TRACING THE PROPHET OF SELF-EMANCIPATION: A life-geography of Walter Rodney's Marxist thought and activism (1942-1980)

My thesis will examine the influence of Marxism on the political thought and activism of the Afro-Guyanese historian Walter Rodney (1942-1980). It will revise prior interpretations of his life, which have understated his Marxist ideas to favour his Pan-Africanism and Black Nationalism. In so doing, it will question a tendency among some scholars of the postcolonial to consider Marxism as a Eurocentric ideology, entrenched in colonial prejudices and relevant only to Europe. My reconstruction of Rodney's life will open avenues for biographies as a historical geographical methodology.

After Rodney died, scholars produced fragmented assessments of his contributions. Payne (1983) examined Rodney as the spokesperson for Jamaican Black Power in 1968. Bly (1985) focused on his responses to Nyerere's African socialism, while Gibbons (2012) analysed his anti-dictatorial activism in Guyana in the 1970s. Privileging the ideas Rodney held in one location over another, scholars labelled him a Pan-Africanist or a Black Nationalist. However, they overlooked that Rodney described himself as a "Marxist-Leninist" in his final years (Kwayana, 1988). My research will be the first to bind Rodney's entire praxis in Africa and the Americas since Lewis' biography (1998), which emphasised his contributions to Pan-Africanism.

As Lewis did in his work, I will study Rodney's writings and the influences therein. However, I will take Rodney on his terms to examine how he shaped his politics through his engagement with Marxism. I will also use broader archival sources and semi-structured interviews to account for space, movement and networks when analysing Rodney's political development. I plan to consult sources on Rodney in Atlanta's Woodruff Library, the London Metropolitan Archives and the national libraries of Dar es-Salaam and Georgetown. I will organise sources chronologically to map Rodney's journey and select the places where he developed his Marxist praxis. I will interview the people who knew Rodney in Africa, Europe and the Americas to record their memories of his thoughts and activism.

My thesis will provide significant insight into the relationship between Marxism and the experience of colonised subjects, and on-going debates on the application of Marxism in the Global South: (1) the identity and role of the working class and the intelligentsia, (2) the debate of socialism from above versus from below, and (3) the relationship between race and class. Finally, it will encourage activists in the movement to decolonise academia and Black Lives Matter to engage with Rodney's ideas when discussing race and class.