Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• JAMES, C BOYD

Titel

PRIMITIVES ON THE MOVE: SOME HISTORICAL ARTICULATIONS OF GARVEY AND GARVEYISM, 1887--1927

Ort / Verlag

ProQuest Dissertations & Theses

Erscheinungsjahr

1982

Quelle

ProQuest Dissertations & Theses A&I

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• "Primitives on the Move" is a study that attempts to demonstrate that, in its theory and practice, Garveyism was a mode of social action articulated by a group of dispossessed, reified Blacks who were struggling for Freedom and Equity, propelled by the conviction that their struggle was supported by Nature's Laws of "race immutability" and "race equity," and that those laws were central to the social motion of the universe. Though these "primitives" lived in and about the separate corners of the Black Triangular Nexus (Africa, North America and the Caribbean), I have argued that at all times all of them shared certain key ideas that they deemed compatible with Nature's demands upon them and that those ideas, though dissimilar, were compatible to the expectations and ideologies of the White world with which they attempted to move and realize their being. The period 1890-1930 witnessed the crystallization of Capitalism as a social formation in Europe and North America. Black oppression and White dominance were part and parcel of the modes of social articulations of that particular period. It is against this background, the period of entrenchment of one particular set of ideologies and political-economic mode, in which these "primitives" were able to carve out certain key ideas that were sustained constantly and moved relentlessly as they battled to realize their objectives. This dissertation is intended only as a supplement, not a criticism, to the voluminous modes of thought on Garvey and Garveyism. The ideology of "race first" as a major theme in Garvey's operation, the notion of Garvey being the post-World War I "Black Moses," the thought that the UNIA's radical call for "self-determination" and other nationalist sentiments being a part of the Black search for Freedom and Liberty, all these phases of interpretation are presupposed in this work. Garveyism is related to all these processes in a special way: not purely as a reflex to social oppression but as a creative and "natural" way to some black men and women in their attempt to transfer their reality and those of others around them.