Ewing, Adam. The Age of Garvey: How a Jamaican Activist Created a Mass Movement and Changed Global Black Politics. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014.

== Summary ==
Despite
the recognition of UNIA (Universal Negro Improvement Assoc.) and Garveyism’s
historical significance, participants, observers and scholars have struggled to
explain its rise and success. Ewing writes that the “historical memory around
the image of Garvey” as simply someone that “lit up the sky before crashing
down to earth” has influenced how Garvey is remembered and failed to
acknowledge Garvey’s accomplishments; in particular his influenced not just in
the United States, but throughout the diasporic world. To move beyond this
structured narrative of Garvey, Ewing’s book focuses on the influence of
Garveyism “on the construction of diasporic politics in the diverse context
that the movement bridged: within urban and rural black communities stretched
across the United States,” migrants and labor activists in the Carib.,  welfare associations and independent churches
in central and Southern Africa. Thus, Ewing argues, what was most “important
about Garveyis” was not the parades and shipping lines and colonization schemes
“but the engagement of its proponents in a sustained and more informal project
of organizing, networking, and consciousness raising.” (5) The spread of
Garveyism required a broad political network that shared common view on global
events and diasporic identity, but also responded to specific local conditions.
Ewing sees Garveyism not as an ideology “but as a method of organic mass
politics”; he was an organizer that drew on dominant ideas of the 19th
century and believed (like his followers) in process. As a form of mass
politics, it was also a project in diasporic identity building; Garveyism
embodied the “practice of diaspora” big and small. “The inauguration of two
shipping lines” and the “execution of parades, elocution contest, newspaper
distribution, poor relief, uniform wearing, and local institution building”
Ewing writes, enabled Garveyites to “broadcast a global sense of race dynamic
enough to seem real, and seem useful, for black subjects across the world.” (9)
After its decline in the U.S. in which many Garveyites moved into CIO and
communist parties, it provided a “powerful ideological and political vehicle”
for African activists during the interwar period.