Erik McDuffie ( African American Studies and History) will discuss his book The Second Battle for Africa:
Garveyism, the US Heartland,
and Global Black Freedom. Part of the Story & Place event series.
This talk appreciates the importance of Garveyism and the Midwest for understanding the contours, genealogies, and complexities of twentieth-century Black transnational resistance and for imagining that another world is possible in this moment of global crisis.
About the Speaker
Erik S. McDuffie is professor of African American Studies and History, the Director of the Center for African Studies, and a former Humanities Research Institute (HRI) fellow at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research interests include Black movements, gender, sexualities, the Midwest, urban history, and Global Africa. He is the author of The Second Battle for Africa: Garveyism, the US Heartland, and Global Black Freedom (Duke University Press, 2024). The book won the 2025 Jon Gjerde Book Prize, presented by the Midwestern History Association. He is also the author of the multi-award-winning monograph Sojourning for Freedom: Black Women, American Communism, and the Making of Black Left Feminism, also published by Duke University Press. Originally from Detroit, Michigan, he is a sixth-generation African American midwesterner, whose family hails from the United States, Canada, and St. Kitts.