KEYNOTE SPEAKER
MALAS 2026 KEYNOTE
Dr. Tony Wood
Reimagining Sovereignty: Radical Debates on Race, Nation, and Empire in Interwar Latin America
Keynote Lecture
In the 1920s and 1930s – a century after most of Latin America gained its independence – radicals from across the region sought to reimagine the nation-state. Energized by the Mexican and Russian Revolutions, communists, trade unionists, peasant organizers, and anti-imperial exiles engaged in urgent debates over how to transform their societies, combat racism, and resist empire. They devised 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 decades. This talk reconstructs these transnational discussions, which unfolded in such far-flung locations as Mexico City, Buenos Aires, Havana, Moscow, and Brussels. While these debates have often been neglected within the wider literature on Latin American radicalism, I argue for the importance of their contributions and situate them with the broader arc of Latin American struggles over the meanings of sovereignty.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER:
Dr. Tony Wood is a British–Mexican historian of modern Latin America. He is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Colorado Boulder. His most recent book is Radical Sovereignty: Debating Race, Nation, and Empire in Interwar Latin America (2026). Originally trained as a specialist on Russia and the former Soviet Union, he is also the author of Chechnya: The Case for Independence (2007) and Russia without Putin: Money, Power and the Myths of the New Cold War (2018). He was deputy editor of New Left Review from 2007 to 2014 and is a member of its editorial board. He has written on a range of subjects for the London Review of Books, n+1, The Nation, and the Guardian (UK), among other outlets.