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.