the lives of black people around the world. By the
1920s, his transnational organization, the United Negro Improvement
Association (UNIA), had inspired one of the largest global and grassroots
movements in history prior to decolonization. From the cotton plantations of
Mississippi to the cane fields of Montego Bay, hundreds of thousands, if not
millions, of black people declared themselves “Garveyites” and committed
themselves to the grueling struggle for self-determination and sovereignty.
Nevertheless, Garvey remains among the most maligned figures in black
political thought. The editors of the black radical journal The Messenger
described him as “an ignoramus” appealing to the “emotional nature” of the
masses.4 W. E. B. Du Bois admonished him for being a “demagogue” and
having followers of “the lowest type.”5 Author-publisher Cyril Briggs dis-
missed him as reactionary6 while prominent academic Kelly Miller warned
that, like all West Indians, Garvey was inclined to radicalism and harnessed
mob psychology.7 And sociologist E. Franklin Frazier referred to his follow-
ers as “the black Klan of America.”8 In 1949, a graduate student in history
wrote Du Bois to ask whether Garvey, given his popularity, had had some
influence on the intellectual life of his day. “I think you are over-estimating
the Garvey Movement. It was interesting as the attempted revolt of a peas-
antry against oppression,” but it did not “stimulate in any way the artistic and
literary efforts of the period,” replied Du Bois.9 The student was Edmund
Cronon, whose definitive study Black Moses (1960) portrayed Garvey and
his followers as naïve, anti-intellectual, and jingoistic.10 Accepting Cronon’s
portrayal, some recent biographers have concluded that Garvey’s personality
explains his and his movement’s rapid rise and swift fall.11 But, as Michael
Dawson reminds us, Garvey’s appeals to nationhood resonated with African
Americans in general.12
Jagmohan 273
Today, there are two prevailing views of Garvey’s political thought. The
first argues that Garvey’s politics was classical black nationalism—an attempt
to escape racial injustice through a political project for an independent state.13
In response to white supremacy, argues Wilson Moses, classical black nation-
alists found a basis for common identity in a “nebulous concept of racial
unity” rather than shared territory, language, or culture.14 Garvey’s own
“romantic racialism,” Moses adds, was a vestige of Edward Wilmot Blyden’s
argument for the black diaspora’s primordial right to self-rule in a historical
homeland.15 Members of this group share a common identity because they
have an “African personality,” a common set of habits, ideals, and intuitions,
transmitted through blood, insisted Blyden.16 Garvey further contended that
black people have a religious duty to found a sovereign state on the African
continent.17 In short, Garvey argued for self-determination and sovereignty
from racially essentialist and suspect theological premises. Contrary to this
view, I show that Garvey offered nonessentialist and secular reasons for con-
sidering the black diaspora a single nation with the right to statehood.18
More recent scholarship shifts in the other direction. The turn to global
history and black transatlantic studies has forced a reconsideration of
Garveyism. In this shift, Garveyism fares better than Garvey. Claudrena
Harold meticulously retrieves the complex and discerning politics practiced
by Garvey’s followers in the Jim Crow South,19 while Frank Guridy and
Adam Ewing describe the global scale of that politics.20 Paul Gilroy, a semi-
nal figure in black transatlantic studies, warns that Garvey was too essential-
ist and fascist for recovery.21 But Charles Carnegie and Michelle Ann
Stephens counter that Garvey promoted a form of transnationalism worthy of
reconsideration. Wrongly assuming that transnationalism and nationalism are
necessarily inconsistent ideals, they argue that Garvey’s statist politics was a
utopian and chauvinist distraction from his nobler project for global black
consciousness. Stephens, for example, maintains that Garvey’s most con-
vincing judgments sprang from his transnational commitments, not from his
quest for an independent state.22 It is tempting to reduce the complexities of
Garvey’s political thought by emphasizing either his nationalism or his trans-
nationalism, but doing so severs his aspiration for a sovereign state from his
commitment to global consciousness.
In this article I take a different approach. I argue that Garvey saw
nationalism and transnationalism as mutually necessary and reinforcing
ideals. Garvey’s institutionalism, which is closely tied to the structure of
his political theory, reveals his efforts to base the black diaspora’s right to
self-determination and claim to sovereignty in a cooperative political rela-
tionship. First, I recover Garvey’s transnationalist emphasis by looking at
his intellectual debts to other diaspora struggles, namely political Zionism

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