George Padmore: The Black Radical Tradition & the Liberation of the Global South

Description

Juan Francisco Martínez Peria, a professor of Latin American history at several universities in Buenos Aires, Argentina, will discuss his book George Padmore: The Black Radical Tradition & the Liberation of the Global South (Prometeo, 2024) for the Program in Latin American, Caribbean, and Latinx Studies; the Department of Political Science; and the Center for Africana Studies.

Unfairly forgotten today, George Padmore was a very well-known intellectual and political figure during his lifetime. From 1930 to 1934, he was the leader International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers of the III International, and after breaking with the USSR he was one of the most prominent theorists and builders of Pan-Africanism, Black Marxism, and anti-colonialism. He shared militancy with C.L.R. James, Amy Ashwood Garvey, Jomo Kenyatta, W.E.B. Du Bois, Nehru, Ho Chi Minh, and Nasser and was the mentor of anticolonial leaders from the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia. Likewise, with Kwame Nkrumah he achieved Ghana's independence and promoted the freedom and unity of Africa. For this reason, he was recognized as "The Father of African Emancipation." With the pen as a weapon, he wrote numerous groundbreaking books with which he challenged the colonial and racist pillars of capitalism and promoted the liberation of colonized peoples. On a planet still marked by the specters of coloniality, this book pretends to recover his figure and his legacy, to rethink the world critically from the perspective of the Global South.

Juan Francisco Martínez Peria received his doctorate in history from the Universidad Pompeu Fabra and is now professor of Latin American history at the Universidad de Buenos Aires, at the Universidad Nacional de San Martín, and at the Universidad Nacional Madres de Plaza de Mayo. He has been a postdoctoral fellow at the W.E.B. Du Bois Center at University of Massachusetts Amherst. He is the author of ¡Libertad o Muerte! Historia de la Revolución Haitiana (2012), the editor of Jean Louis Vastey's, El sistema colonial develado (2018), the translator and editor of Vida y Lucha de los trabajadores negros, Antología de textos de George Padmore (2022), and the author of Geoge Padmore: La tradición radical negra y la liberación de Sur Global (2024).