A "Common Spectacle" of the Race

Garveyism's Visual Politics of Founding

Datos Bibliográficos

ID3391982
AutoresAdom Getachew (0000-0002-4279-1694, University of Chicago, autor de correspondencia)
Año2021
Volumen115
Número4
Páginas1197-1209
Fecha de publicación2021-11-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaAmerican Political Science Review (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0003-0554 • E-ISSN: 1537-5943
EditorialCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1017/s0003055421000484
OpenAlexW3170870413
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas6
Referencias citadas43

The questions of what makes a people a people and how they are endowed with political power are central to political founding. Through the Universal Negro Improvement Association's first annual convention, this essay reconstructs the central role of aesthetic practices to the constitution of a new people. The convention's spectacular performances were a vehicle through which participants came to understand themselves as constituting the Universal Negro-a transnational and empowered political subject. Founding was tied to the development of "reverential self-regard," which was a process rather than a singular moment. Central to this process was both the gaze of spectators whose affective responses confirmed the power of the people and the political leader who served as the people's mirror. Focusing on a mass movement rather than canonical instances of constituting republics brings into sharp relief the reiterative labors of staging, enacting, and viewing necessary to the practice of founding

Aesthetics · Art · Constitution · Convention · Gaze · Political science · Politics · Power (physics · Psychoanalysis · Sociology · Spectacle · Subject (documents · Law · Music History and Culture · Psychology · Race, History, and American Society · Theater, Performance, and Music History