Bookshelf

Alumni and faculty members who would like to have their books considered for this listing should contact Stacey Himmelberger, editor of Hamilton magazine. This list, which dates back to 2018, is updated periodically with books appearing alphabetically on the date of entry.

The Second Battle for Africa: Garveyism, the US Heartland, and Global Black Freedom by Erik S. McDuffie ’92

April 10, 2025

Tags Alumni Book

(Duke University Press, 2024).

The author, an associate professor of African American studies and history at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, 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,” the publisher notes. “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 U.S. 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.”

As one reviewer reports: “The Second Battle for Africa is a sweeping tour de force, uncovering and recovering both persistence and ruptures in the history of the Black freedom struggle. By incorporating gender and queer theory and combining a global diaspora perspective with a regional focus, Erik S. McDuffie brings new lenses to the study of Garveyism and Black nationalism.”