more book stuff

Von Eschen's statement that "..Garvey made the American Negro conscious of his African origins and created for the first time a feeling of international solidarity between Africans and peoples of African descent... Garvey transformed African Americans from a national minority to a global majority" seems somewhat at odds with Lipsitz's argument, heavily reliant upon the work of Robert Farris Thompson (the somewhat nutty master of Yale's Timothy Dwight College) that African Americans were in fact practicing small acts - such as reinterpreting and rearticulating customs and practices of the various West African cultures from which their ancestors had originated and had brought with them to the Western Hemisphere, in order to perform exactlly this kind of "transformation" from national minority to global majority. Garvey may have been among the first to articulate these connections within the contexts of electoral politics and transcontinental commerce, and Von Eschen clearly wants to argue that this intellectual, diplomatic connectedness really owes a great deal to Garvey and his followers, which is certainly true. And Garvey's also important in terms of diasporic popular cultures, particularly ska, rocksteady, reggae, dub, etc., as any Don Drummond or Burning Spear song title will attest. But I wonder if the argument can be made that Garvey himself, and his politics become possible largely because of the presence of these less vocal but deeply meaningful traditions that enslaved Africans brought with them and their enslaved and free descendents have preserved for hundreds of years.

(I have some problems with some things that Thompson said in the class I took with him. I will save these for a later post, though, because I want to do some reading and a whole lot of sleeping.)