Review of Radical Sovereignty: Debating Race, Nation, and Empire in Interwar Latin America by Tony Wood (University of California Press, 2026)
In the early 1920s, the Latin American landscape was rocked by two political earthquakes. Though different in nature, the Mexican and Russian Revolutions shared much in common: domestically, both fought for the cause of social justice, while abroad both raised the flag of sovereignty against imperialist interests. Most important of all, the triumph of the Mexican and Russian revolutions opened a new space for debate in Latin America, where egalitarian societies and pan–Latin American anti-imperialism were the order of the day.
Under the influence of both revolutions, radical leftists across Latin America developed different (sometimes competing) agendas to counterbalance US influence and ensure the dignity of the subaltern classes. However, those debates — and the revolutionary potential of Latin American societies in the 1920s and ’30s — have for too long been ignored by historians. In fact, before the publication of Radical Sovereignty: Debating Race, Nation, and Empire in Interwar Latin America, it was common to neglect the impact of the Russian Revolution in the region, to see Latin America’s political movements through a blinkered national lens, or to associate pan–Latin American internationalism with the Cold War era exclusively.
Tony Wood restores the border-crossing debates held by Latin American radicals in the interwar years, shedding light on the tensions, depth, and complexities of leftist thought as it tackled issues of race, the nation, internationalism, and class. 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.
Even more, different strands of Latin American…
Auteur: Jacques Coste
