The Second Battle for Africa: Garveyism, the US Heartland, and Global Black Freedom [Hardcover]

InThe Second Battle for Africa, Erik S. McDuffie establishes the importance of the US Midwest to twentieth-century global Black history, internationalism, and radicalism. McDuffie shows how cities like Chicago, Detroit, and Cleveland, as well as rural areas in the heartland, became central and enduring incubators of Marcus Garvey’s Black nationalist Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) and its offshoots. Throughout the region, Black thinkers, activists, and cultural workers, like the Grenada-born activist Louise Little, championed Black freedom. McDuffie explores Garveyism and its changing facets from the 1920s onward, including the role of Black midwesterners during the emergence of fascism in the 1930s, the postwar US Black Freedom Movement and African decolonization, the rise of the Nation of Islam and Malcolm X in the 1950s and 1960s, and the continuing legacy of Garvey in today’s Black Midwest. Throughout, McDuffie evaluates the possibilities, limitations, and gendered contours of Black nationalism, radicalism, and internationalism in the UNIA and Garvey-inspired movements. In so doing, he unveils new histories of Black liberation and Global Africa.USErik S. McDuffie establishes the importance of the US Midwest to global Black history and radicalism, tracing the influence of Garveyism and its legacies from the 1920s onward.Erik S. McDuffie is Professor of African American Studies and History at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and author ofSojourning for Freedom: Black Women, American Communism, and the Making of Black Left Feminism, also published by Duke University Press."McDuffie's book is unlike previous works that examine Garveyism up to Garvey's deportation, in that he carries the story forward into the twentieth century. More than this, he expertly examines the many formations influenced by Garvey. He then sites these trends in the ‘Diasporic Midwest,’ working to establish this regiol&