“Green Is the Color of the Luxuriant Vegetation of Our Motherland”: Marcus Garvey, Temporality, and Wilderness as a Repeating Phase (2024)
Like other nationalists of the early twentieth century, the Harlem-based Pan-Africanist Marcus Garvey invoked landscape to rally potential citizens across lines of difference and imagine national community. The centrality he and his organization, the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), gave to nature can be seen in the Pan-African flag, the green stripe of which symbolized the “luxuriant vegetation of our Motherland.” But unlike European and European American nationalists, Garvey understood time as cyclical rather than linear, which meant that he saw wilderness not as a national starting place to be preserved in national parks but rather as a repeating phase. Garvey’s understanding of landscape demonstrates the centrality of nature in the formation of national identity, while illustrating the limits of historian Benedict Anderson’s theory that linear time was a universal condition of all nationalisms. Furthermore, the green stripe on Garvey’s Pan-African flag reveals a trenchant Black American environmental critique of European colonialism in Africa and provides further evidence that long before the environmental justice movement of the 1980s, African Americans understood environmental issues and the fight for social justice as intertwined.
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