UBC Political Science’s Distinguished Speaker Series hosts Dr. Adom Getachew for her talk titled, “Africa for the Africans: A History of Self-Determination Before Decolonization.”
Abstract: From the mid-nineteenth century into the twentieth, Africa for the Africans was the banner under which a range of pan-Africanists imaginaries and political projects were articulated. This lecture charts the transformations of this pan-African motto, examining, in particular, the shifting conceptions of “Africa” in the first two decades of the twentieth century.
Bio: Adom Getachew is Neubauer Family Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago. She is a political theorist with research interests in the history of political thought, theories of race and empire, and postcolonial political theory. Her work focuses on the intellectual and political histories of Africa and the Caribbean. She is the author of Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination from Princeton University Press (2019) and co-editor, with Jennifer Pitts, of the forthcoming W .E. B. Du Bois’s International Thought. She is currently working on a second book on the intellectual origins and political practices of Garveyism—the black nationalist/pan-African movement, which had its height in the 1920s. Her public writing has appeared in Dissent, Foreign Affairs, the London Review of Books, the Nation, and the New York Times.
