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Radical Sovereignty

Debating Race, Nation, and Empire in Interwar Latin America
by Tony Wood (Author)
Hardcover Paperback eBook
Price: $29.95 / £25.00
Publication Date: Dec 2025
Edition: 1st Edition
Title Details:
Rights: World
Pages: 362
ISBN: 9780520391277
Trim Size: 6 x 9
Illustrations: 10 b/w illustrations
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About the Book

In the 1920s and 1930s, Latin American radicals engaged in urgent debates over how to combat racism, resist empire, and reimagine the nation-state. Drawing on a global array of sources, Radical Sovereignty reconstructs these transnational discussions that unfolded in such far-flung locations as Mexico City, Buenos Aires, Havana, Moscow, and Brussels. Energized by the Mexican and Russian Revolutions, communists, trade unionists, peasant organizers, and anti-imperial activists emerged from these debates with innovative ideas for addressing historical oppressions, including proposals for a pan-continental confederation and calls to grant Black and Indigenous peoples in the Americas the right to form their own sovereign states. While these projects did not come to fruition, they left an enduring mark on Latin America's political landscape, bequeathing approaches to race, ethnicity, and self-determination that have resurfaced in recent years.

About the Author

Tony Wood is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Colorado Boulder. He is author of Chechnya: The Case for Independence and Russia without Putin: Money, Power, and the Myths of the New Cold War.

Table of Contents

Contents
 
List of Figures
List of Abbreviations
 
Introduction
 
Part One. Mexico City (1923–1929)
1. "Our Internationalism"
2. Against Empire
3. Anti-Imperial Rifts
 
Part Two. Moscow/Buenos Aires/The Caribbean/Lima (1928–1932)
4. Black Radicals, Bolsheviks, and Self-Determination
5. Race, Class, and the Making of the Present
6. Continental Nationalism
 
Part Three. Cuba/Mexico (1932–1940)
7. Another Country
8. A Plural Nation

Epilogue: Afterlives
 
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Reviews

“Challenging the liberal critique that Marxists ignore the question of race, Wood demonstrates through vast archival evidence that Latin American radicals in fact spilled rivers of ink and held dozens of rich discussions about racial injustice — and imagined possible ways to eradicate it.”

— Jacobin
"A pathbreaking exploration of Black and Indigenous lefts in interwar Latin America that shows the myriad and fascinating ways in which those movements rethought and challenged the nation-state. In Tony Wood’s nuanced and ambitious account—one that moves effortlessly between Moscow, Mexico City, Havana, and more—the reader encounters forgotten or misunderstood paths not taken. A must-read for anyone interested in the global history of the left and its relation to questions of race and self-determination."—Ada Ferrer, Professor of History, Princeton University

"Wood draws a vivid picture of Latin America’s architects of liberation, those who forged an anti-imperialist and anti-racist path to sovereignty and whose legacy was 1960s internationalism."—Tanalís Padilla, author of Unintended Lessons of Revolution: Student Teachers and Political Radicalism in Twentieth-Century Mexico

"Wood provides a clear-headed investigation of Latin America’s Communist and anti-imperialist left, its efforts to forge a global revolutionary agenda, and its debates around race, class, and nation."—Karin Rosemblatt, author of The Science and Politics of Race in Mexico and the United States, 1910–1950