Unruly virtues of the spectacular: Performing Engendered Nationalisms in the UNIA in Jamaica

This paper complicates notions of anticolonial nationalist resistance by discussing images emerging within the performances of Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). Approaching the Garvey movement as a practice taken up by active subjects who engaged with and used its ideas, the paper contends that anticolonial resistance cannot be reduced to a single narrative, easily appropriated or overturned by dominant groups. An examination of anticolonial performance in the Garvey movement allows us to move beyond the binary of resistance versus accommodation because performances were productive in multiple ways. UNIA performances were marked by excesses, strategic collusions, contradictions and absences. It was precisely this instability that allowed subjects from diverse social locations to grasp alternative social possibilities and elaborate these in terms of the particular marginalization or exploitation that they faced. The multiplicity of narratives generated point to the difficulty of reducing Garveyite resistance to a set of fundamental fixed ideas. Two examples bear out this argument. The first focuses on performances of gender in the movement. Spectacular parades taught the official position of the movement, privileging a militant, modernist image of black masculinity, ready to rule but reliant on subordinate, if active and organized, femininity. Women resisted these images of subordination, drawing on their training in the movement to advance a black feminist critique outside of the movement. Their struggles were simultaneously reformist and radical, for while they improved middle-class women’s lives, they overlooked the needs of working-class women. The second example focuses on challenges to middle-class respectability and sexual rigidity through variety concerts at Edelweiss Park. The result is that, through its performances, the UNIA facilitated multiple unruly forms of resistance and advanced different claims for change over time and space.