Page 28 - BCALA Summer 2018

28 | BCALA NEWS | Volume 45, Issue 3 Garvey, Ethel Collins, Maymie Leona
Turpeau De Mena, Mittie Maude Lena Gordon, and Ethel Waddell. However, around every corner readers are introduced to new and often equally intriguing characters— particularly grassroots organizers, writers, and journalists—all of whom contributed to the development of Black Nationalist thought during this period. Indeed, the very title of the book is drawn from an article written by Josephine Moody, a Cleveland- based United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) member who, up until now, has been absent from the historical record[1].
The varied and diverse voices that animate the book are testament to Blain’s skill as a historian, as well as her diligent mining of neglected Black Nationalist publications, personal correspondence, Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) files, and census records. These painstaking efforts
to recover and do justice to the actions and ideas of these women provides vital historical context in terms of thinking about the range
and dynamism of Black Nationalist organizing, while also providing a
real sense of the forces, tensions,
and ideologies that animated the movement. The book embeds these women’s lives as activists within the longer history of Black Nationalism, while also tracing how the Great Depression, New Deal, Second World War, and anticolonial movements around the world influenced their global outlook. This makes “Set the World on Fire” a clear and eminently readable book, ensuring that it will be accessible to broader public audiences at the same time as it breaks new
scholarly ground. For me though, “Set the World on Fire” is particularly invaluable for the insights it offers
on the gendered politics of Black Nationalism/internationalism, as well as the chronology and character of Black resistance in the first half of the twentieth century.
Building on work by Barbara Bair, Ula Yvette Taylor, and others,
Blain documents how women simultaneously embraced and subverted masculinist articulations of Black Nationalism[2]. While these activists often endorsed Black male authority, they continued to insist that their central position at the heart of the Black family and community entitled them to a public political platform. Throughout the book, Blain refers to this stance as a form of “proto-feminism,” which “challenged sexism and sought to empower Black women globally but walked a fine line between advancing women’s opportunities and simultaneously supporting Black men’s leadership” (p. 142).
This is perhaps most thoroughly explored in chapter 1, which examines the role of women within the UNIA. Blain documents the crucial role
that Marcus Garvey’s two wives,
Amy Ashwood and Amy Jacques, played in the practical and ideological development of the organization. She also demonstrates the key leadership contributions of Henrietta Vinton Davis, Mayme De Mena, Irene M. Blackstone, Ethel Maude Collins, Adelaide Casely Hayford, and Laura Adoker Kofey. These individuals forged prominent roles for themselves within the Garvey movement at
various times, and in the process, were at the forefront of forging Black Nationalist networks throughout the Atlantic world. While aspects of this story have been told before, “Set the World on Fire” moves beyond existing scholarship that explores the gender politics of Garveyism by tracing how these formative experiences continued to shape Black Nationalist politics beyond the 1920s, long after the fragmentation of the UNIA. As Blain argues, “Black women found a sense of empowerment in the UNIA, and the organization functioned as a political incubator in which many Black women became politicized and trained for future leadership” (p. 20). While many women were influenced by Marcus Garvey’s Pan-African vision, they did not simply take his ideas forward unchanged. Instead they developed their own structures and initiatives that dramatically expanded Black Nationalism in subsequent decades. As Blain states in her introduction: “The Black Nationalist women chronicled in this book created spaces of their own in which to experiment with various strategies and ideologies” (p. 2).
In extending the chronology of Black Nationalism, “Set the World on Fire” also makes a valuable contribution
to how historians think about and represent resistance. Shunning narrow questions concerning success/failure, the book instead documents how activist networks were forged and maintained, as well as how ideas spanned generations and national borders. The ways in which Black women engaged with grassroots organizing, theorized Black Nationalism in print, and established