Collected for the first time, the foundational contributions of a scholar and activist who shaped the study of Garveyism and pan-Africanism.

“Compiles some of the most important writings by Robert A. Hill, providing cogent and fresh insight into the thinking and legacy of this preeminent scholar of Marcus Garvey and the African world.”—Erik S. McDuffie, author of Sojourning for Freedom: Black Women, American Communism, and the Making of Black Left Feminism  

“A vitally important work that reminds us that Hill is not only the premier excavator, collector, and archivist of Marcus Garvey and Garveyism but also an underappreciated intellectual whose classic writings are a must-read for scholars of Africa, the African diaspora, political, religious, and literary pan-Africanism, Black Power, decolonization, and revolutionary socialist thought and action.”—Robert Trent Vinson, author of Albert Luthuli: Mandela before Mandela

The Essential Writings of Robert A. Hill brings together Robert A. Hill’s most important writings for the first time, highlighting his intellectual contributions to the history of pan-Africanism. A pioneering scholar and activist, a groundbreaking builder of pan-African archives, and the editor of the multivolume Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers, Hill remains underacknowledged for his influence on the field. This collection is a long-overdue testament to his legacy.

Adam Ewing showcases Hill’s groundbreaking writings on Garveyism, the pan-African, anticolonial movement that spread across the globe following World War I. Hill’s essays trace Marcus Garvey’s evolving thought and illuminate the resonance of the movement in the Caribbean and its diaspora, in the United States, and across sub-Saharan Africa. The volume also includes Hill’s writings on diverse aspects of pan-Africanism, including the impostor figure in diaspora history, Cyril Briggs’s African Blood Brotherhood, the Rastafarian movement, the fiction of George Schuyler, George Beckford and the Abeng collective in Jamaica, the theories of Walter Rodney, the life and thought of C.L.R. James, and the music of Bob Marley.

This volume not only demonstrates Hill’s intellectual praxis and its roots in his academic influences and personal experiences but also reveals the breadth, diversity, complexity, and centrality of the pan-African tradition in African diasporic politics and thought.

Adam Ewing, associate professor of African American studies at Virginia Commonwealth University, is coeditor of Global Garveyism and the author of The Age of Garvey: How a Jamaican Activist Created a Mass Movement and Changed Global Black Politics.

Publication of this work made possible by a Sustaining the Humanities through the American Rescue Plan grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.