The Jamaican Pan-Africanist, Marcus Garvey co-founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association in 1914, which would be the institutional nucleus of what is still remembered as the largest Black mass movement in history. In the course of Garveyism’s meteoric rise, oratory was central. It wasn’t only Garvey’s voice that mattered, however. Instead, Garveyites universalized and democratized oratory, providing occasions for the emulation, rehearsal, and repetition of eloquence. In this talk, Adom Getachew, Professor of Political Science and Race, Diaspora & Indigeneity at the University of Chicago, charts the origins of the movement’s emphasis on the arts of eloquence by attending to its origins in West Indian traditions of oratory and examining its transformation into a mass practice.

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