Adom Getachew: A 'Common Spectacle of the Race': Garveyism's Visual Politics of Founding

Adom Getachew is Neubauer Family Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago. She is a political theorist with research interests in the history of political thought, theories of race and empire, and postcolonial political theory.

In July 1920, just a month before the first annual convention of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), the association’s co-founder, Marcus Garvey, announced, “We are a new people, born out of a new day and new circumstance.” The convention, he argued, was a moment of political founding on the model of the Philadelphia Convention in 1787. This talk will examine the UNIA’s conception of political founding, with particular attention to central role of images, theatricality and performance.

Sponsored by the School of History, Philosophy and Religious Studies and the History Department Unrestricted Fund at Oregon State University.