The Age of Garvey: How a Jamaican Activist Created a Mass Movement and Changed Global Black Politics by Adam Ewing (review)

Abstract

Marcus Garvey, the Jamaican black nationalist leader of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), has remained an important figure in both popular culture and academic scholarship. Adam Ewing’s The Age of Garvey: How a Jamaican Activist Created a Mass Movement and Changed Global Black Politics is among the newest additions to this scholarship. While most scholars focus on the 1910s, the height of Garveyism, Ewing shifts the temporal frame and argues that Garveyism entered a second period—the Age of Garvey—in the 1920s and 1930s, serving as a vehicle for diasporic politics to emerge across the African diaspora.