Amy Ashwood Garvey, International Thinker
This blog post is a first in a series of 'trailers' for the first major publication from our project, a forthcoming book: Patricia Owens and Katharina Rietzler (eds.) Women's International Thought: A New History with Cambridge University Press in January 2021. The volume includes chapters from many brilliant contributors including Robbie Shilliam. Here Shilliam gives us a preview of his work on Amy Ashwood Garvey's international thought.
Amy Ashwood Garvey moved hundreds of thousands of people with her ideas and influence. She was an original co-conspirator, with her husband Marcus Garvey, in one of the largest and most remarkable social movements of the twentieth century: the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League (UNIA). She travelled the globe, creating and sustaining networks of activists, thinkers and politicians that reached through West Africa, the Caribbean, North America and Europe. Her relentless initiatives spanned the worlds of entertainment, commerce, politics, social care, domestic economy, and publishing. She fraternised with the high and the low, the famous and the infamous.
But Amy Ashwood's grand publishing designs never materialized. Perhaps the closest she reached to publication success was the preview of her Liberia book written by her friend Sylvia Pankhurst, the famous suffragette, socialist and Ethiopianist. Otherwise, the book manuscripts are missing presumed lost; at best, the archives possess only sets of un-edited notes. Few - if any - of her powerful speeches were recorded in detail. What remains in print of her philosophy and opinions are mostly titles, outlines, as well as personal and autobiographical notes.
What does it mean to produce international thought? Who is a theorist, and in what location and register does their thought become recognizable as such? These questions are entertained regularly enough in International Relations (IR), at least by its feminist and postcolonial theorists. We should, by now, be acquainted with a series of methodological segregations and excisions by which international political thought is rendered as a provincial canon of mostly elite white, European, (dead), men. Indeed, to frame the boundaries of what is recognizably international political thought is too often to make vicarious elite white European men out of non-elite non-white non-European non-men. The distorting nature of such an enterprise should be clear enough.
Amy Ashwood presents a further challenge. How might we reconstruct international thought from only fragments of archives, most of which are not written in a theoretical register recognizable to academics? One might argue that not all political actors should or need be treated as theorists. Still, it is impossible not to discern the contours of Amy Ashwood's intellect upon 20th century global politics, especially through her Pan-Africanist circuits. Is it satisfying, then, for this intellect to be lost in the crack between politics and theory, movements and texts? Such challenges are considered by the editors of this volume as they caution against straightforward recoveries of forgotten women, especially when such recoveries reproduce the exclusions and hierarchies congenital to canons of IR theory.
Brittney Cooper argues that the theories of women such as Amy Ashwood need to be retrieved from unexpected places, i.e. autobiographies, medical records etc. This consideration brings to the fore the salience of "living knowledge traditions". I have mobilized this phrase to argue that theory does not appear only or even mainly in the form of a recognizable text and its author. "Theory" gives too much to written composition; and while theorists might balk at the prospective collapse of their professional wall against, say, ethnography, I must insist that theorising is more consequential than writing theory, and that living knowledge traditions exceed text. In the context of this chapter, and given Cooper's instruction, I seek these living traditions in the praxis of "race women" - those who in the early 20th century publicly stood for the uplift of Black peoples.
The theorising of race women must first of all be gleaned in the very act of cultivating the spaces for theorising and debating Black liberation. Imagine, for one moment, the difficulty in theorising as a Black intellectual in white intellectual locales wherein the meeting of Black minds is itself greeted with suspicion if not derision. Hence, for Black intellectuals in white supremacist societies, the cultivation of the space for theorising has always been at the same time the theorisation of power and resistance. This is the praxis of Black intellectual organization, one that is rarely documented or explicated in political theory texts. But furthermore, race women had to approach this underappreciated challenge fractally: the confrontation with power itself (race) was imbued with power confrontations (gender), and acts of resistance (against, e.g. white supremacism) were confronted with acts of resistance (against, e.g. Black patriarchy).
The necessarily fractal disposition of race women's praxis is all the more worthy of consideration when it came to the organizing of Black liberation. Consider, for instance, one of Amy Ashwood's many commercial enterprises: the Florence Mills Social Club, situated in London's West End. Mills was an African-American cabaret star who fatally contracted tuberculosis in London, and was known both as a proponent of Black rights and as the "queen of happiness". The naming by Amy Ashwood of her 1930s London club was no accident, but rather signalled a popular, diasporic Blackness - i.e. a Pan-Africanism - safely ensconced within a politically inflected entertainment space. Known for its good Caribbean and African food, the Club became a premier location for "race intellectuals from all parts of the world … to gather" as the Sunday Express put it at the time.
In fact, CLR James, famous Trinidadian Marxist, claimed that it was in Florence Mills that the International African Friends of Abyssinian (IAFA) was gestated. In 1935, the Friends sough to catalyse public opinion over fascist Italy's belligerent and colonial designs on sovereign Ethiopia (both members of the League of Nations). The networks developed by the IAFA would eventually deliver the seminal 1945 Pan-African Congress in Manchester, to which Amy Ashwood herself made important contributions. The formation of the IAFA thus demonstrates how the sensate elements of food, music and dance at Florence Mills produced a Pan-African comradery that could not have begun in the British Library. Contrary to androcentric and individualised accounts of theory production, theorising might also be, by necessity, a situated, communal pursuit, and in this regard Amy Ashwood was a luminary.
To understand her acuity in this respect we need to acknowledge just how gifted a conversationalist Amy Ashwood was. Take, for instance, the opinion of CLR James, for whom Amy Ashwood was amongst four of the most "brilliant" conversationalists he had ever met, alongside the likes of Leon Trotsky. Indeed, Amy Ashwood's conversational skills were fundamental to the cultivation of social networks that enabled her to raise funds and commitments for projects in almost every locale she frequented - whether that be in West Africa, Europe, the Caribbean or North America. Incidentally, despite her own itinerant lifestyle, the relationships that she developed were remarkably "sticky" and long-lasting.
These skills, though, did not only catalyse the thoughts and actions of elites and notables; remarkably, Amy Ashwood could turn them towards popular oratory. It is important to remember that, alongside other race women, Amy Ashwood was on a par with Marcus in persuading crowds in Harlem and elsewhere to commit financially and otherwise to the UNIA. Her success was in part to do with a mastery of rhetoric. But beyond that, she took a hermeneutical orientation towards her publics and the spaces within which they would meet and talk. That is, Amy Ashwood was concerned to discuss and agitate in ways that crossed the thresholds of various situated understandings of blackness. To understand the diasporic challenges of orienting thus, a brief excursus is required regarding the demographic and social contours of Harlem, the premier site of UNIA organizing in the late 1910s and early 20s.
Harlem was home to a significant migration of Black peoples not only from the South of the US but also from the Anglo-Caribbean. At this point in time, manual and unskilled labour circuits in the Caribbean and South America were vibrant and well-established. Many migrants had already passed through other entrepots of Caribbean immigration, especially Panama, including Marcus, Amy Ashwood's father, and Amy Ashwood herself prior to her first arrival in the United States. In Panamanian labour sites such as Colon, US interests had introduced Jim Crow segregation into the social and working regimes, thereby politicizing many sojourners to US-style racism before they even arrived in NYC. Concomitantly, the "internal" migration to northern US cities was itself a reaction to - and further encouraged - a resurgence of Jim Crow legislation and practices.
The meeting of different migrants - "internal" and "external" - could not but be intractably political. Neither could it occur without tensions. Caribbean peoples sometimes faced prejudice from African-Americans. More acute than such prejudice, perhaps, were the class tensions within the Caribbean populations. In New York, white collar workers were regularly colour-bared from taking positions they were used to filling in the islands; while manual labour paid far better than in the islands. In this respect, the colonial class and respectability hierarchies of the Caribbean (often colour-coded) were somewhat turned upside down in Harlem, just as Caribbean positionalities were challenged by African-American positionalities, the latter of which were also marked by migration journeys. Therefore, any hermeneutics of race uplift utilized in Harlem had to be attuned not only to a dizzying diversity of familial trajectories and lived experiences but also to the fractal nature of Black struggle.
Ula Taylor has incisively explored the way in which the "street strollers" of Harlem theorised in sophisticated ways by negotiating such a varied and contentious landscape as they socialised with groups in various public locales. As Amy Ashwood moved from corner to corner she would have to quickly and pragmatically interpret the crowd composition, as well as the dynamic and tenor of the conversation. Furthermore, she would have to calculate her interventions in a way that seamlessly wove in the local conventions and traditions to her (multivalent) Caribbean voice so that she could cross thresholds of blackness. For this purpose, Amy Ashwood would sometimes use poetry to take advantage of what Taylor characterises as a particular "hear-me-talking-to-you mode of discourse". Tellingly, she was fond of using Paul Laurence Dunbar, the first African-American poet to gain national (and international) prestige, and who was unafraid to use a Black dialect in his work. Amy Ashwood often recited from Dunbar's "We Wear the Mask", a poem that engaged themes resonant with WEB Dubois's "veil" or "double consciousness".
While Amy Ashwood was perfectly capable of sketching out grand abstract designs, her praxis was cultivated by working through these fractals, experienced in multiple locales and across multiple classes of peoples. However, the strongest directions were undoubtedly cast through Amy Ashwood's inter-linked pursuit of women's respectability and liberation. As the chapter goes on to demonstrate, it is through her paradoxical pursuit of both respectability and liberation that we might glean the fractal contours of Amy Ashwood's Pan-Africanism.
